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Turgénieff
I do not mean to recount all the misunderstandings which existed between my father and Turgénieff, which ended in a complete breach between them in 1861. The actual external facts of that story are common property, and there is no need to repeat them.[7] According to general opinion, the quarrel between the two greatest writers of the day arose out of their literary rivalry.
It is my intention to show cause against this generally received opinion, and before I come to Turgénieff's visits to Yásnaya Polyána, I want to make as clear as I can the real reason of the perpetual discords between these two good-hearted people, who had a cordial affection for each other— discords which led in the end to an out-and-out quarrel and the exchange of mutual defiance.
As far as I know, my father never had any serious difference with any other human being during the whole course of his existence. And Turgénieff, in a letter to my father in 1865, wrote, "You are the only man with whom I have ever had misunderstandings."
Whenever my father related his quarrel with Iván Sergéyevitch, he took all the blame on himself. Turgénieff, immediately after the quarrel, wrote a letter apologizing to my father, and never sought to justify his own part in it.
Why was it that, as Turgénieff himself put it, his "constellation" and my father's "moved in the ether with unquestioned enmity"?
This is what my sister Tatyána wrote on the subject in her article "Turgénieff," published in the supplement to the "Novoye Vrémya," February 2, 1908:
"When this young wine has done fermenting," he wrote to Druzhénin in 1856, "the result will be a liquor worthy of the gods." In 1857 he wrote to Polónsky, "This man will go far, and leave deep traces behind him."
Nevertheless, somehow these two men never could "hit it off" together. When one reads Turgénieff's letters to my father, one sees that from the very beginning of their acquaintance misunderstandings were always arising, which they perpetually endeavored to smooth down or to forget, but which arose again after a time, sometimes in another form, necessitating new explanations and reconciliations.
In 1856 Turgénieff wrote to my father:
The following year he wrote a letter to my father which, it seems to me, is a key to the understanding of Turgénieff's attitude toward him:
It seems to me that Turgénieff, as an artist, saw nothing in my father beyond his great literary talent, and was unwilling to allow him the right to be anything besides an artist and a writer. Any other line of activity on my father's part offended Turgénieff, as it were, and he was angry with my father because he did not follow his advice. He was much older than my father,[8] he did not hesitate to rank his own talent lower than my father's, and demanded only one thing of him, that he should devote all the energies of his life to his literary work. And, lo and behold! my father would have nothing to do with his magnanimity and humility, would not listen to his advice, but insisted on going the road which his own tastes and nature pointed out to him. Turgénieff's tastes and character were diametrically opposed to my father's. While opposition always inspired my father and lent him strength, it had just the opposite effect on Turgénieff.
Being wholly in agreement with my sister's views, I will merely supplement them with the words uttered by his brother, Nikolái Nikoláyevitch, who said that "Turgénieff cannot reconcile himself to the idea that Lyovótchka is growing up and freeing himself from his tutelage."
As a matter of fact, when Turgénieff was already a famous writer, no one had ever heard of Tolstoy, and, as Fet expressed it, there was only "something said about his stories from 'Childhood.'"
I can imagine with what secret veneration a young writer, just beginning, must have regarded Turgénieff at that time, and all the more because Iván Sergéyevitch was a great friend of my father's elder and beloved brother Nikolái.
I do not like to assert it positively, but it seems to me that just as Turgénieff was unwilling to confine himself to "merely
Turgénieff himself said that when they first came to know each other my father dogged his heels "like a woman in love," and at one time he used to avoid him, because he was afraid of his spirit of opposition.
My father was perhaps irritated by the slightly patronizing tone which Turgénieff adopted from the very outset of their acquaintance; and Turgénieff was irritated by my father's "crankiness," which distracted him from "his proper métier, literature."
In 1870, before the date of the quarrel, Turgénieff wrote to Fet:
Turgénieff was just the same about my father's "Confession," which he read not long before his death. Having promised to read it,
In a letter to D. V. Grigórevitch he called the book, which was based, in his opinion, on false premises,
It is evident that even then Turgénieff did not understand what a mastery my father's new philosophy of life had obtained over him, and he was inclined to attribute his enthusiasm along with the rest to the same perpetual "crankinesses" and "somersaults" to which he had formerly attributed his interest in school-teaching, agriculture, the publication of a paper, and so forth.
IVÁN SERGÉYEVITCH three times visited Yásnaya Polyána within my memory, in: August and September, 1878, and the third and last time at the beginning of May, 1880. I can remember all these visits, although it is quite possible that some details have escaped me.
I remember that when we expected Turgénieff on his first visit, it was a great occasion, and the most anxious and excited of all the household about it was my mother. She told us that my father had quarreled with Turgénieff and had once challenged him to a duel, and that he was now coming at my father's invitation to effect a reconciliation.
Turgénieff spent all the time sitting with my father, who during his visit put aside even his work, and once in the middle of the day my mother collected us all at a quite unusual hour in the drawing-room, where Iván Sergéyevitch read us his story of "The Dog."
I can remember his tall, stalwart figure, his gray, silky, yellowish hair, his soft tread, rather waddling walk, and his piping voice, quite out of keeping with his majestic exterior. He had a chuckling kind of laugh, like a child's, and when he laughed his voice was more piping than ever.
In the evening, after dinner, we all gathered in the zala. At that time Uncle Seryózha, Prince Leoníd Dmítryevitch Urúsof, Vice-Governor of the Province of Tula; Uncle Sasha Behrs and his young wife, the handsome Georgian Patty; and the whole family of the Kuzmínskys, were staying at Yásnaya.
Aunt Tánya was asked to sing. We listened with beating hearts, and waited to hear what Turgénieff, the famous connoisseur, would say about her singing. Of course he praised it, sincerely, I think. After the singing a quadrille was got up. All of a sudden, in the middle of the quadrille, Iván Sergéyevitch, who was sitting at one side looking on, got up and took one of the ladies by the hand, and, putting his thumbs into the armholes of his waistcoat, danced a cancan according to the latest rules of Parisian art. Every
After tea the "grown-ups" started some conversation, and a warm dispute arose among them. It was Prince Urúsof who disputed most warmly, and "went for" Turgénieff.
Of Turgénieff's third visit I remember the woodcock shooting. This was on the second or third of May, 1880.
We all went out together beyond the Voronka, my father, my mother and all the children. My father gave Turgénieff the best place and posted himself one hundred and fifty paces away at the other end of the same glade.
My mother stood by Turgénieff, and we children lighted a bonfire not far off.
My father fired several shots and brought down two birds; Iván Sergéyevitch had no luck, and was envying my father's good fortune all the time. At last, when it was beginning to get dark, a woodcock flew over Turgénieff, and he shot it.
"Killed it?" called out my father.
"Fell like a stone; send your dog to pick him up," answered Iván Sergéyevitch.
My father sent us with the dog, Turgénieff showed us where to look for the bird; but search as we might, and the dog, too, there was no woodcock to be found. At last Turgénieff came to help, and my father came; there was no woodcock there.
"Perhaps you only winged it; it may have got away along the ground," said my father, puzzled. "It is impossible that the dog shouldn't find it; he couldn't miss a bird that was killed."
"I tell you I saw it with my own eyes, Lyoff Nikolaievich; it fell like a stone. I didn't wound it; I killed it outright. I can tell the difference."
"Then why can't the dog find it? It's impossible; there's something wrong."
"I don't know anything about that," insisted Turgénieff. "You may take it from me I'm not lying; it fell like a stone where I tell you."
There was no finding the woodcock, and the incident left an unpleasant flavor, as if one or the other of them was in the wrong. Either Turgénieff was bragging when he said that he shot it dead, or my father, in maintaining that the dog could not fail to find a bird that had been killed.
And this must needs happen just when they were both so anxious to avoid every sort of misunderstanding! That was the very reason why they had carefully fought shy of all serious conversation, and spent all their time merely amusing themselves.
When my father said good night to us that night, he whispered to us that we were to get up early and go back to the place to have a good hunt for the bird.
And what was the result? The woodcock, in falling, had caught in the fork of a branch, right at the top of an aspen-tree, and it was all we could do to knock it out from there.
When we brought it home in triumph, it was something of an "occasion," and my father and Turgénieff were far more delighted than we were. It turned out that they were both in the right, and everything ended to their mutual satisfaction.
Iván Sergéyevitch slept down-stairs in my father's study. When the party broke up for the night, I used to see him to his room, and while he was undressing I sat on his bed and talked sport with him.
He asked me if I could shoot. I said yes, but that I didn't care to go out shooting because I had nothing but a rotten old one-barreled gun.
"I'll give you a gun," he said. "I've got two in Paris, and I have no earthly need for both. It's not an expensive gun, but it's a good one. Next time I come to Russia I'll bring it with me."
I was quite taken aback and thanked him heartily. I was tremendously delighted at the idea that I was to have a real central-fire gun.
Unfortunately, Turgénieff never came to Russia again. I tried afterward to buy the gun he had spoken of from his legatees not in the quality of a central-fire gun, but as Turgénieff's gun; but I did not succeed.
That is all that I can remember about this delightful, naïvely cordial man, with the childlike eyes and the childlike laugh, and in the picture my mind preserves of him the memory of his grandeur melts into the charm of his good nature and simplicity.
In 1883 my father received from Iván Sergéyevitch his last farewell letter, written in pencil on his death-bed, and I remember with what emotion he read it.
Apropos of this letter of Turgénieff's, I should like to say that my father was sincerely annoyed, when he heard applied to himself the epithet "great writer of the land of Russia," which was taken from this letter.
He always hated clichés, and he regarded this one as quite absurd.
"Why not 'writer of the land'? I never heard before that a man could be the writer of a land. People get attached to some nonsensical expression, and go on repeating it in season and out of season."
I have given extracts above from Turgénieff's letters, which show the invariable consistency with which he lauded my father's literary talents. Unfortunately, I cannot say the same of my father's attitude toward Turgénieff.
In this, too, the want of dispassionateness in his nature revealed itself. Personal relations prevented him from being objective.
In 1867, apropos of Turgénieff's "Smoke," which had just appeared, he wrote to Fet:
In 1865, before the final breach with Turgénieff, he wrote, again to Fet:
In the autumn of 1883, after Turgénieff's death, when the family had gone into Moscow for the winter, my father stayed at Yásnaya Polyána alone, with Agáfya Mikháilovna, and set earnestly about reading through all Turgénieff's works.
This is what he wrote to my mother at the time:
Unfortunately, my father's intended lecture on Turgénieff never came off. The Government forbade him to pay this last tribute to his dead friend, with whom he had quarreled all his life only because he could not be indifferent to him.
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