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 (Moscow-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 Afanasy Fet—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. Ivan Turgenev, 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).