A DESPERATE CHARACTER, AND OTHER STORIES
By Ivan Turgenev
Translated from the Russian By Constance Garnett
1899
THE NOVELS OF IVAN TURGENEV
Complete in Fifteen Volumes.
i. Rudin. ii. A House of Gentlefolk. iii. On the Eve. iv. Fathers and Children. v. Smoke. vi. & vii. Virgin Soil. 2 Vols. viii, & ix. A Sportsman’s Sketches. 2 Vols. x. Dream Tales and Prose Poems. xi. The Torrents of Spring and other Stories. xii. A Lear of the Steppes and other Stories. xiii. The Diary of a Superfluous Man and other Stories. xiv. A Desperate Character and other Tales. xv. The Jew and other Stories.
TO JOSEPH CONRAD
WHOSE ART IN ESSENCE OFTEN RECALLS
THE ART AND ESSENCE OF TURGENEV
INTRODUCTION
The six tales now translated for the English reader were written by Turgenev at various dates between 1847 and 1881. Their chronological order is:—
Pyetushkov, 1847
The Brigadier, 1867
A Strange Story, 1869
Punin and Baburin, 1874
Old Portraits, 1881
A Desperate Character, 1881
Pyetushkov is the work of a young man of twenty-nine, and its lively, unstrained realism is so bold, intimate, and delicate as to contradict the flattering compliment that the French have paid to one another—that Turgenev had need to dress his art by the aid of French mirrors.
Although Pyetushkov shows us, by a certain open naïveté of style, that a youthful hand is at work, it is the hand of a young master, carrying out the realism of the ‘forties’—that of Gogol, Balzac, and Dickens—straightway, with finer point, to find a perfect equilibrium free from any bias or caricature. The whole strength and essence of the realistic method has been developed in Pyetushkov to its just limits. The Russians are instinctive realists, and carry the warmth of life into their pages, which warmth the French seem to lose in clarifying their impressions and crystallising them in art. Pyetushkov is not exquisite: it is irresistible. Note how the reader is transported bodily into Pyetushkov’s stuffy room, and how the major fairly boils out of the two pages he lives in! (pp. 301, 302). That is realism if you like. A woman will see the point of Pyetushkov very quickly. Onisim and Vassilissa and the aunt walk and chatter around the stupid Pyetushkov, and glance at him significantly in a manner that reveals everything about these people’s world. All the servants who appear in the tales in this volume are hit off so marvellously that one sees the lower-class world, which is such a mystery to certain refined minds, has no secrets for Turgenev.
Of a different, and to our taste more fascinating, genre is The Brigadier. It is greater art because life’s prosaic growth is revealed not merely realistically, but also poetically, life as a tiny part of the great universe around it. The tale is a microcosm of Turgenev’s own nature; his love of Nature, his tender sympathy for all humble, ragged, eccentric, despised human creatures; his unfaltering keenness of gaze into