By Stuart Mitchner

The portrait of Turgenev was painted in 1872 by Vasily Perov

I’ve been looking at a photograph of the Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev, who was born on this day, November 9, in 1818. What interests me about the photo, which isn’t clear enough to be reproduced here, is the unorthodox pose. He’s seated with one leg tucked under the other with a book propped on the thigh of the tucked-under leg. There’s a suggestion of amusement in his expression that seems to say, “Hello, whoever you are, let’s agree about the absurdity of humans striking poses and be comfortable together in the moment. We’re all in this together.”

Turgenev seems less the victim of the photographic situation than his more renowned countrymen Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, both of whom look far from comfortable in the poses for which they’re best known. That said, more familiar portraits of Turgenev like the one on this page show a handsome, white-haired, white-bearded gentleman of a certain age, imprisoned in the moment. My sense is that the man with one leg tucked under the other is closer to the writer that Henry James was referring to in 1883 on the occasion of Turgenev’s death. Recalling their first meeting in 1875, James says, “I found him adorable … and he remained the most approachable, the most practicable, the least unsafe man of genius it has been my fortune to meet. He was so simple, so natural, so modest, so destitute of personal pretension and of what is called the consciousness of powers, that one almost doubted at moments whether he were a man of genius after all.”

You never know with James, but he seems to be implying that his friend was somehow almost too nice, too humane, to be a genius. Writing three decades later, Joseph Conrad expressed his fondness for Turgenev in similar terms (“the clearest mind, the warmest heart, the largest sympathy”) while pointing out that in spite of “the loftiness of his character, the purity of his motives, and the peace of his conscience,” he had been, in effect, “beaten with sticks during the greater part of his existence.” Even when he was dead, “Revolutionists went on for a time flinging after his shade those jeers and curses from which that impartial lover of all his countrymen had suffered so much in his lifetime.”

The Bazarov Effect

The hostility Conrad describes was provoked by Turgenev’s most famous creation, the arrogant young nihilist Bazarov in Fathers and Sons (1862), which, as Isaiah Berlin observes, “caused the greatest storm among its Russian readers of any novel before or, indeed, since.” Publisher Thomas Seltzer’s introduction to my ancient, disintegrating Modern Library edition of the book is in agreement that “no event in the literary history of Russia ever created such a stir.” The mixture of “indignation and applause” it aroused “brought a crisis to Turgenev’s own life,” for “the indignation came from his friends,” the applause from his enemies. Set off by conflicting responses to a character who was viewed by some as the first Bolshevik in Russian literature, the furor was such that it’s said to have influenced Turgenev’s decision to leave Russia to spend his last decades on the continent. Considering the power exerted by beautiful women in his work, however, it’s more likely that Turgenev wanted to be near the love of his life, the opera singer Pauline Viardot.

Given that he was more comfortable with writers like James and Flaubert, it’s no wonder that Russian writers disparaged Turgenev’s self-imposed exile. It’s amusing but not surprising to learn that Fathers and Sons, a classic of Russian literature, was conceived while he was “taking sea baths” on the Isle of Wight.

Dissecting Frogs

According to Turgenev’s own account of the genesis of the character, Bazarov was modeled on “the striking personality of a young provincial doctor” in whom he saw “the beginning of that which, as yet scarely born and still in a state of ferment, afterwards received the name of nihilism.”

Turgenev makes Bazarov’s subversive presence felt before anything about him or his nihilist beliefs has been stated. When his friend and disciple Arkady’s humane, well-meaning if occasionally sentimental father Nikolai begins to quote some lines from Pushkin (“Spring, spring, sweet time of love!”), Bazarov interrupts him to ask for a match to light his pipe. Later he mentions to Arkady how his father “wastes his time reading poetry.” When Bazarov asks “Did you notice how shy and nervous he is?”, Arkady shakes his head “as though he himself were not shy and nervous.” Bazarov goes on to point out how “these old idealists … develop their nervous systems till they break down.” No doubt quite a few Pushkin-quoting old idealists took offense at that casually tossed-off generalization. As he settles in as a guest in Arkady’s household, Bazarov displays his contempt for polite society, art, aesthetics, and decorum, while devoting himself to “pure science,” which consists of examining insect life and capturing and dissecting frogs.

Returning home one day from a walk, Arkady is admiring the fields and “the soft light of the sun” when Bazarov delivers one of his characteristic edicts, declaring that “Nature’s not a temple but a workshop and man’s the workman in it.” As he says those words, “the long drawn notes of a violoncello” float out to them from the house. It’s Arkady’s father playing Schubert’s Expectation “with much feeling, though with an untrained hand,” the melody flowing “with honey sweetness through the air.” Startled at first, Bazarov asks Arkady how old his father is and bursts into laughter when he hears, amused by the idea of “a man of forty-four, a paterfamilias in this out of the way district” playing the cello.

As Bazarov laughs, Arkady does not “even smile.” This is the first clear disconnect between the disciple and the master. It’s also a Turgenev moment — the sound of music on the air, coming almost as if by magic. The choice of Schubert’s Expectation makes sense in the context of the scene, since the title refers to the song Schubert set to a poem by Schiller celebrating love and nature. By now you’re aware that in Turgenev’s world love and beauty and humanity will carry the day.

The Reading Environment

It’s pleasantly unsettling to be reading Fathers and Sons again in the Modern Library edition that has my own crude notes in the margin, made when I was a college sophomore. My comments would seem to signify a muted enthusiasm compared to the superlatives and exclamation points I lavished on Anna Karenina and The Brothers Karamazov, both read in the same spring, probably the single most blissful reading period of my life. Where Tolstoy and Dostoevsky are hailed with penciled “Yeses!” and “Greats!,” I find only a single “Yes!” penciled after what may be the most explicitly sentimental passage in Fathers in Sons: “No one who has not seen those tears in the eyes of the beloved, knows yet to what a point, faint with shame and gratitude, a man may be happy on this earth.”

It’s possible that my first, relatively low-key college-age reaction is a reflection of Turgenev’s secondary stature among literary gods like Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, who was born two days and three years after Turgenev. Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov were like juggermauts, not books so much as experiences. Perhaps Turgenev would be as celebrated and as read in 2016 as Tolstoy or Dostoevsky had he written one of those “large loose and baggy monsters, with their queer elements of the accidental and the arbitrary” that Henry James famously describes in reference to Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Instead, Turgenev is the sort of writer James has in mind when he ends his peroration by expressing his “delight in deep-breathing economy and an organic form.”

In my own sophomoric way, I seem to have been in synch with James. After the rhapsodic concluding paragraph of Fathers and Sons and one of the most moving death scenes in all literature, I’ve proclaimed in my 19-year-old scribble: “He has said more in 243 pages than many great writers manage to say in 700.”