woodcutter, Turgenev writes:
How wonderfully a Russian peasant dies! The temper in which he meets his end cannot be called indifference or stolidity; he dies as though he were performing a solemn rite, coolly and simply.
It has been objected that Turgenev confined himself to the serfs who lived on his motherâs estates and, even there, that he knew only the house serfs intimately and from the immediate master-and-man point of view. He was the outsider and the country gentleman. This judgment is too sweeping, as many incidents in the
Sketches
show, and, in any case, a writerâs talent has a right to itself. If he was born an outsider, he also
chose
to be an outsider or scrutinising spectator who was in the classical tradition he inherited from his love of Pushkin: from the outside he can summarily penetrate the insideâby his images and sentencesâand see his truth. This power of âtelling the truthâ grew and when he attempts the subjective he is less successful and falls into sentimentality. There is one story in the
Sketches,
âThe Tryst,â in which he tries to evoke a peasant girlâs feelings about love, where we see this happening and in which he falls into the falsity of the non-peasant writer writing about peasants from the inside.
Chapter 5
During these three years in France, Turgenev was not always at Courtavenel. When he got money for his
Sketches
or when he could borrow from Mme. Garcia, he stayed in Paris and he also managed to run up debts to the tune of 6,000 roubles, on his expectations. (It may be that this troubled the precise Louis Viardot more than anything else.) In 1848 he had a flat near the Palais Royal and then moved to a cheaper place at the corner of the Boulevard des Italiens and the rue de la Paix and was working on two plays:
A Provincial Lady
and
A Month in the Country.
Pauline Viardot had turned his mind to the theatre. Like most of the Russian gentry in Paris, he was there to despise the French. The Russians met to shout out their souls through the night at the house of the rich Annenkov, the perpetual traveller, talker and fat lazy gourmet, who amused himself by analysing the characters of his friends who borrowed money from him. Turgenev disliked the formal sameness of the city, but he loved the food; he shared the general Russian opinion that the Paris of Louis Philippe was âunbeautifulââHerzen called France âthe cuspidor of Europe.â And Belinsky, who died that year, called Paris meaningless. Throughout the nineteenth century only Gogol seems to have been captivated by Europe, but for him Europe had meant Rome. Turgenev, more instructed thanmost, understood their nostalgia for the timeless, empty distances of the Russian landscape and the dilapidated condition of Russian life. Russia was feudal, but, at least, it was not middle-class. It was not packed with the characters of Balzacâs novels which nauseated him. The Latins, he explained eventually to the Goncourts, are men of
âla loiâ
but in Russia
âla loi ne se cristallise pas.
â The Russians are thieves and yet even a man who confesses to twenty thefts if it is shown that he was in need or hungry will be acquitted. But:
vousêtes de la loi, de lâhonneur, nous tout autocratisé que nous soyons, nous sommes moins conventionnels, nous sommes des hommes de lâhumanité.
And another time he said the Russians were a race of liars in life because they have been slaves so long but in art they love truth and reality.
In February of that year he followed the Viardots to Brussels to hear Pauline sing and there one morning the hall porter woke him up and shouted âFrance has become a Republicâ: the riot-spotted reign of the bourgeois king, Louis Philippe, had come to an end. He took the train to Paris at once. Crowds were in the streets. News of revolution in Poland, Italy and Germany was coming in. The wretchedly paid factory workers in
How wonderfully a Russian peasant dies! The temper in which he meets his end cannot be called indifference or stolidity; he dies as though he were performing a solemn rite, coolly and simply.
It has been objected that Turgenev confined himself to the serfs who lived on his motherâs estates and, even there, that he knew only the house serfs intimately and from the immediate master-and-man point of view. He was the outsider and the country gentleman. This judgment is too sweeping, as many incidents in the
Sketches
show, and, in any case, a writerâs talent has a right to itself. If he was born an outsider, he also
chose
to be an outsider or scrutinising spectator who was in the classical tradition he inherited from his love of Pushkin: from the outside he can summarily penetrate the insideâby his images and sentencesâand see his truth. This power of âtelling the truthâ grew and when he attempts the subjective he is less successful and falls into sentimentality. There is one story in the
Sketches,
âThe Tryst,â in which he tries to evoke a peasant girlâs feelings about love, where we see this happening and in which he falls into the falsity of the non-peasant writer writing about peasants from the inside.
Chapter 5
During these three years in France, Turgenev was not always at Courtavenel. When he got money for his
Sketches
or when he could borrow from Mme. Garcia, he stayed in Paris and he also managed to run up debts to the tune of 6,000 roubles, on his expectations. (It may be that this troubled the precise Louis Viardot more than anything else.) In 1848 he had a flat near the Palais Royal and then moved to a cheaper place at the corner of the Boulevard des Italiens and the rue de la Paix and was working on two plays:
A Provincial Lady
and
A Month in the Country.
Pauline Viardot had turned his mind to the theatre. Like most of the Russian gentry in Paris, he was there to despise the French. The Russians met to shout out their souls through the night at the house of the rich Annenkov, the perpetual traveller, talker and fat lazy gourmet, who amused himself by analysing the characters of his friends who borrowed money from him. Turgenev disliked the formal sameness of the city, but he loved the food; he shared the general Russian opinion that the Paris of Louis Philippe was âunbeautifulââHerzen called France âthe cuspidor of Europe.â And Belinsky, who died that year, called Paris meaningless. Throughout the nineteenth century only Gogol seems to have been captivated by Europe, but for him Europe had meant Rome. Turgenev, more instructed thanmost, understood their nostalgia for the timeless, empty distances of the Russian landscape and the dilapidated condition of Russian life. Russia was feudal, but, at least, it was not middle-class. It was not packed with the characters of Balzacâs novels which nauseated him. The Latins, he explained eventually to the Goncourts, are men of
âla loiâ
but in Russia
âla loi ne se cristallise pas.
â The Russians are thieves and yet even a man who confesses to twenty thefts if it is shown that he was in need or hungry will be acquitted. But:
vousêtes de la loi, de lâhonneur, nous tout autocratisé que nous soyons, nous sommes moins conventionnels, nous sommes des hommes de lâhumanité.
And another time he said the Russians were a race of liars in life because they have been slaves so long but in art they love truth and reality.
In February of that year he followed the Viardots to Brussels to hear Pauline sing and there one morning the hall porter woke him up and shouted âFrance has become a Republicâ: the riot-spotted reign of the bourgeois king, Louis Philippe, had come to an end. He took the train to Paris at once. Crowds were in the streets. News of revolution in Poland, Italy and Germany was coming in. The wretchedly paid factory workers in
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