684
PARTISAN REVIEW
Outwardly, socially Turgenev demanded a world in which the
conventions of worldly and gentlemanly conduct prevailed; his softness of
manner,
his
weak voice, in notorious contrast to his tall commanding
presence in a room, his aristocratic yet sincere humility all belonged to
his external being; they concealed the literary statesman of which both
Do~toevsky
and Tolstoy were aware and in their view of his social and
political diplomacies, their perception of his skill was a continuing source
of irritation. Turgenev could bend and weave like a funereal willow in
a storm, but he did not break; he was enslaved by Pauline Viardot, yet
he exacted from her a singular respect for loyalties of friendship as well
as moments of violent passion.
What Turgenev represented either at home or abroad
was
a new
phenomenon, scarcely discerned even among the greatest of his Russian
contemporaries-the artist as a man of sensibility. This distinction drew
him in the direction of Symbolism in which the arts of
sugge~tion
and
association are employed. Consciously enough Turgenev translated his
poetic impulses and perceptions into prose, creating for his readers the
effect of lyrical nuances and intensities-the art that in Walter Pater's
phrase "aspired to a condition of music," and in Turgenev's prose
~us
tained the music of the writer's voice.
To the naked eye the man of sensibility is almost never the
hero in a
~ene
of action; unlike his romantic ancestors, his Byrons and
his Pushkins, he is more frequently a victim of well-nourished illnesses
and a physical coward-and Turgenev was both. A famous legend ran:
Soon after young Turgenev stepped on board the S. S.
Nicholas I
en
route to Berlin via Stettin on the Baltic, the ship caught fire. A passenger
heard him plead in his strange womanish voice, "For God's sake, save
me-I'm my mother's only son!" Whether literally true or false the
story had enough psychological truth in it to delight his critics, includ–
ing Dostoevsky, and to annoy Turgenev for many years, forcing
him
to write, even as he approached death, his own modified version of the
incident. Yet the story is of a piece with his excessive modesty; on read–
ing his work aloud to his Russian friends and critics before publication
he
would listen calmly to their instructions to burn it. The point is that
he did not follow their advice nor did he have any intention of doing so.
These symptoms were also of a piece with
his
internal convictions
and discriminations, with his early evolutions through eighteenth-century
social enlightenment, pantheism, Hegelian idealism into acutely ob–
servant discovery of his own world ; his concern was with the finer
grains of moral conduct, the hidden strength of unseen or inarticulate
emotions, the truth revealed in lips telling a lie, and
in
A Sportsman's
