Turgenev and the Esthetics of the Whole Man

Charles A. Moser*

Read Goethe, Homer and Shakespeare.1 Ivan Ibigenev It was the sense of artistic proportion, the classical restraint combined with the realis- tic idiom, the pictorial brilliance balanced by the insights into human nature, which had the greatest appeal.2 Richard Freeborn

In the supercharged ideological atmosphere of the Russia of the 1860s, disputes over the nature of art in general, and literature in particular, aroused high passions difficult for us to comprehend today. During that decade a writer was denied the luxury of purely personal opinions on esthetics. Since the censorship often prevented Russian intellectuals from addressing philosophical and political questions directly, they fought those heady battles out in the arena of artistic literature and the literary criticism dependent upon it. Hugenev's Fathers and Sons (1862) in many ways defined the political

* Charles A. Moser, Professor of Slavic at the George Washington University, is the author of several articles and books on the history of Russian as well as Bulgarian literature. His special field of interest is Russian intellectual history in the 1860s. 1 From a letter to M. A. Markovich (Marko Vovchok) of January 1860: Ivan Tbigenev, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii ipisem v28-i tomakh (-Leningrad, 1960-68), Pis'та, IV, 9. In the body of this article I shall cite this edition, prefixing a volume in the Pis'ma series with a R, and a volume in the Sochineniia series with an S. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own. 2 Richard Freeborn, Turgenev: The Novelist's Novelist (Oxford, 1960), p. 181.

19 issues of the 1860s; Chernyshevsky's What Is To Be Done? of 1863 was immensely influential, not because of its esthetic worth, but because it propounded widely popular social ideas under the cover of fiction; and Dostoevsky's The Possessed (1871-72) was a powerful political summation and esthetic rebuttal to those ideas and the reality they had engendered since their propagation. Many outstanding thinkers of the 1860s devoted at least a portion of their energies to literary criticism, which they transformed into a vehicle of social criticism and philosophical polemics. Generally speaking, the radical camp envisioned the ultimate disappearance of art in a future world where the ideal would be translated into reality, and considered discussion of "esthetics" a means of smuggling into intellectual discourse what they regarded as a discredited and outmoded philosophical dualism, the outcrop- ping of an allegiance to some fantastic, other-worldly viewpoint. The conservative camp, on the other hand, maintained that art should enjoy a unique place in human affairs, that within the esthetic realm could be found an invaluable compass for human strivings. The various critical camps and individual critics tended to emphasize one or another constituent element of esthetics, although they usually did not exclude all others. The radical critics—including Chernyshevsky, Dobrolyu- bov and Pisarev—though the ideas contained within a novel or short story defined its value, although they agreed that a writer should possess some artistic talent. At the extreme, however, their theory equated artistic literature with journalism, or with scholarly writing. Taking exception to this view, certain more immoderate members of the "esthetic camp"— especially the poet —maintained that ideas had no place at all in art, which should concern itself solely with beauty. And nearly all critics of the 1860s believed that true art must inevitably embody truth: the remarkable critic Apollon Grigoryev, who died in 1864, devoted many a page to this subject. In fact, the house of esthetics had many mansions: art had numerous components, no single one of which was sufficient to define it. , who was keenly interested in artistic questions, was clearly aware of this. In his views of art he held to a centrist position which recognized the place of each of its constituent elements. Thus his esthetic theory was much less dramatic than that of a Pisarev or a Fet, but it displayed the virtues of reason and balance to which Ttirgenev always adhered in his view of life as well. Hirgenev shared with the esthetic camp a belief in the central importance of art in human affairs, and a dedication to the ideal and to beauty: he once implicitly defined a poet as the "servant of the ideal" (P. V, 44). During the 1860s he repeatedly examined his heart to be certain of his devotion to beauty, and always came away satisfied. Thus in 1861 he assured

20 his confidante, Countess Lambert, that he still "retained a living love for the Good and the Beautiful" (P. IV, 184); by middecade, amidst many personal discouragements, he drew consolation from his sense of the beautiful: "It is a blessing that my feeling for beauty has not been extinguished; it is a blessing that I can still rejoice in it, and shed tears over a verse or a melody," he wrote to I. P. Borisov in 1865 (P. V, 334). Years before, in 1850, he had composed—in a letter to another servant of the arts, the singer Pauline Viardot—a brief essay on what he understood by beauty:

You ask me what 'The Beautiful' is. It is, despite the action of time, which destroys the form in which it is expressed, always here... because Beauty is the only imperishable thing, and so long as even the smallest remnant of its material form exists, its immortality is ensured. 'The Beautiful' is evident everywhere, it manifests itself even in death. But nowhere does it shine with such power as in the human personality; it is here that it speaks most clearly to the mind, and that is why I always prefer a great musical talent served by an imperfect voice to a good voice which is stupid, the beauty of which is only material.3

This short essay incorporates many elements which remained constant in TUrgenev's conception of art and the beautiful: a sense of the transitoriness of reality and of art; a recognition that beauty cannot be abstract, but must always be expressed in some material form, even if that of the soundwaves created by the human voice; the importance of intelligence in art; and the emphasis on the link between art and the individual human personality. Tbrgenev also recognizes that beauty reveals itself through form, that formless chaos cannot be beautiful. This idea, indeed, is incorporated in Fathers and Sons. Although Bazarov consciously and rationally denigrates esthetics—he once speaks of it as "mouldy"—on an emotional level he discovers that he is unexpectedly susceptible to the power of feminine beauty as embodied in Odintsova. Intellectually he believes in the destruction of the existing order: to put it another way, he advocates the wrecking of social institutions or forms, the spreading of social formless- ness. But after Odintsova rejects him, Bazarov rethinks his philosophy. He who had once negated the ideal of love, now on his deathbed again speaks of his love, and even links love with esthetics: "Love is a form," he says to Odintsova during their last conversation, "and my own personal form is disintegrating" (S.VIII, 395). One might conclude from this passage that at the end Bazarov reconsiders his dedication to overall negation, realizing that reality must exist through forms. Love also seeks to take on form, whereas hatred destroys forms in human affairs.

' Letter to Pauline Viardot of September 1850 (original in French), P. I, 389.1 have used the translation in Freeborn, Turgenev, p. 189.

21 Bazarov's nihilism derives from a dedication to the ideal of the unfettered intellect, a belief that the mind defines our humanity. The argument over the place of the intellect in art was a fierce one during the 1860s. In his correspondence throughout the 1860s Hugenev carried on a continuing debate on this score with his friend Fet, whom he used to call the "high priest (zhrets) of pure art" (P. IV, 155). TUrgenev claimed to value Fet's literary judgments highly, although when Fet announced his dislike for Fathers and Sons Hugenev stubbornly refused to accept his assessment (and was quite right in so doing). ТЪе core of the disagreement between the two men lay in their views of the place of intellect in art. Fet maintained that the intellect had no place in true art, a position which TUrgenev could not accept at all. In 1862 TUrgenev chided Fet because his "detestation of intellect in art has brought you to the most refined intellectualization on the subject." He criticized him for "ostracizing the intellect" in art and for claiming that a work of art should contain nothing more than the "unconscious babbling of a sleeper" (P. IV, 330). By 1865 this argument was still unresolved, as may be seen from a passage TUigenev wrote to Fet on the subject of Tolstoy:

In your constant fear of ratiocination (rassuditel'nost'), there is a great deal more of that very ratiocination of which you are so frightened than of any other feeling. It's time to quit praising Shakespeare for being a fool, as you claim; that's just as nonsensical as to claim that some Russian peasant, in between a couple of belches, as if in a dream, had enunciated the final word of civilization (P. VI, 28).

In mid-1866 TUigenev was still berating Fet on this topic, scolding him for equating "intellectualizing" (rassuditel'stvo) with what Turgenev regarded as the very positive concepts of "human thought and human knowledge," and for placing an excessive emphasis on "instinct and immediacy" in art (P. VI, 85-86). As a practical critic Fet measured many authors—including in his play Kozma Zakharych Minin, Sukhoruk, Leo Tolstoy, and even TUrgenev himself—with the yardstick of his negation of the intellect. TUrgenev rejected this approach strongly, and this was one of the reasons for his vigorous reaction against Fet's criticism of Fathers and Sons. If Fet cast out the intellect from art, the radical critics held that the value of a work of art should be determined solely by the worth of its ideas. In his relations with radical contemporaries—and TUigenev had many friends among them, including especially —TUrgenev sometimes implicitly admitted that unacceptable ideas in an artistic work affected his esthetic assessment of it. A .striking example of this occurs in a letter of late 1862 to Herzen, in which TUrgenev sets forth several reasons for

22 his dislike of the radical poet Nikolay Ogarev, Herzen's close associate. The first reason he gives is that "in his articles, letters and conversations [Ogarev] preaches outmoded socialist theories about communal property etc. with which I don't agree" (P. V, 74). Thus an author's ideas, even though expressed in non-literary genres, affect Hugenev's evaluation of his literary work. And if this is so, it is not at all astonishing that Hugenev rejected What Is To be Done? totally because of the ideas it propounded: "If this is—I don't even say art or beauty," he wrote to a friend shortly after it appeared, "but if this is even intellect or some genuine accomplishment— why there is nothing left for us but to crawl off into a corner somewhere" (P. V, 129). On the other hand, Hirgenev was by no means blind to the literary achievement of the younger radical generation, whose work he followed closely. In 1863 he spoke highly in several letters of Vasily Sleptsov; he had a good opinion of Nikolay Pomyalovsky, who died early in the decade; and later on he thought at least as well of Fedor Reshetnikov. Beyond writers who may easily be regarded as representatives of the radical or conservative camps, Hirgenev judged two other Russian writers, less easily politically classifiable, partly from the point of view of intellect in art. Although in his article "On the Subject of Fathers and Sons" (1869) Hugenev declared that Was by the "power of its poetic gift" superior to any other work of European literature to have appeared since 1840 (S.XIV, 107-08), and although he never wavered in his appreciation of Tolstoy's artistic talent, he took strong exception to Tolstoy's historical theories in his correspondence:

It's terrible when a self-taught man, especially of Tolstoy's sort, sets off to philosophize: he will inevitably get on some hobbyhorse, think up some single system which will apparently explain everything quite simply—such as historical fatalism, for example—and then he just writes away! (P. VII, 122)

Hugenev objected to the use of literature as a vehicle for the advancement of historical or social theories. Wherever he discovered this, he labeled it "Slavophilism," attaching the most derogatory label in his arsenal: Hirgenev thought the Slavophiles the intellectual captives of harmful historical theories which vitiated whatever value their writings might otherwise have possessed. He esteemed Tolstoy despite his historical theories, and most certainly not because of them, and believed that Tolstoy's shortcomings in this area stemmed from his deficient education (see, for example, Hugenev's letter to Fet of 1866 on this subject [P. VII, 299]) Goncharov's novel The Precipice (1869) was another matter. Tui^enev dismissed it as simply the fruit of an unintelligent mind, and crushingly characterized Goncharov—in a letter of 1869 to Pavel Annenkov—as the

23 "poet of commonplaces" (P. VII, 299) (we should recall, of course, that the personal animosity between the two writers probably affected TUrgenev's judgment, too). In an earlier letter to Annenkov Turgenev had complained of the book's "loquacity," and described its chief characters and situations as "old-fashioned," things which should be "relegated to the archives." "What a lack of genuine, living truth!" he exclaimed, and concluded that the book would appeal only to "vulgarians" (poshliaki) (P. VII, 278). In a letter to another correspondent of 1869, I. P. Borisov, Hirgenev asked in exasperation about The Precipice: "Where are its power, its beauty, its intellect?" (P. VIII, 13). In TUrgenev's opinion Goncharov's last novel lacked, among other things, intellectual substance. Since it did not engage the mind, it could not qualify as a worthwhile literary work. Still, Turgenev thought it was not the province of art to analyze life and reality in purely intellectual terms. The artist, he believed, required an intuitive understanding of reality, as may be seen clearly from a famous passage in a letter of 1860 to Konstantin Leontyev which tells us much about TUrgenev's literary method:

A poet must be a psychologist, but a secret psychologist: he must know and feel the roots of phenomena, but he must picture only the phenomena themselves— in their flowering or fading (P. IV, 135).

The writer must "know and feel the roots of phenomena"—that is, he must comprehend intuitively the hidden causes of social manifestations—but he should not expose them improperly to the light. And since such "roots" are hidden from us, they cannot be known scientifically. In his article "On the Subject of Fathers and Sons," Turgenev offers a formulation of a related thought. Critics, he says, often do not understand how an author creates. They are

entirely convinced that a writer necessarily does nothing more nor less than 'try to put across his ideas'; they cannot believe that the greatest joy for a writer is to reproduce the truth, the reality of life precisely and powerfully, even if that truth does not correspond with his own sympathies (S.XIV, 99-100).

The writer starts, not from ideas, but from his perception of life as it actually is; and life as it actually is, is not susceptible of rational analysis. That interpretation of reality lies behind a comment TUrgenev made to console his friend , a poet who felt alienated in the anti-poetic atmosphere of the 1860s dominated by the radical thinkers. "Don't try to figure out why there are no poets," he advised Polonsky in 1869. "There aren't any because there are none" (P. VIII, 20). As in religion, so in his understanding of reality TUigenev was an agnostic. Reality—which we can

24 know in a meaningful sense through art—is brought into being by processes which we can never explain rationally. Style was another element of art to which Tuigenev paid close attention. In the letter of 1862 cited above, in which 1\xrgenev explains to Herzen his reasons for disliking Ogarev, after outlining his disagreements with Ogarev on an intellectual level, Hugenev concludes with a stylistic argument: "even when [Ogarev] is almost right... he couches his views in language which is heavy, listless and disorienting, language which makes his lack of talent quite obvious" (P. V, 74). Hugenev attached immense importance to beauty and effectiveness of language. In his famous prose poem "The Russian Language" (S.XIII, 198) he derives assurance of the greatness of the Russian people from the magnificence of its language; in the concluding passage in "On the Subject of Fathers and Sons" he makes an earnest appeal to his readers:

Preserve our language, our magnificent Russian language, that treasure, that heritage passed on to us by those who have gone before, with Pushkin shining first among them! (S.XIV, 109)

Evidently a major source of Hugenev's antipathy toward Chernyshevsky was also his dislike of his language and style. In a letter of 1863 commenting on What Is To Be Done? Hugenev remarked that Chernyshevsky's "manner arouses a physical revulsion within me, like a wormseed." "I had never yet met an author," he went on, "whose characters stank: Mr. Chernyshevsky is such an author" (P. V, 129; emphasis in the original). Hugenev also makes some remarks here on Chernyshevsky's "man- ner," by which we should probably understand both his personal and his literary style. It is noteworthy that he does not describe this "manner" discursively, as a literary critic might; rather he transmits his impression of Chernyshevsky and his manner through a crude but striking image, as an artist would:

Willy-nilly I see Mr. Chernyshevsky as a naked, toothless old man, who sometimes lisps like an infant, waggling his unwashed bottom as an added attraction, and sometimes swears like a coachman—belching and snuffling (P. V, 129).

The image is very unpleasant, but it conveys a message which has a greater impact for having been transmitted in artistic form. Although Hirgenev's image of Chernyshevsky apparently fuses an impression of the individual himself and his literary style, in the case of The Precipice Hugenev conceives of an image intended to describe Goncharov's

25 literary style alone, in an interesting transition from the abstract to the concrete. "His style itself," Hngenev wrote to Annenkov in 1869,

which once so entranced me, now appears to me in the form of a smoothly shaven, handsomely deathly face of a bureaucrat with sideburns extended in a thin line from the ears to the corners of the mouth (P. VII, 278).

In other words, Goncharov's style was bland, unobtrusive, out of date and boring, with no life in it. The Precipice was written "by a bureaucrat for bureaucrats and their wives," TUigenev decided. Such people might find Goncharov's style appealing, and the book might enjoy a considerable commercial success, but to TUrgenev Goncharov had nothing more to say. TUrgenev's use of an image to describe a particular literary style illustrates the depths of his commitment to his mentor Belinsky's dictum of the 1840s, that the literary artist thinks in images. An idea is implicit in the literary image. In 1869 TUigenev wrote to Polonsky that all through his literary career "I never took ideas as my starting point, but always images;" and since at the moment he was experiencing difficulty in conceiving images, his literary production suffered (P. VI, 328). In 1862 TUrgenev addressed this same question of the relationship between ideas and images in a letter to Fet. Fet had attributed what he saw as the failure of Fathers and Sons to a "tendency" in the novel, to the fact that the author had concocted a preconceived intellectual scheme which he had then imposed upon his material. TUrgenev thought this criticism wholly wrongheaded, especially since, he asserted, he still did not know whether he "loved Bazarov or hated him," whether he had wished to "exalt Bazarov or condemn him." "I'll tell you one thing, though," he went on:

I sketched all those characters the very same way I would sketch mushrooms, leaves, or trees; they caught my eye and I set about drawing them. But to reject my own impressions simply on the grounds that they resembled tendencies would be a strange mockery (P. IV, 371).

Certain ideological and intellectual tendencies exist in real life, and an author may observe individuals embodying those tendencies and depict them in a literary work. Such depiction is quite legitimate, TUrgenev believed, and is something very different from a writer's imposing a preconceived scheme on his material for his own ideological purposes. One thing TUigenev disliked about the younger radical writers of the 1860s was their inability to conceive images, to exercise the creative imagination, a vital element of literary art. Writing to Polonsky in early 1868, TUrgenev complained of the laek of "talents" among the younger generation.

26 All these Sleptsovs, Reshetnikovs, Uspenskys and others certainly have ability, but where are their inventiveness, power, imagination, fictional gift? They are incapable of thinking anything up, and they're probably even proud of it, since they think that this way they can come closer to the truth (P. VII, 26).

The slighting references to such writers as Sleptsov and Reshetnikov in this passage are a bit surprising, but the core of Turgenev's criticism is that the radical writers lack a natural imaginative endowment, something which is a gift and cannot be cultivated. But if they are not to blame for that lack, they are culpable for seeking to make a theoretical virtue of that defect. TUrgenev used imagery, not only to describe such abstractions as literary style, but also to characterize the creative process itself. Some- times—understandably—that imagery is linked to generation and reproduc- tion. In speaking of the radical authors in the letter just quoted, TUrgenev concluded: "These gentlemen are infertile types (bessemianniki) incapable of sowing anything" (P. VII, 26; emphasis in the original). On another occasion—this time speaking of himself—he employed a rather more scabrous image. The occasion was another letter to Fet, who again disapproved of one of his novels (Smoke), and again attributed his putative failure to the intrusion of tendentious theory. TUrgenev again vigorously defended his novel against Fet's strictures, arguing that it contained very few pages which could rightly be considered tendentious. If Smoke was in fact a failure, he said, "then it is not theory which is to blame; rather the cause of the failure is a case of poetic impotence" (P. VI, 316). Once in a while TUrgenev designed very poetic images for the process of literary creation. Among the more striking of them is one found in a letter of June 1861 to Countess Lambert, written as TUigenev was completing Fathers and Sons. "Just now I am incapable of passing judgement on it," he wrote.

I know what I want to say, but I am totally unsure of how much I have managed to say... An author never knows—at the point when he is displaying his Chinese shadows—whether the candle in his lantern is still burning or not. He himself can see his characters, whereas others, perhaps, may see nothing but a dark wall (P. IV, 263).

The artist, then, is a source of light, but that source is uncertain, and he cannot foretell whether others will truly understand what he wishes to communicate. TUigenev had such experiences on many occasions in his life, especially in the 1860s. In general he found that very few people genuinely received the message which he transmitted. Many critics of the 1860s thought truth a central element of art. TUrgenev granted it importance, but he defined that importance in a

27 particular manner, which he sought to communicate in another striking image in a letter to Polonsky of January 1868, while discussing the radical writers' extreme preoccupation with truth. Truth, he said, "is the air without which we cannot breathe; but art is a plant, and sometimes even a rather fantastic one, which matures and develops in that air" (P. VII, 26). TUrgenev always expected truth from art: it was central to art's mission, and to an understanding of life. In 1863 he wrote to encourage Fet to continue writing the sketches entitled «Iz derevni» (From the Countryside) which he had begun to publish: "There is truth in them," he said, "and truth is what we need most of all, everywhere and in everything" (P. V, 92). Later that same year, however, in a letter to Vasily Botkin, TUrgenev reported on his first reading of a work by Sleptsov. The story "thrills you to your marrow," he wrote, which indicates that the author possessed a "great talent." However, he went on, "realism by itself is disastrous—truth, no matter how powerful it may be, is not art" (P. V, 159). In 1866—by which time Sleptsov had become fairly well known as a writer—TUrgenev basically held to this same assessment of Sleptsov's achievement. "What poverty and emptiness of content," he wrote to Annenkov in January, "though there is talent there. What use is it, though!" (P. VI, 43). If a writer had nothing to say, great skill in saying it could not make him an artist. Tutgenev considered himself a realist, one who always observes closely the world of which he writes. His absences from Russia, which had become quite extensive by the 1860s, did affect his writing, and especially his last novel, Virgin Soil (1876) (he had decided to make the heroes of Smoke in large part Russians living in Germany, a society which he could observe while living abroad). Writing in late 1864 to urge a friend to return to Russia, TUrgenev remarked that "although on the one hand it is said that prophets have difficulties in their own land, on the other hand you cannot help realizing that native air is absolutely necessary for an artist" (P. V, 293). The link with contemporary reality simply must be there. Toward the end of the decade TUrgenev read a novel by the minor author Mikhail Avdeev, one of his imitators. To a degree, no doubt, he was flattered to have a "school" of his own, but on the other hand Avdeev imitated and, thereby, underlined his weak points. Turgenev thought Avdeev too "literary" an author. "Oh, this literature which smells of literature!" TUigenev exclaimed. "Tolstoy's chief strength lies precisely in the fact that his things have the smell of life about them" (P. VII, 70). A few months later, speaking of Tolstoy once again, TUrgenev noted the centrality of Tolstoy's link to real life for the success of War and Peace. "When he touches the ground," Turgenev remarked, "he, like Antaeus, again recovers all his powers: the old prince's death, Alpatych, the village^ rebellion, all this is astounding" (Р. VII, 122). According to TUigenev, when Tolstoy observed reality directly—and not merely through histories and memoirs—his tremendous

28 artistic power revived; but otherwise his historical theories hindered and damaged his art. Finally, Hirgenev believed the artist should preserve an inner freedom, by which he understood primarily freedom from preconceived notions, a willingness to follow the truth of reality wherever it led. The principal accusation which Hirgenev raised against War and Peace in "On the Subject of Fathers and Sons" was that its author had not achieved that spiritual liberation. "The most melancholy example of a lack of true freedom," he wrote, stemming from a lack of genuine knowledge, is provided by Count L. N. Tolstoy's latest work... Without honesty, without education, without freedom in the widest possible sense—in relation to oneself, to one's preconceived notions and systems, even to one's own people and one's history—a genuine artist is inconceivable; he cannot breathe without that air (S.XIV, 107-08). In fact, Hirgenev recalled in this piece, had accused him of this very shortcoming in Fathers and Sons. "One feels," Katkov had written to him of the novel, "a certain lack of freedom in the author's attitudes toward the hero of his tale [Bazarov], some sort of discomfort and constraint" (S.XIV, 104n). Hugenev rejected that criticism, no doubt quite sincerely, and yet there may be some substance to it, especially in view of the fact that Fet interpreted the book in a similar fashion. In any case, in this same article Hugenev admits that for political reasons he perhaps should not have labeled Bazarov a "nihilist," since his novel gave the term a resonance which made it ideologically very useful to the radicals' enemies (S.XIV, 105). Even a Turgenev could not be entirely free in his judgements, but he explicitly strove toward it as an ideal. In 1864, thoroughly discouraged by the adverse reaction to Fathers and Sons, Hirgenev published a series of ruminations entitled "Enough," with the subtitle "A Fragment from the Notes of a Dead Artist." In chapters 15 and 16, as the narrator deals with the question of art, the small cloud on the intellectual horizon in the definition of beauty which he sent to Pauline \Viardot in 1850 has become a menacing mist. Art, he says, is magnificent, but nature, both as destroyer and as creator, is all-powerful, and it "knows nothing of art, just as it knows nothing of freedom or of good." Even art cannot long withstand time's pitiless assault. To be sure, nature itself creates beauty, of short duration, repeatedly, as in a butterfly's wing; but the narrator connects true beauty and true freedom with the unique human personality. Artistic creation is the expression of an individual human personality, and individual creation will eventually always go down to destruction (S.IX, 119-21). Hugenev was not always so thoroughly pessimistic as this, but he did invariably hold that art was the work of the individual in his totality, an

29 expression of the entire human personality. As he formulated it in a letter of 1862 to Fet: "I maintain that art is such a great cause that the whole person is scarcely enough for it, with all his capabilities, and including his intellect" (P. IV, 330). And in trying to explain to Countess Lambert in 1863 why he was utterly incapable of writing simple stories for the common people, Hirgenev commented that very intelligent observers who do not also happen to be writers and who are accustomed to arranging their lives as they wish, "are absolutely unable to understand that an artist often cannot control his own child" (P. V, 120-21). The relationship between the creator and his creation in some ways resembles that between father and son: clearly the son is linked to the father genetically and intellectually, but he also lives an independent life which his father can influence only partially. In like manner, a fictional character acquires an existence of its own and develops according to its own unfathomable laws, even though it is obviously the offspring of its creator at the same time. In sum, then, TUigenev embraced the esthetics of the whole man. He acknowledged all the constituent elements of artistic creativity which his various contemporaries did: the necessity of talent, the importance of beauty, the role of intellect, artistic style, the ability to "think in images," the centrality of truth, the link with contemporary reality, the artist's need to cultivate an inner freedom in order to depict reality as it truly is. But he also knew that none of these elements sufficed in itself for the creation of great art. They all must be melded together in appropriately harmonious relationships within the matrix of the individual human personality. In "On the Subject of Fathers and Sons" TUrgenev provided an excellent summary of the true artistic temperament as he spoke of "capturing" the essence of life:

The power to "capture", to "seize" life can be given only by talent, and one cannot endow oneself with talent; but talent by itself is not sufficient either. You must have constant contact with the milieu which you undertake to depict; you must have honesty (pravdivost'), pitiless honesty with regard to your own feelings; you must have freedom, total freedom in your views and conceptions; and, finally, you must have education, you must have knowledge (S.XIV, 106-07).

This combination TUigenev saw exemplified in the giants of world literature, the greatest of human personalities, and it was from them—Goethe, Homer, Shakespeare—that the aspiring writer should learn.

30