Virgin Soil Part 1

Virgin Soil.

by Ivan S. Turgenev.

INTRODUCTION

TURGENEV was the first writer who was able, having both Slavic and universal imagination enough for it, to interpret modern Russia to the outer world, and Virgin Soil was the last word of his greater testament.

It was the book in which many English readers were destined to make his acquaintance about a generation ago, and the effect of it was, like Swinburne's Songs Before Sunrise, Mazzini's Duties of Man, and other congenial doc.u.ments, to break up the insular confines in which they had been reared and to enlarge their new horizon. Afterwards they went on to read Tolstoi, and Turgenev's powerful and antipathetic fellow-novelist, Dostoievsky, and many other Russian writers: but as he was the greatest artist of them all, his individual revelation of his country's predicament did not lose its effect. Writing in prose he achieved a style of his own which went as near poetry as narrative prose can do.

without using the wrong music: while over his realism or his irony he cast a tinge of that mixed modern and oriental fantasy which belonged to his temperament. He suffered in youth, and suffered badly, from the romantic malady of his century, and that other malady of Russia, both expressed in what M. Haumand terms his "Hamletisme." But in Virgin Soil he is easy and almost negligent master of his instrument, and though he is an exile and at times a sharply embittered one, he gathers experience round his theme as only the artist can who has enriched leis art by having outlived his youth without forgetting its pangs, joys, mortifications, and love-songs.

In Nejdanov it is another picture of that youth which we see--youth reduced to ineffectiveness by fatalism and by the egoism of the lyric nature which longs to gain dramatic freedom, but cannot achieve it.

It is one of a series of portraits, wonderfully traced psychological studies of the Russian dreamers and incompatibles of last mid-century, of which the most moving figure is the hero of the earlier novel, Dimitri Rudin. If we cared to follow Turgenev strictly in his growth and contemporary relations, we ought to begin with his Sportsman's Note Book. But so far as his novels go, he is the last writer to be taken chronologically. He was old enough in youth to understand old age in the forest, and young enough in age to provide his youth with fresh hues for another incarnation. Another element of his work which is very finely revealed and brought to a rare point of characterisation in Virgin Soil, is the prophetic intention he had of the woman's part in the new order.

For the real hero of the tale, as Mr. Edward Garnett has pointed out in an essay on Turgenev, is not Nejdanov and not Solomin; the part is cast in the woman's figure of Mariana who broke the silence of "anonymous Russia." Ivan Turgenev had the understanding that goes beneath the old delimitation of the novelist hide-bound by the law--"male and female created he them."

He had the same extreme susceptibility to the moods of nature. He loved her first for herself, and then with a sense of those inherited primitive a.s.sociations with her scenes and hid influences which still play upon us to-day; and nothing could be surer than the wilder or tamer glimpses which are seen in this book and in its landscape settings of the characters. But Russ as he is, he never lets his scenery hide his people: he only uses it to enhance them. He is too great an artist to lose a human trait, as we see even in a grotesque vignette like that of Fomishka and Fimishka, or a chance picture like that of the Irish girl once seen by Solomin in London.

Turgenev was born at Orel, son of a cavalry colonel, in ISIS. He died in exile, like his early master in romance Heine--that is in Paris-on the 4th of September, 1883. But at his own wish his remains were carried home and buried in the Volkoff Cemetery, St. Petersburg. The grey crow he had once seen in foreign fields and addressed in a fit of homesickness.

"Crow, crow, You are grizzled, I know, But from Russia you come; Ah me, there lies home!" called him back to his mother country, whose true son he remained despite all he suffered at her hands, and all the delicate revenges of the artistic prodigal that he was tempted to take.

E. R.

The following is the list of Turgenev's chief works:

ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS OF WORKS: Russian Life in the interior: or, the Experiences of a Sportsman, from French version, by J. D. Meiklejohn, 1855; Annals of a Sportsman, from French version, by F. P. Abbott, 1885; Tales from the Notebook of a Sportsman, from the Russian, by E. Richter, 1895; Fathers and Sons, from the Russian, by E. Schuyler, 1867, 1883; Smoke: or, Life at Baden, from French version, 1868, by W. F. West, 1872, 1883; Liza: or, a Nest of n.o.bles, from the Russian, by W. R. S.

Ralston, 1869, 1873, 1884; On the Eve, a tale, from the Russian, by C.

E. Turner, 1871; Dimitri Roudine, from French and German versions, 1873, 1883; Spring Floods, from the Russian, by S. M. Batts, 1874; from the Russian, by E. Richter, 1895; A Lear of the Steppe, From the French, by W. H. Browne, 1874; Virgin Soil, from the French, by T. S. Perry, 1877, 1883, by A. W. Dilke, 1878; Poems in Prose, from the Russian, 1883; Senilia, Poems in Prose, with a Biographical Sketch of the Author, by S.

J. Macmillan, 1890; First Love, and Punin and Baburin from the Russian, with a Biographical Introduction, by S. Jerrold, 1884; Mumu, and the Diary of a Superfluous Man, from the Russian, by H. Gersoni, 1884; Annouchka, a tale, from the French version, by F. P. Abbott, 1884; from the Russian (with An Unfortunate Woman), by H. Gersoni, 1886; The Unfortunate One, from the Russian, by A. R. Thompson, 1888 (see above for Gersoni's translation); The Watch, from the Russian, by J. E.

Williams, 1893.

WORKS: Novels, translated by Constance Garnett, 15 vols., 1894-99.

1906. Novels and Stories, translated by Isabel F. Hapgood, with an Introduction by Henry James, 1903, etc.

LIFE: See above, Biographical Introductions to Poems in Prose and First Love; E. M. Arnold, Tourgueneff and his French Circle, translated from the work of E. Halperine-Kaminsky, 1898; J. A. T. Lloyd, Two Russian Reformers: Ivan Turgenev, Leo Tolstoy, 1910.

VIRGIN SOIL

"To turn over virgin soil it is necessary to use a deep plough going well into the earth, not a surface plough gliding lightly over the top."--From a Farmer's Notebook.

I

AT one o'clock in the afternoon of a spring day in the year 1868, a young man of twenty-seven, carelessly and shabbily dressed, was toiling up the back staircase of a five-storied house on Officers Street in St. Petersburg. Noisily shuffling his down-trodden goloshes and slowly swinging his heavy, clumsy figure, the man at last reached the very top flight and stopped before a half-open door hanging off its hinges. He did not ring the bell, but gave a loud sigh and walked straight into a small, dark pa.s.sage.

"Is Nejdanov at home?" he called out in a deep, loud voice.

"No, he's not. I'm here. Come in," an equally coa.r.s.e woman's voice responded from the adjoining room.

"Is that Mashurina?" asked the newcomer.

"Yes, it is I. Are you Ostrodumov?

"Pemien Ostrodumov," he replied, carefully removing his goloshes, and hanging his shabby coat on a nail, he went into the room from whence issued the woman's voice.

It was a narrow, untidy room, with dull green coloured walls, badly lighted by two dusty windows. The furnis.h.i.+ngs consisted of an iron bedstead standing in a corner, a table in the middle, several chairs, and a bookcase piled up with books. At the table sat a woman of about thirty. She was bareheaded, clad in a black stuff dress, and was smoking a cigarette. On catching sight of Ostrodumov she extended her broad, red hand without a word. He shook it, also without saying anything, dropped into a chair and pulled a half-broken cigar out of a side pocket.

Mashurina gave him a light, and without exchanging a single word, or so much as looking at one another, they began sending out long, blue puffs into the stuffy room, already filled with smoke.

There was something similar about these two smokers, although their features were not a bit alike. In these two slovenly figures, with their coa.r.s.e lips, teeth, and noses (Ostrodumov was even pock-marked), there was something honest and firm and persevering.

"Have you seen Nejdanov?" Ostrodumov asked.

"Yes. He will be back directly. He has gone to the library with some books."

Ostrodumov spat to one side.

"Why is he always rus.h.i.+ng about nowadays? One can never get hold of him."

Mashurina took out another cigarette.

"He's bored," she remarked, lighting it carefully.

"Bored!" Ostrodumov repeated reproachfully. "What self-indulgence! One would think we had no work to do. Heaven knows how we shall get through with it, and he complains of being bored!"

"Have you heard from Moscow?" Mashurina asked after a pause.

"Yes. A letter came three days ago."

"Have you read it?"

Ostrodumov nodded his head.

"Well? What news?

"Some of us must go there soon."

Mashurina took the cigarette out of her mouth.

"But why?" she asked. "They say everything is going on well there."

"Yes, that is so, but one man has turned out unreliable and must be got rid of. Besides that, there are other things. They want you to come too."

"Do they say so in the letter?"