Good old Turgenev stimulates no interest today. There has been no book or study published about him in English in thirty years. Compare him to Tolstoy and Dostoevsky who each generate, it seems, at least two English books a year.
Sensible, sceptical, progressive, liberal, rational, in his lifetime Turgenev quarrelled with both those writers; he found Tolstoy’s religious enthusiasms unbearable; Turgenev freed his peasants not because it was holy to do so, or because he believed in some profound mystical and spiritual and soul-saving light buried deep in the Russian peasant soul, or because he wanted to live like a simple Russian peasant, but because it was the rational and the humane thing to do. And he found Dostoevsky’s reactionary conservatism repugnant. Given his temperament, he probably also found Dostoevsky’s novels sick.
Small wonder that Western scholars aren’t interested in Turgenev. Rational cultured minds are maybe admirable and pleasant to spend time with but aren’t exciting and, as a result, make poor-selling copy. Far better madmen, religious freaks, and political fantasists.
This man, one of Russia’s most admirable and sensible thinkers ever, isn’t popular in Russia, either, mainly because he refused to believe in some inherent Russian superiority. A great admirer of European art and classical music, he emigrated to Switzerland and then France. And in his novels put his views on Russian culture of the times plainly:
“Why, there’s a (Russian) gentleman disporting himself here, who imagines he’s a musical genius. “I have done nothing, of course,” he’ll tell you. “I’m a cipher, because I’ve had no training, but I’ve incomparably more melody and more ideas in me than in Meyerbeer.” In the first place, I say: why have you had no training? and secondly, that, not to talk of Meyerbeer, the humblest German flute-player, modestly blowing his part in the humblest German orchestra, has twenty times as many ideas as all our untaught geniuses; only the flute-player keeps his ideas to himself, and doesn’t trot them out with a flourish in the land of Mozarts and Haydns; while our friend the rough diamond has only to strum some little waltz or song, and at once you see him with his hands in his trouser pocket and a sneer of contempt on his lips: I’m a genius, he says. And in painting it’s just the same, and in everything else. Oh, these natural geniuses, how I hate them!
As if every one didn’t know that it’s only where there’s no real science fully assimilated, and no real art, that there’s this flaunting affectation of them. Surely it’s time to have done with this flaunting, this vulgar twaddle, together with all hackneyed phrases such as “no one ever dies of hunger in Russia,” “nowhere is there such fast travelling as in Russia,” “we Russians could bury all our enemies under our hats.” I’m for ever hearing of the richness of the Russian nature, their unerring instinct, and of Kulibin…. But what is this richness, after all, gentlemen? Half-awakened mutterings or else half-animal sagacity. Instinct, indeed! A fine boast. Take an ant in a forest and set it down a mile from its ant-hill, it will find its way home; man can do nothing like it; but what of it? do you suppose he’s inferior to the ant? Instinct, be it ever so unerring, is unworthy of man; sense, simple, straightforward, common sense—that’s our heritage, our pride; sense won’t perform any such tricks, but it’s that that everything rests upon. As for Kulibin, who without any knowledge of mechanics succeeded in making some very bad watches, why, I’d have those watches set up in the pillory, and say: see, good people, this is the way not to do it. Kulibin’s not to blame for it, but his work’s rubbish. To admire Telushkin’s boldness and cleverness because he climbed on to the Admiralty spire is well enough; why not admire him? But there’s no need to shout that he’s made the German architects look foolish, that they’re no good, except at making money…. He’s not made them look foolish in the least; they had to put a scaffolding round the spire afterwards, and repair it in the usual way. For mercy’s sake, never encourage the idea in Russia that anything can be done without training. No; you may have the brain of a Solomon, but you must study, study from the A B C. Or else hold your tongue, and sit still, and be humble! Phoo! it makes one hot all over!’
Potugin took off his hat and began fanning himself with his handkerchief.
‘Russian art,’ he began again. ‘Russian art, indeed!… Russian impudence and conceit, I know, and Russian feebleness too, but Russian art, begging your pardon, I’ve never come across. For twenty years on end they’ve been doing homage to that bloated nonentity Bryullov, and fancying that we have founded a school of our own, and even that it will be better than all others…. Russian art, ha, ha, ha! ho, ho!’
‘Excuse me, though, Sozont Ivanitch,’ remarked Litvinov, ‘would you refuse to recognise Glinka too, then?’
Potugin scratched his head.
‘The exception, you know, only proves the rule, but even in that instance we could not dispense with bragging. If we’d said, for example, that Glinka was really a remarkable musician, who was only prevented by circumstances—outer and inner—from becoming the founder of the Russian opera, none would have disputed it; but no, that was too much to expect! They must at once raise him to the dignity of commander-in-chief, of grand-marshal, in the musical world, and disparage other nations while they were about it; they have nothing to compare with him, they declare, then quote you some marvellous home-bred genius whose compositions are nothing but a poor imitation of second-rate foreign composers, yes, second-rate ones, for they’re the easiest to imitate. Nothing to compare with him? Oh, poor benighted barbarians, for whom standards in art are non-existent, and artists are something of the same species as the strong man Rappo: there’s a foreign prodigy, they say, can lift fifteen stone in one hand, but our man-154- can lift thirty! Nothing to compare with us, indeed! I will venture to tell you some thing I remember, and can’t get out of my head. Last spring I visited the Crystal Palace near London; in that Palace, as you’re aware, there’s a sort of exhibition of everything that has been devised by the ingenuity of man—an encyclopædia of humanity one might call it. Well, I walked to and fro among the machines and implements and statues of great men; and all the while I thought, if it were decreed that some nation or other should disappear from the face of the earth, and with it everything that nation had invented, should disappear from the Crystal Palace, our dear mother, Holy Russia, could go and hide herself in the lower regions, without disarranging a single nail in the place: everything might remain undisturbed where it is; for even the samovar, the woven bast shoes, the yoke-bridle, and the knout—these are our famous products—were not invented by us. One could not carry out the same experiment on the Sandwich islanders; those islanders have made some peculiar canoes and javelins of their own; their absence would be noticed by visitors. It’s a libel! it’s too severe, you say perhaps…. But I say, first, I don’t know how to roar like any sucking dove; and secondly, it’s plain that it’s not only the devil no one dares to look-155- straight in the face, for no one dares to look straight at himself, and it’s not only children who like being soothed to sleep. Our older inventions came to us from the East, our later ones we’ve borrowed, and half spoiled, from the West, while we still persist in talking about the independence of Russian art! Some bold spirits have even discovered an original Russian science; twice two makes four with us as elsewhere, but the result’s obtained more ingeniously, it appears.’
Perhaps recognizing the truth of these sentiments, Russians did not take kindly to such words. And despite the fact that a century and a half later, Russia can boast a truly significant contribution to Western classical music (Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Shoskakovich), Russians still feel small and uncouth and uncultured compared to their Western neighbors and such sentiments still rile.
As the Russian proverb has it, the truth pokes in the eye.
Ivan Turgenev, Smoke
Oltre Mare 