Russia this year, like England, has had as its chief literary event the publication of a work giving an insight into the life and character of its greatest man of letters. With us, the newly published “Letters of Tourgénieff” corresponds to the last two volumes of the noble tribute which Mr. Froude has paid to the memory of Thomas Carlyle. Both works reveal the inner life of the two greatest writers whom the two empires have produced in our time, but there, alas! the resemblance begins and ends. For whereas Carlyle was an heroic character, a prophet of righteousness, lifting up his voice in a ceaseless protest against the favourite superstitions of his contemporaries, such as their fanatical faith in constitutionalism, Tourgénieff unfortunately was much greater as an author than as a man, and was conspicuously weak where Carlyle was courageously strong. When Tourgénieff died Russia with her usual inquisitiveness and generosity remembered only that she had lost a writer of genius, but these letters serve to recall to her memory the weakness and shortcomings forgotten in the first burst of sorrow.

There is no country in the world where it is more necessary than in Russia to remember the importance of correct moral principles. A foolish doctrine, a preposterous theory—thanks to the extraordinary impressionability and yearning for self-sacrifice which characterize my countrymen—do more harm in Russia than in any other part of the globe. Englishmen never emancipate themselves from the restraint of the categorical imperative. It is true that the imperative is not always Divine, but it is not the less absolute. When an Englishman ceases to believe in God, he is still obedient to Mrs. Grundy. In Russia we have no goddesses of that sort. When once a Russian loses his faith in the Divine, in the supernatural, there is no restraint in reserve such as people here find in the respectable. Hence the responsibility of those Russians who either sap the faith of their countrymen in law and religion, or who encourage the dreams of wild and reckless youths is far greater than that of Englishmen who do the same things. Tourgénieff did not realize that, and, as these letters remind us, contrary to the doctrine of the ancient Greeks, he grew worse and weaker in his political views, and at last actually descended so far as to subsidize the organs of the Nihilistic infamy. In spite of his fascinating charm, his culture, his manners, Tourgénieff was one of the weakest characters that we had. He had quite an anti-Russian love of popularity and a morbid want of political courage. He expressed enthusiastically sympathies to Dostoéfsky, the very opposite of Tourgénieff in this respect—the pride of the Slavophils, our best author and patriot—and at the same time he expressed sympathies with the Genevan Nihilists almost in the same effusive way. I wish all this were less proved by facts, as it was soon after his death; for it is loathsome to think of shortcomings of that sort in so gifted a writer. Tourgénieff died on the 22nd of August, 1883, and almost immediately the editor of Genevan Nihilist paper wrote an obituary in which he deplored the loss sustained by their party; and it soon afterwards was ascertained that during several years—even in spite of the terrible catastrophe of the 1st of March, which resulted in the murder of Alexander II, who by emancipating so many millions of men had realized Tourgénieff’s own ideals—Tourgénieff continued to give considerable sums of money for the Nihilist propaganda, and also maintained friendly intercourse with men like Peter Krapotkin, Lavroff, and Co. Of course, this will not be regarded as offensive by many Englishmen, who only think the use of dynamite objectionable when it is employed on London Bridge or St. James’s square; but to Russians dynamitards are equally enemies of the human race, whether they are called Nihilists or Invincibles, and Tourgénieff’s patronage of the assassins is a deplorable blot on the fame of our great author. Of all his literary creations he seems to have been most attached to Bazaroff, the repulsive Nihilist, in his “Fathers and Sons.” Some one observed that that hero was a caricature. Tourgénieff exclaimed, “Oh, no; Bazaroff was no caricature; he was my favourite hero, on whose account I quarrelled with Katkoff. I never wished to would the feelings of youth.” Which, indeed, was too true. He never ventured to do his duty in that respect. He never destroyed their illusions. “Bazaroff,” he says in another letter, “dominates all other types. I wanted him to be heroic. He is honest, truthful, and a Democrat to the backbone.” Unfortunately he was much more than that. He has served to multiply types of men who may be Democrats to the backbone, but are neither honest nor truthful, and who besides have hesitated at no crime against their country and her best and first representative—the Emperor.

Another deplorable fact which stands fully revealed in these letters was Tourgénieff’s extraordinary weakness for a Jewish artist, who naturally was no friend to Russia. That lady was the rival, the successful rival, of his country. Again and again he returns to his Fatherland only to confess that the indissoluble ties “which bind him” were stronger than the love of his country. For her he sacrificed the greatest part of his life, Russia, his fame, and all that he possessed. This intense devotion began in 1844, and it continued unbroken to his death, and strange to say, it seems that her husband was anything but opposed to that devotion. In 1869 Tourgénieff even went so far in his eagerness to serve his idol as to descend to writing a long letter to the papers on purpose to puff up a little opera of hers, which turned out a perfect fiasco—in Weimar, and in which he himself had been an amateur actor. Now, in my country nothing seems more vulgar than the different kinds of puffing up and advertising left and right. We always think it more dignified, more correct, to let things speak for themselves on their own merits.           

            Enough of the faults and foibles of one who certainly was a striking man. His views upon certain questions were nobler than his life. His ideal, as is often the case after all, contrasted sadly with the real. In his letters he at all events often reappears to be what he ought always to have been. “Everything Russian,” said he in 1856, “is doubly dear to me.” “People may say what they like,” he writes, “but abroad one feels dislocated. You care for nobody, and nobody cares for you. One ought to go abroad young, while intending to live, or quite old, when you have done with life.” While full of praise of the loveliness of a Princess M——, he cannot refrain from deploring her ignorance of her own language. “I met her in Paris, the very type of Goethe’s Gretchen; quite lovely, but, unfortunately, she does not understand a word of Russian. She was born and brought up here. She is not answerable for that monstrosity; still, it is unpleasant. She cannot avoid having inwardly the latent contradiction between her blood, her nature, and her language, her thoughts, and that contradiction will either take the shape of commonplace or will degenerate in suffering. Still, she is indescribably lovely.”

In 1875 he declared emphatically that he had never printed a line in any foreign language. Nay, so patriotic was he that he declared such reports could only be circulated in order to wound him. As was natural in such a nature the great awakening of enthusiasm for the oppressed Slavs, which made 1876-8 memorable in Russia, awakened Tourgénieff’s interest. He showed his sympathy in a characteristic fashion by writing a poem in which he indicated his appreciation of Lord Beaconsfield’s Eastern policy by describing Queen Victoria as playing at croquet with—human skulls. “I sometimes feel a tremendous longing to go to Russia. Something most extraordinary is taking place there, something like the Crusades.” Poor Tourgénieff, however, lost so entirely and real understanding of Russia that in October, 1876, he still thought she could avoid war with Turkey. “A fact, by-the-by, which is greatly desired by the Revolutionists,” added he, “as they think that under present circumstances peace would entirely discredit the Emperor in the eyes of his people.” He himself had no definite opinion or wish. Tourgénieff’s views on religious questions were certainly far from orthodox, and this still further cut him off from understanding his countrymen. “You think that I consider or ought to consider Mohammedanism inferior to Christianity,” he wrote in 1876: “How wrong of you! I consider them both as belonging to the same formation, but differing in their shape.” In December Tourgénieff still doubted the possibility of war: “All seems quite quiet again, quite smooth among us.” Even in February, 1877, the same lamblike disposition in Russia was supposed to exist by Tourgénieff, while every Russian at home—cultivated or ignorant, old or young—knew that war was certain.

It really is quite incomprehensible how Tourgénieff could so long remain abroad, especially as his deep conviction “was that Europe hates us, the whole of Europe, without exception. We are alone, utterly alone, and have to remain so.” (My experience, I am happy to declare, certainly taught me quite differently, as far as England was concerned, and I have often had welcome opportunities of pointing out feelings of quite an opposite nature.) In 1878 Tourgénieff visited Oxford and Cambridge. “What a complicated and curious thing it is, those English educational schools! And how bitterly we are hated there!” He certainly was not fortunate in the choice of his Oxford and Cambridge associates.

More interesting than his political heresies are his literary judgments. “‘Prison Life in Siberia,’” he wrote, “contains pages worthy of Dante. It is full of delicate and deep psychology.” Of Count Leo Tolstoy he writes enthusiastically. His criticisms of foreign authors will perhaps be even more interesting to non-Russians. Of George Sand he writes: “I find they do not do justice to her extreme kindness. However rare her genius, her kindness was still more so. When they were putting her coffin into the grave an old peasant threw some flowers and said, ‘From the Nohant peasants, not from the poor, because, thanks to her generosity, we had no poor among us.’ And with all this it should not be forgotten that George Sand was far from rich. She had to work till the last day of her life, and could hardly make two ends meet. You could never come into contact with that woman without immediately feeling that you were in the presence of the most generous, benevolent nature, in which every particle of egoism was burned out by the flame of pure enthusiasm, by the faith in the ideal. And all this seemed as dominated by a kind of unconscious aureole, something great and heroic. Believe me, George Sand is one of our saints.” Of another Frenchwoman he wrote in an altogether different way. Referring to Sarah Bernhardt, Tourgénieff says: “I cannot tell you how disgusted I am with the follies that are made about that dislocated, affected mediocrity, whose only merit is her lovely voice. Many sins will be pardoned to the editor of the Novoe Vremya (Mr. Souvorine) for having shown up that intolerable phraseuse and poseuse. He has done credit to the Russian critical sense.”

Of English authors Tourgénieff expressed his opinion with freedom. Writing in 1872 to one of his compatriots he says:—“I wish I could recommend you something strikingly good in English literature; but it is quite impossible. Modern English poets are all Rossettis, which means terribly affected and unreal. Algernon Swinburne is an exception, in him alone you find sparkles of real talent. He imitates Victor Hugo, but there is genuine passion in him, while Hugo composes his feeling. Read Swinburne’s ‘Songs before Sunrise.’ Now and then he is slightly misty; still, you’ll enjoy the reading.” Mr. Ralston he praises as an excellent and serious man, not a mere correspondent of some sort or a mere writer of feuilletons. In 1856 he met a famous American authoress, of whom he writes:—“I was introduced the other day to Mrs. Beecher Stowe—timid, quiet woman—with two carroty daughters, wearing immeasurable crinolines and red cloaks.”

The closing chapters of his life are soon told. Tourgénieff bore his last illness with great fortitude. “It seems I may linger twenty years with my incurable illness. But is such life worth living? I cannot walk, I cannot stand; I can only sleep thanks to morphia—and lie only on the left side. But enough: if ever I get better you are sure to hear it at once.” “Remember Goethe,” he says at another time.”Was he not saturated with every human blessing?—great fame, loved by women, hated by idiots; his works translated even in Chinese, the whole of Europe rushing to kneel before him. And Napoleon even said of him, ‘C’est un homme.’ Well, and with all that, when he was eighty-two he declared that during all his life he had been actually happy only a quarter of an hour! So, you see, we must not grumble.” In December, 1882, he wrote:—“I repeat, I am not losing heart still I did not give up all hope it was much worse. I am sixty-four. I have enjoyed my life, and now I must shut up. But how I wish I could go to Russia.” In the published volume the last letter—written in pencil with almost a dying hand—is addressed to Count Leo Tolstoy, and is dated June 28, 1883. He died on the 22nd of August 1883.

O.K.

Holloway’s Hotel, Dover-street, Dec. 24.