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Turgenev's and Conracts Attitudes to Social Changes and Freedom In Brygida PUDEŁKO (Opole) Turgenev’s and ConracTs Attitudes to Social Changes and Freedom in Virgin Soil and Under Western Eyes Much of Joseph Conrad’s writing, covering an era obsessed by a sense of its own fragmentation, the break-up of old structures, old conventions of art, thought and politics can be seen to continue the nineteenth-century realist tradition. Morally, psychologically artistically and philosophically he can be a probing and challenging writer, who, like many great writers, was influenced by and responded to the ideas and ideals of his day as well as his literary predecessors. Since he began writing under the influence of the nineteenth- -century realists, but at a period which is regarded as the first stage of Modernism, and possessed a multi-cultural literary heritage, realist and modern- ist elements are merged in his fiction. For Conrad, whose family had been exposed to political persecution from Russia, it was “a country, a system of govemment, and a people; it was also, and very importantly, a literaturę” (Najder 1977: 126). On 20 October 1911 Conrad wrote to 01ivia Rayne Garnett: “I know extremely little of Russians. Practically nothing. In Poland we have nothing to do with them. One knows they are there. And that’s disagreeable enough. [...] I crossed the Russian frontier at the age of ten. Not having been to school then I never knew Russian” (Conrad 1983-2008, vol.4: 490). Six years later he repeated his denial of Russian in a letter to Edward Gamett: ‘‘The trouble is that I too don’t know Russian; I don’t even know the alphabet” (Conrad 1983-2008, vol. 4: 248). To George T. Keating, in 1922, Conrad protested against FI.L. Mencken’s “harping on [his] Slavonism”: “If he means that I have been influenced by the so-called Pobrano z https://repo.uni.opole.pl / Downloaded from Repository of Opole University 2021-10-01 204 Brygida Pudełko Slavonic literaturę then he is utterly wrong. I suppose he means Russian; but as a matter of fact T never knew Russian. The few novels I have read I have read in translation” (Jean-Aubry 1927, vol. 2: 289). In his letter to Charles Chasse of 31 January 1924 Conrad also expressed his opinion on the Russian language and literaturę: I must point out that I do not know the Russian language, that I know next to nothing of Russian imaginative literaturę, except the little I have been able to read in translations; that the formative forces acting on me, at the most plastic and impressionable age, were purely Western: that is French and English: and that, as far as I can remember, those forces found in me no resistance, no vague, deep-seated antagonism, either racial or temperamental. (Jean-Aubry 1927, vol. 2: 336) Nevertheless, although Conrad denied his knowledge of the Russian language and declared limited knowledge of Russian literaturę, the latter is the third, after English and French, most freąuently mentioned in his letters. This was largely due to Conrad’s friendship with Edward Gamett who had many Russian friends, and whose wife Constance was a well-known translator of Turgenev’s novels into English. The great Russian novelists of the nineteenth century aroused mixed feelings in Conrad. Although Lev Tolstoy was considered by Conrad “perhaps [...] worthy” (Conrad 1983-2008, vol. 5: 71) of Constance Gametfs translation, he was treated with reserved respect and suspicion as being too mystical for Conrad’s taste. Flis chief antipathy was reserved for Dostoevsky - “the grimacing, haunted creature, who is under a curse” (Jean-Aubry 1927, vol. 2: 192) - in contrast to the civilized, liberał and humane Turgenev, who was one of Conrad's literary predecessors and masters, next to Flaubert, Maupassant and James.1 The contrast is crucial for it shows how Conrad viewed Turgenev as a pure artist tragically caught between his apollonian gifts and the mirę of the world, while he viewed Dostoevsky as a grim, graceless writer who lacked all that Turgenev possessed. We may also agree that avoiding being accused of rejecting all “things Russian’’ and all Russian writers, Conrad found it easiest to praise Turgenev, who combined in himself and in his writing national and universal values in a satisfactory balance. Conrad’s unreserved admiration for Turgenev dated from his childhood. “As a boy,” Conrad wrote to Garnett on 2 May 1917, “I remember reading Smoke in Polish translation” and “Gentlefolks in French” (Jean-Aubry 1927, vol. 2: 192). In the nineteenth century, literaturę came to function as a counterweight to the power of the Russian govemment. Writers in Russia could not fail to be 1 Conrad was twenty-six years old when Turgenev died in 1883. Almayer’s Folly - his first novel was published twelve years later, in 1895. Pobrano z https://repo.uni.opole.pl / Downloaded from Repository of Opole University 2021-10-01 Turgenev’s and Conrad’s Atlitudes to Social Changes and Freedom... 205 aware of the morał disorder and social injustice in the world around them, the repressive force of the government, the pressure of censorship, and literary critics such as V. G. Belinsky, N. G. Chemyshevsky, N. A. Dobrolyubov, and D. I. Pisarev, all of whom insistently tried to persuade urgent programs of social change to happen. Radicals and liberals who opposed the all-powerful autocracy often seized upon literaturę as a surrogate for direct political discourse. Consequently, as Isaiah Berlin puts it, “literaturę became the battleground on which the central social and political issues of life were fought out” (Berlin 1995: 265). Political ideas which could not be expressed elsewhere became absorbed into the literary form, resulting in “works of Turgenev, Tolstoy, Goncharov, Dostoevsky, and of minor novelists, too” (Berlin 1995: 115). Although Turgenev’s writing was not as deeply and passionately committed as that of Dostoevsky after his Siberian exile, or of the later Tolstoy, it was sufficiently concerned with social analysis “to enable both the revolutionaries and their critics, especially the liberals among them, to draw ammunition from his novels” (Berlin 1995: 264). The tremendous interest aroused by Turgenev’s books was partly due to the fact that they were all concerned with politics - that, beside their delicate and restrained literary art, they dealt “with the central social and political ąuestions that troubled the liberals of his generation” (Berlin 1995: 269). Morę sensitive and scrupulous, less obsessed and intolerant than the great tormented moralists of his age, he reacted bitterly against the horrors of the Russian autocracy. One may ask what issues of the day absorbed Turgenev - a writer profoundly and painfully concerned with his country’s condition and destiny? It was, of course, the emancipation of the serfs, the injustices of autocracy and the political system in Russia. V. Belinsky, one of Turgenev’s closest friends and advisors in the 1840’s, whose unparalleled literary authority dominated the philosophical and literary scene during the early and middle part of the 1840’s, believed that it was the responsibility of Russian literaturę to oppose social injustice, especially serfdom, and formulated a theory of literaturę which was to serve society. Belinsky’s sense of social commitment thus helped to usher in the era of realism in prose fiction in Russia, one of the results of which is that Turgenev may be regarded as the first political novelist in the nineteenth-century Russian literaturę. Edward Garnett, who described Turgenev as a “consummate artist whose contemporary pictures synthesise many aspects of the social and political movements of his time” (Garnett 1917: 11), also acknowledged the utilitarian function of Turgenev’s prose - as a vehicle for social change. On 17 June 1855 Turgenev wrote to Vasily Botkin: “There are epochs when literaturę cannot merely be artistic, there are interests higher than poetry” (Turgenev 1958: 179). Three years later Lev Tolstoy, then dedicated to the ideał Pobrano z https://repo.uni.opole.pl / Downloaded from Repository of Opole University 2021-10-01 206 Brygida Pudełko of pure art, suggested to Turgenev the publication of a purely literary and artistic periodical which refrained from the political polemics of the day. Turgenev replied that it was not “lyrical twittering” that the times were calling for, nor “birds singing in the boughs” (Turgenev 1986, vol. 2: 126). In another letter to Tolstoy, Turgenev added: “You loathe this political morass; true, it is a dirty, dusty, vulgar business. But there is dirt and dust in the streets, and yet we cannot, after all, do without towns” (Turgenev 1986, vol. 2: 129). Turgenev, as an acute observer not anxious to preach and to convert, also dissociated himself from politics by claiming that he had no interest in it or by declaring his liberał, gradualist views. In a letter to Alexander Herzen dated 4 November 1862,2 he wrote: ‘Tm not a political creature; but if it comes to that, I confess that it’s better to be a non-political person such as I am than to be a political one in the style of Ogaryov or Bakunin” (Turgenev 1983, vol.l: 221). Nevertheless, although Turgenev denied being a political writer, he, as P.V. Annenkov wrote: “became the chronicler and historian in Russia of the intellectual and spiritual torments of his entire age” (Annenkov 1968: 200). However, Turgenev’s skepticism, his lack of passion, and “above all his determination to avoid too definite a social or political commitment” (Brelin 1995: 292) was not ąuite like Conrad’s, who systematically avoided all political commitment. He never voted in a British election, in spite of his respect for English institutions; nor would he involve himself in Polish affairs.
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