CLASSIC READ
MICHAEL HENDERSON on the pleasures of reading Turgenev
Michael Henderson on Turgenev
Of all the great Russian writers, Ivan Turgenev is the one most persistently overlooked. He has never been underrated. Indeed, among novelists of the past century, he has been venerated. But because he doesn’t roar, like Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, readers do not always hear his voice. Nevertheless he is a lion. His masterpiece, Fathers and Sons, or Fathers and Children, was published in 1862, a year after the emancipation of the serfs by Tsar Alexander II. It is an exquisite and very moving novel, characterised by the sympathy for humankind that one finds in Chekhov’s plays and short stories. Which is why Turgenev and Chekhov will always be the most deeply loved of Russian writers.
Turgenev was a European Russian, who lived for many years in Germany and France, and was a skilful linguist. In terms of style and temperament he has more in common with his friend Flaubert than with his great Russian contemporaries. Too radical for the conservatives, too conservative for the radicals, he never fitted easily into Russian literary or political circles.
Reading Turgenev (the title, happily, of a delightful novella by the great Irish writer William Trevor) is one of life’s highest pleasures. How beautifully in Fathers and Sons he captures those quirks of behaviour that make life so rich: the infant laughing at a greenfinch in its cage; the suitor rejected because he didn’t own a watch.
Bazarov, the self-proclaimed nihilist, who despises ‘romanticism’, is the anti-hero. But it is his parents, emblems of the old Russia of peasant tales and Holy Fools, we take to our hearts. The famous final page, as they mourn their son, has earned its place in the annals of literature. We love Arkady too, and the girl he marries, the flower-picking, piano-playing Katya.
Turgenev’s voice is tolerant, and wise. He writes of ‘that feeling of absolute quiet which is probably familiar to every one of us and the charm of which consists in a scarcely conscious, mute, yet wholly concentrated contemplation of the wide wave of life as it rolls on ceaselessly within and around us’. I know of no greater novel, nor one so truthful. It is the book of a lifetime.