The New Lifetime Reading Plan

It is a fair guess that this queer Yankee semihermit, this genuinely rugged individualist who distrusted the state and treated July 4 like any other day, may turn out to be, oddly enough, not only the most American of ali our writers, but one of the most enduring.

IVAN SERGEYEVICH TURGENEV фl

IVAN SERGEYEVICH TURGENEV

1818-1883 Fathers and Sons

Of the four great nineteenth-century Russian novelists, Turgenev seems to wear the least well. Perhaps that is because, as authorities tell us, his style is of such delicacy and evocativeness that no translation does it justice. Or it may be that some of his themes have lost their attractive power: the "superfluous men," the charming but effete Russian gentry of the 1840S and 1850S; the struggle, if the term is not too strong, between the dominating female and the weaker male; the pale beauty of early love, of frustrated love, of remembered love; and his recurrent motif, the mutations of failure.

Turgenev's mother was a witch out of a dreadful fairy tale. The terror and despair she inspired in her son never left his mind and crept into much of his work. His lifelong passion for the famous, ugly, but apparently fascinating singer Pauline Viardot-Garcia offered no compensation for his bruised spirit. He followed her about Europe like a dog, enjoyed (if he did) her ultimate favors only briefly, and obtained what happiness he could by living near her or at times with her and her hus- band. There is no doubt that she distorted his view of women; he seems either to fear them or to sentimentalize them.

Turgenev shuttled between his Russian estates and Western Europe for many years, and spent the last twenty or so mainly in Paris and Baden. He was an expatriate, rather like Joyce [110]. Like Joyce, he widened his own country s perspec­tive by throwing open to it a view of cosmopolitan culture. Also like Joyce, this "Westernizer" continued to draw his central inspiration from his native land, no matter how distanced his externai life became. Turgenevs political position, throughout the century that was preparing for 1917, was that of the unen- gaged, liberal, enlightened, humane skeptic. Hence his books, while at once winning the admiration of the cultivated, often failed to please either the reactionaries or the radicais.

Some of his shorter works (particularly many of the Sportsmans Sketches) are indeed beautiful. But probably his reputation will continue to rest mainly on Ґ others and Sons, also translated as Fathers and Children. As its title suggests, it was intended to be a study of the conflict between the generations. The theme, in my opinion, has been more powerfully treated by other novelists, including Samuel Butler in The Way of ali Flesh.

To us, however, Fathers and Sons appears more interesting as the first classic presentation of that element in the Russian character which surfaced in our time and which, let us hope, will become less aggressive as the Russians move toward a democra- tic culture. Turgenev lacks Dostoyevsky's intuitive, indeed terri- fying grasp of the revolutionary-terrorist temperament [87]. Yet in Bazarov, the center of his masterpiece, he does give us a clear, almost Olympian picture of the mid-nineteenth-century nihilist (the word is Turgenevs invention). In Rъssia, as the years went by, the nihilist type was to assume a number of different forms: the terrorist, the anarchist, the atheist-materialist, the science worshiper, and at last the dedicated Communist. Though the book exhibits in relief most of Turgenev's other admirable qual- ities—particularly his economy and his un-Russian clarity of form—it will stand or fali, I think, with Bazarov.

C.F.

82

KARL MARX

1818-1883

FRIEDRICH ENGELS

1820-1895

The Communist Manifesto

Ideas have consequences. In no case can this be more clearly shown than in that of Karl Marx. He would perhaps have denied it. He would have said that, the victory of the prole- tariat being inevitable, his life and work were devoted merely to clarifying the issues and perhaps slightly accelerating the outcome of the struggle. Nevertheless, the history of the world since 1917 seems to have confirmed the judgment expressed in the first sentence of Isaiah Berlin^ Karl Marx: His Life and Environment—"No thinker in the nineteenth century has had so direct, deliberate and powerful an influence upon mankind as Karl Marx." It is for that reason alone that a reading of The Manifesto of the Communist Party (for which his coworker Engels is partly responsible) is here suggested. Marx was a highly unpleasant person, and most of us reject his doctrines, but to have no acquaintance with him or them is to remain partially blind.