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DARIUSZ TOLCZYK
gories. The hero of Turgenev's
Fathers and Sons,
the young materialist
Bazarov, put it briefly (in what became one of the most often quoted
maxims in Russian literature): "Nature is not a temple but a workshop."
This new view of nature brought a new metaphysical problem. The
early critics of Turgenev's
Fathers and Sons,
for instance, consumed by
polemics over Bazarov's political radicalism, did not quite realize that
this late patron of the nihilists paid a terrible price in the novel for his
views. Indeed, the seeds of literary revolution were already present in
the
ground of realistic poetics. In Turgenev's novel nature is deaf and dumb
for Bazarov, and this silence of nature is tragically portrayed by Tur–
genev. Bazarov's ability to love was doubtful; his deficiencies were self–
inflicted, a result of his lack of beliefs. The last scene of
Fathers and
Sons
shows us the grave of this unfulfilled "conqueror" of nature. He, unlike
Karamzin's Liza, died without the compassionate silence of birds, and
flowers blossomed on his grave, quite indifferent to the sadness of his
death.
Turgenev's
A Hunter's Sketches
was considered almost a model of re–
alistic writing. Yet its ambivalence toward the poetics of realism is present
at a deeper level in the stories. "Biryuk" opens: "I was coming back
from hunting one evening alone in a droshky." The very first sentence
gives a great deal of information; we have in it time, direction, cause,
circumstances, a precise quantification of motion, and purpose. The nar–
rator keeps adding information: "I was eight versts from home.... A
thunderstorm was coming on. In front, a huge purplish storm cloud
slowly rose from behind the forest; long gray rain clouds raced over my
head.. . ." The presence of all the objects mentioned here is explainable
in terms of temporal and spatial relationships. The narrator himself is a
necessary point of reference, a "camera" which notices objects in a visual
relationship to itself ("in front," "over my head,"). His perception gives
the impression of consequential objectivity. Then, a storm comes and the
light suddenly changes, blurring the images seen by the narrator-protago–
nist. He decides to hide under the trees next to a path. But "suddenly,
in
a flash of lightning, I saw a tall figure on the road. I stared intently
in
that direction - and again the figure seemed to spring out of the ground
near my droshky."
"To spring out of the ground" is a colloquialism in the Russian
language and not a literary metaphor to be taken seriously. But if we
read it seriously, perhaps this expression is not unintentional to the
author whose narration slips from an objective, matter-of-fact
monologuethe worn-out metaphor. Could it be a more or less literal
report of what is happening to the narrator? It is noteworthy that the
narrator, having lost his ability to see in the poor and distorted visibility
