TURGENEV
TURGENEV
A STUDY
BY
EDWARD GARNETT
WITH A FOREWORD BY JOSEPH CONRAD
LONDON: 48 PALL MALL
W. COLLINS SONS & CO. LTD.
GLASGOW MELBOURNE AUCKLAND
COPYRIGHT 1917
FOREWORD
Dear Edward—I am glad to hear that you areabout to publish a study of Turgenev, that fortunateartist who has found so much in life for us and nodoubt for himself, with the exception of bare justice.Perhaps that will come to him, too, in time. Yourstudy may help the consummation. For his luckpersists after his death. What greater luck anartist like Turgenev could wish for than to find inthe English-speaking world a translator who hasmissed none of the most delicate, most simplebeauties of his work, and a critic who has knownhow to analyse and point out its high qualities withperfect sympathy and insight.
After twenty odd years of friendship (and myfirst literary friendship too) I may well permitmyself to make that statement, while thinking ofyour wonderful Prefaces as they appeared from timeto time in the volumes of Turgenev’s completeedition, the last of which came into the light ofpublic indifference in the ninety-ninth year of thenineteenth century.
With that year one may say, with some justice, thatthe age of Turgenev had come to an end too; onlywork so simple and human, so independent of thetransitory formulas and theories of art belongs asyou point out in the Preface to Smoke “to all time.”
Turgenev’s creative activity covers about thirtyyears. Since it came to an end the social andpolitical events in Russia have moved at an acceleratedpace, but the deep origins of them, in the moraland intellectual unrest of the souls, are recorded inthe whole body of his work with the unerring lucidityof a great national writer. The first stirrings, thefirst gleams of the great forces can be seen almostin every page of the novels, of the short storiesand of A Sportsman’s Sketches—those marvellouslandscapes peopled by unforgettable figures.
Those will never grow old. Fashions in monstersdo change, but the truth of humanity goes on forever, unchangeable and inexhaustible in the varietyof its disclosures. Whether Turgenev’s art, whichhas captured it with such mastery and such gentleness,is for “all time” it is hard to say. Since, asyou say yourself, he brings all his problems andcharacters to the test of love we may hope that itwill endure at least till the infinite emotions of loveare replaced by the exact simplicity of perfectedEugenics. But even by then, I think, womenwould not have changed much; and the womenof Turgenev who understood them so tenderly, soreverently and so passionately—they, at least, arecertainly for all time.
Women are, one may say, the foundation of hisart. They are Russian of course. Never was awriter so profoundly, so whole-souledly national.But for non-Russian readers, Turgenev’s Russia isbut a canvas on which the incomparable artist ofhumanity lays his colours and his forms in the greatlight and the free air of the world. Had he inventedthem all and also every stick and stone, brook andhill and field in which they move, his personageswould have been just as true and as poignant intheir perplexed lives. They are his