686
PAR.TISAN R.EVIEW
no novel which had the physical magnitude of
War and Peace
or of
The
Brothers Karamazov.
The very nature of his true position rested in his
not seeming to write "great works," but rather of being particularly
objective, of allowing his genius for acute observation to have its say.
The position he had attained through the publication of
A
S
ports–
man's Notebook, Rudin, On the Eve, A House of Gentlefolk
and
Fathers and Children
established his reputation in Europe as well as
among his Russian contemporaries, but it did not free him from the
severity of political critics in his own country; although
Rudin, On the
Eve,
and
Fathers and Children
gave to his readers characters who lived
and breathed the turbulent intellectual and political life of mid-nine–
teenth-century Russia; although Bazarov of
Fathers and Children
and
Insarov of
On the Eve
were memorable portraits of the revolutionary
hero; although Rudin was a recognized descendant of Eugen Onegin–
they were not cut to political designs. More than that, Turgenev com–
plicated critical discussion of his work by writing "The Diary of a Super–
fluous Man," who though he tells the story, is of the inarticulate com–
pany of the German music teacher in
A House of Gentlefolk
and the
giant deaf-mute in "Moommoo." Yet it was a part of Turgenev's re–
sponsibility as a man, as a writer as well as artist, to see for the blind,
to speak for those who could not talk; this responsibility, coupled with
the perceptions of a poet, was the deepest root in his position as a
political liberal; it provided fuel for his attacks on glib, office-seeking
near-aristocrats, on the bureaucracy as well as against the cruelty of
all who hold or seek power over others. All this of course transcended
political and didactic readings of his short stories and novellas; the
closing words of
A House of Gentlefolk
are appropriate footnotes to the
intention of his art. Liza, one of the most glorious and certainly the
most appealing of his heroines, is last seen by her lover walking through
the cloisters of a convent. Neither speaks: "There are such moments in
life," Turgenev wrote, "such feelings . . . One can but point to them
-and pass on."
Turgenev's strength, like that of Alexander Blok, was concealed
within the hidden resources of his memory, in the Proust-like recollec–
tions of past experience; that is why his two stories of adolescence, "First
Love" and "The Watch" have an endurance beyond all other stories of
their kind; taken together, the two stories explore the ranges of adoles–
cent emotion: the awakening of sex, shame, pride, ambition, the dis–
covery of lyrical beauty in the mere sense of being, and the wave of
disillusionment that follows it.
It is this aspect of Turgenev's art, present also in
A Sportsman's
