Chapter XVI: Letter 1

Instead of a letter, dear friend, I am sending you a dissertation, and an unfinished one too. After our conversation I read over again Pisarev’s article on Bazarov, which I had quite forgotten, and I am very glad I did—that is, not that I had forgotten it, but that I read it again. The article confirms my point of view. In its one-sidedness it is more true and more worth consideration than its opponents have supposed. Whether Pisarev has correctly grasped the character of Bazarov as Turgenev meant it, does not concern me. What does matter is that he has recognised himself and his comrades in Bazarov, and has added to the portrait what was lacking in the book. The less Pisarev has adhered to the narrow framework in which the exasperated ‘Father’ has tried to confine the obstinate ‘Son,’ the more freely has he been able to treat him as the expression of his ideal.

‘But what interest can Mr. Pisarev’s ideal have for us? Pisarev is a smart critic, he has written a great deal, he has written about everything, sometimes about subjects of which he had knowledge, but all that does not give his ideal any claim on the attention of the public.’

The point is that it is not his own individual ideal, but the ideal which both before and since the appearance of Turgenev’s Bazarov has haunted the younger generation, has been embodied not only in various heroes in novels and stories, but in living persons who have tried to take Bazarovism as the basis of their words and actions. What Pisarev says I have seen and heard myself a dozen times; in the simplicity of his heart, he has let out the cherished thought of a whole circle and, focussing the scattered rays on one centre, has shed a light on the typical Bazarov.

To Turgenev, Bazarov is more than alien; to Pisarev, more than a comrade; to study the type, of course, one must take the view which sees in Bazarov the desideratum.

Pisarev’s opponents were frightened by his lack of caution; while denouncing Turgenev’s Bazarov as a caricature, they repudiated even more violently his transfigured double; they were displeased at Pisarev’s having put his foot in it, but it does not follow from this that he was wrong in his interpretation.

Pisarev knows the heart of his Bazarov through and through; he makes a confession for his hero. ‘Perhaps,’ he says, ‘at the bottom of his heart Bazarov does accept a great deal of what he denies in words, and, perhaps, it is just what is accepted and concealed that saves him from moral degradation and from moral insignificance.’

We regard this indiscreet utterance, which looks so deeply into another soul, as very important.

Further on, Pisarev describes his hero’s character thus: ‘Bazarov is extremely proud, but his pride is not noticeable’ (clearly this is not Turgenev’s Bazarov) ‘just because it is so great. Nothing would satisfy Bazarov but an _eternity of ever-widening activity and ever-increasing enjoyment_.’[76]

Bazarov acts everywhere and in everything only as he wishes, or as he thinks advantageous and convenient; he is guided only by his personal desire or personal calculation. He acknowledges no Mentor above him, without himself nor within himself. Before him is no lofty aim, in his mind is no lofty thought, and with all that his powers are immense. If Bazarovism is a malady, it is a malady of our age, and will have to run its course in spite of any amputations or palliatives.

Bazarov looks down on people, and rarely gives himself the trouble, indeed, to conceal his half-contemptuous and half-patronising attitude to those who hate and to those who obey him. He loves no one. He thinks it quite unnecessary to put any constraint on himself whatever. There are two sides to his cynicism, an internal and an external, the cynicism of thought and feeling and the cynicism of manner and expression. The essence of his inner cynicism lies in an ironical attitude to feeling of every sort, to dreaminess, to poetical enthusiasm. The harsh expression of this irony, the causeless and aimless roughness of manner, are part of his external cynicism. Bazarov is not merely an empiricist; he is also an unkempt Bursch. Among the admirers of Bazarov there will doubtless be some who will be delighted with his rude manners, the vestiges left by his rough student life, and will imitate those manners, which are in any case a defect and not a virtue.[77] Such people are most often evolved in the grey environment of hard work: stern work coarsens the hands, coarsens the manners, coarsens the feelings; the man is toughened, casts off youthful dreaminess, and gets rid of tearful sentimentality; there is no possibility of dreaming at work; the hard-working man looks upon idealism as a folly peculiar to the idleness and soft self-indulgence of the well-to-do, he reckons moral sufferings as imaginary, moral impulses and heroic deeds as far-fetched and absurd. He feels a repulsion for high-flown talk.’

Then Pisarev draws the genealogical tree of Bazarov: the Onyegins and Petchorins begat the Rudins and the Beltovs,[78] the Rudins and the Beltovs begat Bazarov. (Whether the Decembrists are omitted intentionally or unintentionally I do not know.) The bored and disillusioned are succeeded by men who strive to act, life rejects them both as worthless and incomplete. ‘It is sometimes their lot to suffer, but they never succeed in getting anything done. Society is deaf and inexorable to them. They are incapable of adapting themselves to its conditions, not one of them ever rises so high as head clerk of a government office. Some are consoled by becoming professors and working for future generations. Their negative usefulness is incontestable. They increase the numbers of men incapable of practical activity, in consequence of which practical activity itself, or more precisely the forms in which it usually finds expression now, slowly but steadily sink lower in public esteem.’

‘It seemed (after the Crimean War) that Rudinism was over, that the period of fruitless ideals and yearnings was succeeded by a period of seething and useful activity. But the illusion has faded. The Rudins have not become practical workers, and a new generation has come forward from behind them and taken up a reproachful and ironical attitude towards its predecessors. “What are you whining about, what are you seeking, what are you asking from life? You want happiness, I suppose? I daresay you do! Happiness has to be fought for. If you are strong, take it. If you are weak, hold your tongue; we feel sick enough without your whining!” A gloomy, concentrated energy is expressed in this unfriendly attitude of the younger generation to their Mentors. In their conceptions of good and evil the young generation and the best men of the preceding one are alike, the sympathies and antipathies of both are the same; they desire the same thing, but the men of the past generation were in an everlasting fuss and ferment. The men of to-day are not in a fuss, they are not trying to find anything, they will not give in to any compromise, and they hope for nothing. They are as helpless as the Rudins, but they recognise their helplessness. “I cannot act now,” each of these new men thinks, “and I am not going to try. I despise everything that surrounds me, and I am not going to conceal my contempt. I shall enter on the battle with evil when I feel myself strong.” Having no possibility of acting, men begin to reflect and investigate. Superstitions and authorities are torn to shreds, and the philosophy of life is completely cleared of all sorts of fantastic conceptions. It is nothing to them whether the public is following in their footsteps. They are full of themselves, of their own inner life. In short, the Petchorins had will without understanding, the Rudins understanding without will, the Bazarovs both understanding and will. Thought and action are blended in one firm whole.’

As you see, there is everything here (if there is no mistake), both character-drawing and classification. All is brief and clear, the sum is added up, the bill is presented, and perfectly correctly from the point of view from which the author has attacked the question.

But we do not accept this bill, and we protest from our premature coffins which have not yet arrived, though bespoken. We are not Charles V., and have no desire to be buried alive.

How strange has been the fate of _Fathers and Children_! That Turgenev created Bazarov with no idea of patting him on the head is clear; that he meant to do something for the ‘Fathers’ is clear too. But when he came to deal with such pitiful and worthless ‘Fathers’ as the Kirsanovs, Turgenev was carried away by Bazarov in spite of his harshness, and instead of thrashing the son he chastised the fathers.

And so it has come to pass that some of the younger generation have recognised themselves in Bazarov. But we entirely fail to recognise ourselves in the Kirsanovs, just as we did not recognise ourselves in the Manilovs nor the Sobakevitches, although Manilovs and Sobakevitches existed all over the place in the days of our youth, and are existing now.

Whole herds of moral freaks live at the same date in different layers of society and in its different currents; undoubtedly they represent more or less general types, but they do not represent the most striking and characteristic side of their generation, the side which most fully expresses its force. Pisarev’s Bazarov is, in a one-sided sense, to a certain extent the extreme type of what Turgenev called the ‘Sons’; while the Kirsanovs are the most commonplace and ordinary representatives of the ‘Fathers.’

Turgenev was more of an artist in his novel than is thought, and that is why he turned out of his course, and to my thinking he did well in so doing—he meant to go one way, and he went another and a better one.

He might just as well have sent his Bazarov to London. That insignificant creature, Pisemsky, did not shrink from travelling expenses for his sorely tried freaks. We could perhaps have shown Bazarov on the banks of the Thames that, without rising to the post of head clerk of an office, one might do quite as much good as any head of a department; that society is not always deaf and inexorable when the protest finds a response; that action does sometimes succeed; that the Rudins and the Beltovs sometimes have will and perseverance; and that, seeing the impossibility of carrying on the work to which they are urged by their inner impulse, they have forsaken many things, gone abroad, and without ‘fuss and ferment’ have established a Russian printing-press, and are carrying on a Russian propaganda. The influence of the London press from 1856 to the end of 1863 is not merely a practical fact, but an historical fact. It cannot be effaced, it has to be accepted. In London Bazarov would have seen that it was only from a distance that we seemed to be waving our arms in despair, and that in reality we were keeping our hands hard at work. Perhaps his wrath would have been changed to lovingkindness, and he would have given up treating us with ‘reproach and irony.’

I frankly confess this throwing of stones at one’s predecessors is very distasteful to me. I repeat what I have said already: ‘I should like to save the younger generation from historical ingratitude, and even from historical error. It is high time that the fathers gave up devouring their children like Saturn, but it is time the children ceased to follow the example of those savages who slaughter their old people. Surely it is not right that only in natural science the phases and degrees of development, the variations and the deviations, even the _avortements_, should be studied, accepted, considered _sine ira et studio_, while as soon as one approaches history the physiological method is abandoned, and the methods of the Criminal Court and the House of Correction are adopted.’

The Onyegins and Petchorins have passed away.

The Rudins and the Beltovs are passing.

The Bazarovs will pass ... and very quickly, as a matter of fact. It is a too artificial, bookish, overstrained type to persist for long.

A type has already tried to thrust himself forward to replace him, one rotten in the spring of his days, the type of the orthodox student, the conservative patriot trained at Government expense, in whom everything loathsome in Imperial Russia was incarnate, though even he felt embarrassed after serenading the Iversky Madonna, and singing a thanksgiving service to Katkov.

All the types that arise pass, and all, in virtue of the law of the conservation of energy which we have learnt to recognise in the physical world, persist and will spring up in different forms in the future progress of Russia and in her future organisation.

And so would it not be more interesting, instead of pitting Bazarov against Rudin, to analyse what are the salient points connecting them, and what are the reasons of their appearing and their transformation? Why have precisely these forms of development been called forth by our life, and why have they passed one into the other in this way? Their dissimilarity is obvious, but in some respects they are alike. Typical characters readily pounce on distinctions, exaggerate the angles and prominent features for the sake of emphasising them, paint the barriers in vivid colours, and tear apart the bonds. The shades are lost and unity is left far away, hidden in mist, like the plain that joins the foot of the mountains, whose tops, far apart from each other, are brightly lighted up. Moreover, we load on the shoulders of these types more than they can carry, and ascribe to them in life a significance they have not had, or have only in a limited sense. To take Onyegin as the finest type of the intellectual life of the period between 1820 and 1830, as the integral of all the tendencies and activities of the class then awakening, would be quite a mistake, although he does represent one of the aspects of the life of that time.

The type of that period, one of the most splendid types of modern history, was the Decembrist and not Onyegin. He could not be touched by Russian literature for all these forty years, but he is not the less for that.

How is it the younger generation have not the clearness of vision, the imagination, or the heart to grasp the grandeur and the virtue of those brillant young men who emerged from the ranks of the Guards, those spoilt darlings of wealth and high rank who left their drawing-rooms and their piles of gold to demand the rights of man, to protest, to make a statement for which—and they knew it—the hangman’s rope and penal servitude awaited them? It is a melancholy and puzzling question.

To resent the fact that these men appeared in the one class in which there was some degree of culture, of leisure, and of security, is senseless. If these ‘princes, boyars, voyevods,’ these secretaries of state and colonels, had not been awakened by moral hunger, but had waited to be aroused by bodily hunger, there would have been no whining and restless Rudins, nor Bazarovs, priding themselves on their combination of will and knowledge: in their place there would have been a regimental doctor who would have done the soldiers to death, robbing them of their rations and medicines, and have sold the death certificate to a Kirsanov’s bailiff when he had flogged a peasant to death, or there would have been a court clerk taking bribes, for ever drunk, fleecing the peasants of their quarter-roubles, and handing overcoat and goloshes to his Excellency, a Kirsanov and Governor of the province; and what is more, serfdom would not have received its death-blow, nor would there have been any of that underground activity under the heavy heel of authority, gnawing away the imperial ermine and the quilted dressing-gown of the landowners. It was fortunate that, side by side with men who found their gentlemanly pastimes in the kennels and the serfs’ quarters, in outraging and flogging at home and in cringing servility in Petersburg, there were some whose ‘pastime’ it was to tear the rod out of their hands and fight for freedom, not for licence but freedom for mind, for human life. Whether this pastime of theirs was their serious work, their passion, they showed on the gallows and in prison ... they showed it, too, when they came back after thirty years spent in Siberia.

If the type of the Decembrist has been reflected at all in literature, it is—faintly but with kindred features—in Tchatsky.[79]

His exasperated, bitter feeling, his youthful indignation, betray a healthy impulse to action; he feels what it is he is displeased with, he beats his head against the stone wall of social conventions and tries whether the prison bars are strong. Tchatsky was on the straight road for penal servitude, and if he survived the 14th of December he certainly did not turn into a passively suffering or proudly contemptuous person. He would have been more likely to rush into some indignant extreme, like Tchaadayev, to become a Catholic, a Slav-hater or a Slavophil, but he would not in any case have abandoned his propaganda, which he did not abandon either in the drawing-room of Famussov or in his entrance-hall, and he would not have comforted himself with the thought that ‘his hour had not yet come.’ He had that restless energy which cannot endure to be out of harmony with what surrounds it, and must either crush it or be crushed. This is the ferment which makes stagnation in history impossible and clears away the scum on its flowing but dilatory wave.

If Tchatsky had survived the generation that followed the 14th of December in fear and trembling, and grown up crushed by terror, humiliated and suppressed, he would have stretched across it a warm hand of greeting to us. With us Tchatsky would have come back to his natural surroundings. These _rimes croisées_ across the generations are not uncommon even in zoology. And it is my profound conviction that we should meet Bazarov’s children with sympathy and they us ‘without bitterness and sarcasm.’ Tchatsky could not have lived with his hands folded, neither in capricious peevishness nor in haughty self-admiration; he was not old enough to find pleasure in grumbling sulkiness, nor young enough to enjoy the conceit and self-sufficiency of adolescence. The whole character of the man lies in this restless ferment, this leaven of energy. But it is just that aspect that displeases Bazarov, it is that that incenses his proud stoicism. ‘Keep quiet in your corner if you have not the strength to do anything; it is sickening enough as it is without your whining,’ he says; ‘if you are beaten, well, stay beaten.... You have enough to eat; as for your weeping, that’s just an idle diversion’ ... and so on.

Pisarev was bound to speak in that way for Bazarov; the part he played required it.

It is hard not to play a part so long as it is liked. Take off Bazarov’s uniform, make him forget the jargon he uses, let him be free to utter one word simply, without posing (he so hates affectation!), let him for one minute forget his bristling duty, his artificially frigid language, his rôle of castigator, and within an hour we should understand each other in all the rest.

In their conceptions of good and evil the new generation are like the old. Their sympathies and antipathies, says Pisarev, are the same; what they desire is the same thing ... at the bottom of their hearts the younger generation accept much that they reject in words. It would be quite easy then to come to terms. But until he is stripped of his ceremonial trappings Bazarov consistently demands from men who are crushed under every burden on earth, outraged, tortured, deprived both of sleep and of all possibility of action when awake, that they should not speak of their misery; there is a smack of Araktcheyev about it.

What reason is there to deprive Lermontov, for instance, of his bitter lamentation, his upbraidings of his own generation which sent a shock of horror through so many? Would the prison-house of Nicholas be really any better if the gaolers had been as irritably nervous and carping as Bazarov and had suppressed those voices.

‘But what are they for? What is the use of them?’ ‘Why does a stone make a sound when it is hit with a hammer?’

‘It cannot help it.’

And why do these gentlemen suppose that men can suffer for whole generations without speech, complaint, indignation, cursing, protest? If complaint is not of use for others, it is for those who complain; the expression of sorrow eases the pain. ‘_Ihm_,’ says Goethe, ‘_gab ein Gott zu sagen, was er leidet._’

‘But what has it to do with us?’

Nothing to do with you, perhaps, but something to do with others, maybe; moreover, you must not lose sight of the fact that every generation lives for itself also. From the point of view of history it leads on to something else, but in relation to itself it is the goal, and it cannot, it ought not to endure without a murmur the afflictions that befall it, especially when it has not even the consolation which Israel had in the expectation of the Messiah, and has no idea that from the seed of the Onyegins and the Rudins will be born a Bazarov. In reality, what drives our young people to fury is that in our generation _our_ craving for activity, _our_ protest against the existing order of things was _differently_ expressed from theirs, and that the motive of both was not always and completely dependent on cold and hunger.

Is not this passion for uniformity another example of the same irritable spirit which has made of formality and routine the one thing of consequence and reduced military evolutions to the goose-step? That side of the Russian character is responsible for the development of Araktcheyevism, civil and military. Every personal, individual manifestation or deviation was regarded as disobedience, and excited persecution and incessant bullying. Bazarov leaves no one in peace; he provokes every one with his scorn. Every word of his is a reproof from a superior to a subordinate. There is no future before that. ‘If,’ says Pisarev, ‘Bazarovism is the malady of our age, it will have to run its course.’ By all means. This malady is only in place before the end of the university course; like teething, it is quite unseemly in the full-grown.

The worst service Turgenev did Bazarov was putting him to death by typhus because he did not know how to get rid of him. That is an _ultima ratio_ which no one can withstand; had Bazarov been saved from typhus, he would certainly have grown out of Bazarovism, at any rate in science, which he loved and prized, and which does not change its methods, whether frog or man, embryology or history, is its subject.

‘Bazarov rejected every sort of convention, and was nevertheless an extremely uncultured man. He had heard something about poetry, something about art, and, without troubling himself to think, abruptly passed sentence on the subject of which he knew nothing. This conceit is characteristic of us Russians in general; it has its good points, such as intellectual daring, but at times it leads us into crude errors.’

Science would have saved Bazarov; he would have ceased to look down on people with deep and unconcealed contempt. Science even more than the Gospel teaches us humility. She cannot look down on anything, she does not know what superiority means, she despises nothing, is never false for the sake of a pose, and conceals nothing to produce an effect. She stops short at the facts to investigate, sometimes to heal, never to punish, still less with hostility and irony.

Science—I anyway am not compelled to keep some words hidden in the silence of the spirit—science is love, as Spinoza said of thought and vision.