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PARTISAN REVIEW
Seldom has the pathetic fallacy seemed less fallacious. These lines are
a summary of themes elaborated elsewhere in the poem and throughout
the book. It is a poetry which, for all its echoes, comes out of the
moment, and out of a vividly experienced world.
R. W. Flint
TURGENEV AND HIS PEERS
TURGENEV: A LIFE.
By
David Magarshack. Grove Press. $6.00.
In the present generation the last of the seven! great figures
in Russian literature to be in need of renewed understanding and ap–
praisal is Ivan Turgenev. The list extends from Pushkin to Alexander
Blok, and the period, not unlike the stretch of time during the creation
of a great dramatic art in ancient Greece, was less than a hundred years.
To English and American readers Turgenev was the first of the major
Russian writers whose name was generally known, so well known that
Prince Mirsky in the mid-1920s was able to speak of him as a Victorian
novelist.
A Sportsman's Notebook
appeared in English as early as 1855 ;
his
Virgin Soil,
written in the late 1870s, was immediately translated,
accepted and approved as a fashionable, topical European novel in
London, Boston and New York. Today it is more appropriate to place
Turgenev, though his best writings were in prose, between the names
of two poets, Pushkin and BIok.
An opportunity to revise impreisions of Turgenev's stature appears
in David Magarshack's well-knit and sober biography,
Turgenev:
A
Life.
Its primary merit is that it provides sufficient evidence to show
how distinctly autobiographical much of Turgenev's writings were; and
through this study of his life one is led back, in fact, persuaded, to
renew a reading of Turgenev's stories and novellas. In this perspective
Turgenev is less of a Victorian ancestor than a Russian Proust, carrying
with him throughout his long career touchstones of childhood and
adolescent memories. The generally known facts of Turgenev's life
assume new importance: both his parents were of landed Russian gentry,
the father a handsome, cool-tempered army officer, the mother a plain–
featured, domineering woman who after suffering the cruelties of a
sadistic stepfather, turned her passions for vengeance and love of power
upon the members of her household. Her rule was absolute. Ivan Tur–
genev, her second son, had the advantage of occupying a middle position
in the family; direct responsibilities and blows were less likely to fall
1 The seven are Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov,
Blok.
