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28ИВАН ТУРГЕНЕВ И ГЕНРИ ДЖЕЙМС: РУССКО-АМЕРИКАНСКИЕ ЛИТЕРАТУРНЫЕ СВЯЗИ
Москатов Г.К.
Иван Сергеевич Тургенев и Генри Джеймс впервые встретились в Париже в 1874 г. Тургенев - писатель, уже известный в России и в Европе. Знаменитые романы Джеймса -лучшее в его творчестве - еще впереди.
Иван Тургенев ввел Генри Джеймса в литературный салон Флобера, познакомил с Эдмоном де Гонкуром, молодым Эмилем Золя, Альфонсом Доде и Ги де Мопассаном. Знакомство положило начало дружбе, продолжавшейся всю жизнь.
В двух статьях, написанных после смерти И.С. Тургенева и посвященных ему, Джеймс приводит удивительно живое и, по-видимому, точное свидетельство о своем знаменитом русском друге: “Он был самым трогательным из писателей, самым милым из людей”.
В нашей статье рассказывается о дружбе двух мастеров слова, о сходных чертах их творчества, о близости взглядов на искусство и мораль, на проблемы соотношения формы и содержания, на роман как жанр.
IVAN TURGENEV AND HENRY JAMES: RUSSIAN-AMERICAN LITERARY CONNECTIONS
Henry K. Moskatov
“He was the most touching of writers, the most lovable of men”
INTRODUCTION
The focus of my paper is on Russian -American literary connections as represented by I. Turgenev and H. James. I don’t insist on the fact that this connection is pellucid and unquestionable as my former student Helen Greenberg justly noted in her diploma. I completely share her view. All I’m saying is that there seem to be certain similarities in their styles and since I believe that style as such is the way an author expresses himself, I may expand my statement: there exist similarities in © MocKaroB T.K., 2006
H. James “Ivan Turgenieff”, 1884
how the two literary geniuses viewed questions of taste, art and form, the relation of art to morality and what was the duty of a novel.
Turgenev and James, along with their contemporaries Gustave Flaubert, Edmond de Goncourt, Emile Zola, Alphonce Daudet, and Guy de Maupassant agreed that “art and morality are two perfectly different things”; “that the only duty of a novel was to be well written” [1, 2, 4].
The most important issue, apart from the duty of a novel and its moral and educating background is what novel actually meant to
these two writers who happened to be contemporaries, who just happened to meet in Paris and become friends for the rest of their lives.
James admired his Russian friend prodigiously. His admiration is read in every line of the writings devoted to Turgenev.
Their novels are not works of violent action or complicated plots, but mainly concentrate on characters, their vision of the world, their feelings. And yet the characters reveal themselves best in action. What those actions are in James’s novels? Let us linger around the subject a little further.
While studying James’s novels and his critics I came across [2], that appealed to me and I’d like to render its contents right now in light of the question concerning action.
James novels are referred to in the article as an attempt for “courtly romances in a democratic age”. James, did not naturally, go back for his models to Roman de la Rose or Morte d’Arthur or Sydney’s Arcadia or the Grand Cyrus. But he did devote himself to those classes in modern society which descend from the classes represented by romances of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. His characters, for the most part, neither toil nor spin, trade nor make war, bear children in pain nor bring them up with sacrifices. His books consequently lack the interest of that fiction which shows men and women making some kind of way in the world. James is the laureate of leisure. Moreover the leisure he cared to write about concerns in not the slightest degree with any action whatsoever, even games and sport. Love of course concerns it, as with all novelists. Yet even love in this chosen universe must constantly run the gauntlet of a decorum incomprehensible to all but the initiate. In one of Chretein de Troyes’s roman-146
ces Lancelot, on his way to rescue Guinevere from a most precarious situation, commits the blunder of riding part of the way in a cart and thereby brings upon himself a disgrace his most gallant deeds can scarcely wipe out. Sensible citizens who may have happened upon this narrative in the twelfth century probably felt mystified at the pother much as do their congeners in the twentieth who stare at the wounds which James’s heroes and heroines suffer from blunders intrinsically no more serious than Lancelot’s. How much leisure these persons must enjoy, the sensible citizens think, to have evolved and to keep up this mandarin formality; and how little use they make of it! Only readers accustomed to such decorums can walk entirely at ease in the universe James constructed. But they have the privileges of a domain unprecedented and unmatched in modern literature. It is not merely that he is the most fascinating historian of the most elegant society of the 19th century. He is the creator of a world, immensely beautiful in its own right: a world of international proportions, peopled by charming human beings who live graceful lives in settings, lovely almost beyond description; a world which vibrates with the finest instincts and sentiments and trembles at vulgarity and ugliness; a world full of works of art and learning and intelligence, a world infinitely refined, a world perfectly civilized [4, 5, 7].
Now it seems timely to remind or recall some highlights of Turgenev’s and James’s lives before proceeding to the similarities only briefly touched.
Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev was born on October 28 [November 9, New style], 1818 in Oryol and died on August 22 [September 3], 1883, in Bougival, near Paris.
Novelist, poet, and playwright, whose major works include the short-story collection A Sportsman’s Sketchers (1852) and the novels Rudin (1856), Home of Gentry (1859), On the Eve (1860), and his masterpiece Fathers and Sons (1862). These works offer realistic, affectionate portrayals of the Russian peasantry and penetrating studies of the Russian intelligentsia who are attempting to move the country into a new age. Turgenev poured into his writings not only a deep concern for the future of his native land but also an integrity of craft that has ensured his place in Russian literature. The many years that he spent in Western Europe were due in part to his personal and artistic stand as a liberal between the reactionary tsarist rule and the spirit of revolutionary radicalism that held sway in contemporary artistic and intellectual circles in Russia.
Turgenev’s novels are “months in the country”, which contain balanced contrasts such as those between youth and age, between the tragic ephemerality of love and the comic transience of ideas, between Hamlet’s concern with self and inaptitudes of the quixotic pursuit of altruism. The last of these contrasts he amplified into a major essay, “Hamlet and Don Quixote” (1860). If he differed from his great contemporaries Fyodor Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy in the scale of his work, he also differed from them in believing that literature should not provide answers to life’s question marks. He constructed his novels according to a simple formula that had sole purpose of illuminating the characters and predicament of a single figure, whether hero or heroine. They are important chiefly as detailed and deft sociopsychological portraits. A major device of the novels is the examination of the effect of a
newcomer’s arrival upon a small social circle. The circle, in its turn, subjects the newcomer to scrutiny through the relation that develops between the heroine, who always belongs to the “place” of the fiction, and the hero. The promise of happiness is offered, but the ending of the relation is invariably calamitous.
Always touchy about his literary reputation, Turgenev reacted to the almost unanimously hostile reception given to Fathers and Sons by leaving Russia. He took up residence in Baden-Baden, to which resort Viardot had retired. Quarrels made him an exile in a very real sense. His only novel of this period, Smoke (1867), set in Baden-Baden, is infused with satirically embittered tone that makes caricatures of both the left and the right wings of the intelligentsia. The love is deeply moving, but both emotion and the political sentiments are made to seem ultimately no more lasting and real than the smoke of the title [3, 4].
The Franco-German War of 1870- 1871 forced the Viardots to leave Baden-Baden, and Turgenev followed them, first to London and then to Paris. He now became the honoured ambassador of Russian culture in the Paris of the 1870s. George Sand, Gustave Flaubert, the Goncourt brothers, the young Emile Zola, and Henry James were only a few of the many illustrious contemporaries with whom he corresponded and who sought his company. He was elected vice president of the Paris International Literary Congress in 1878, and in 1879 he was awarded honorary doctoral degree by the University of Oxford. In Russia he was feted on his annual visits.
Turgenev’s work is distinguished from that of his most famous contemporaries by its sophisticated lack of hyperbole, its balance, and its concern of artistic values. His greatest
works are always topical, committed literature, having universal appeal in the elegance of the love story and the psychological acuity of the portraiture. He was similarly a letter writer of great charm, wit, and probity. His reputation may have become overshadowed by those of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, but his own qualities of lucidity and urbanity and, above all, his sense of the extreme preciousness of the beautiful in life endow his work with magic that has lasting appeal [6].
Henry James was born on April 15, 1843 in New York City and died on February 28, 1916 in London.
American novelist and, as a naturalized English citizen from 1915, a great figure in transatlantic culture. His fundamental theme was the innocence and exuberance of the New World in clash with the corruption and wisdom of the Old, as illustrated in such works as Daisy Miller (1879), The Portrait of a Lady (1881), The Bostonians (1886), and The Ambassadors (1903).
James reputation was founded on his versatile studies of “the American girl”. In a series of witty tales, he pictured the “self -made” young woman, the bold and brash American innocent who insists upon American standards in European society. James ended this first phase of his career by producing his masterpiece, The Portrait of a Lady (1881), a study of a young woman from Albany who brings to Europe her narrow provincialism and pretension but also her sense of her own sovereignty, her “free spirit”, her refusal to be treated, in the Victorian world, merely as a marriageable object [5].
In his later years, James lived in retirement in an 18th century house at Rye in Sussex, though on completion of The Golden Bowl he 148
revisited the United States in 1904 - 1905. James had lived abroad for 20 years, and in the interval America had become a great industrial and political power. His observation of the land and its people led him to write, on his return to England, a poetic volume of rediscovery and discovery, The American Scene (1907), prophetic in its vision of urban doom, spoilation, and pollution of resourses and filled with misgivings over anomalies of a “melting pot” civilization. The materialism of American life deeply troubled James, and on his return to England he set to work to shore up his own writings and his own career, against this ephemeral world. He devoted three years in rewriting and revising his principal novels and tales for the highly selective “New York Edition”, published in 24 volumes. For this edition James wrote 18 significant prefaces, which contain both reminiscence and exposition of his theories of fiction.
Throwing his moral weight into Britain’s struggle in World War I, James became a British subject in 1915 and received the Order of Merit from King George V.
Henry James’s career was one of the longest and most productive - and most influential - in American letters. A master of prose fiction from the first, he practiced it as a fertile innovator, enlarged the form, and placed upon it the stamp of a highly individual method and style. He wrote for 51 years - 20 novels, 112 tales, 12 plays, several volumes of travel and criticism, and a great deal of literary journalism. He recognized and helped to fashion the myth of the American abroad and incorporated this myth in the “international novel”, of which he was the acknowledged master. In both his light comedies and his tragedies James’s sense of the human scene was sure
and vivid; and, in spite of the mannerisms of his later style, he was one of the great prose writers and stylists of his century. James’s public remained limited during his lifetime, but, after a revival of interest in his work during the 1940s and ‘50s, he reached an ever -widening audience; his works were translated in many countries, and he was recognized in the late 20th century as one of the subtlest craftsmen who ever practiced the art of a novel. His rendering of the inner life of his characters made him a forerunner of the “stream - of - consciousness” movement in the 20th century [2].
RENDEZVOUS IN PARIS
I’ve mentioned already that Turgenev and James met in Paris in 1874. One should not overestimate the importance of these meetings and claim James became a writer of deeply psychological and realistic dramas only due to his Russian friend. James admired him, no doubt, for quite obvious reason though in his writing he found perfect style and interesting story. Still each and every one of us sometimes needs a start, a spark to light the fire. Perhaps Turgenev was such for James.
It is also worth mentioning, I believe, that through Turgenev James was brought into Goustave Flaubert’s coterie, where he got to know Edmond de Goncourt, Emile Zola, Alphonse Daudet, and Guy de Maupassant.
In two articles which James wrote after Turgenev’s death, he recollected the impressions, which had been made upon him by the Russian writer: “He was the most touching of writers, the most lovable of men” [1].
“The author of these pages had greatly admired his writings before having the fortune
to make an acquaintance, and this privilege, when it presented itself, was highly illuminating... I shall never forget the impression he made upon me at his first interview. I found him adorable; I could scarcely believe that he would prove - that any man could prove - on nearer acquaintance so delightful as that. He was so simple, so natural, so modest, so destitute of personal pretension and of what is called the consciousness of power, that one almost doubted at moments whether he were a man of genius after all... I remember vividly the smile and tone of voice...”
James admired Turgenev and I want to quote some more of his writing about our honored writer. I’ll quote as much as the space of my paper permits, for what James had written about Turgenev is a vivid and conspicuous manifestation of not only his veneration but that he had a great deal to learn from the Russian writer. I deliberately underline Russian, for James knew how cruelly Turgenev suffered because of the instability of his country and his exile. James was different - cosmopolitan from early childhood with no heartrending affection for the land of his birth. The following passages reflect James’s ideas about the plot of the story, character, style, Turgenev as a person and others.
“My writings could not appeal to him. He cared, more than anything else, for the air of reality, and my reality was not the purpose. I do not think my stories struck him as a quite meat for men. The manner was more apparent than the matter; they were too tarabiscote, as James once heard him say of the style of a book - had on the surface too many little flowers and knots of ribbon” [1].
The conviction that held them together was the assurance that art and morality were two
perfectly different things. The only duty of a novel was to be well written; that merit included every other of which it was capable.
“That impression, indeed, always remained with me, even after it had been brought home to me how much there was in him of the quality of genius. He was a beautiful intellect, of course, but above all he was a delightful, mild, masculine figure. The combination of his deep, soft, lovable spirit, in which one felt all the tender parts of genius, with his immense, fair Russian physique, was one of the most attractive things conceivable. Nothing that Turgenev had to say could be more interesting than his talk about his own work, his manner of writing. What I have heard him tell of these things was worthy of the beautiful results he produced; of the deep purpose, pervading them all, to show us life itself. The germ of a story, with him, was never an affair of plot - that was the last thing he thought of: it was the representation of certain persons. The first form in which a tale appeared to him was the figure of an individual, or a combination of individuals, whom he wished to see in action, being sure that such people must do something very special and interesting. They stood before him definite, vivid, and he wished to know, and to show, as much as possible of their nature. The first thing was to make clear to himself what he did know, to begin with; and to this end, he wrote a sort of biography of each of his characters, and everything that they had done and that had happened to them up to the opening of the story” [1].
“... Reading Turgenev’s novels and tales, I was struck afresh with their combination of beauty and reality. He was the most generous, the most tender, the most delightful of men; his large nature overflowed with the love of justice; but he also was of the stuff of which glo-150
ries are made... His vision is of the world of character and feeling, the world of the relations life throws up at every hour and on every spot; he deals little, on the whole, in the miracles of chance - the hours and spots over the edge of time and space; his air is that of the great central region of passion and motive, of the usual, the inevitable, the intimate for weal or woe. No theme that he ever chooses but strikes us as full. Without a patch of ‘plot’ to draw blood, the story he mainly tells us, the situation he mainly gives, runs as if for dear life...”
“... No one has had a closer vision, or a hand at once more ironic and more tender, for the individual figure. He sees it with its minutest sight and tricks - all its heredity of idiosyncrasies, all its particulars of weakness and strength, of ugliness and beauty, of oddity and charm; and yet it is of his essence that he sees it in the general flood of life, steeped in its relations and contacts, struggling or submerged, a hurried particle in the stream” [1].
“... If character, as I say, is what he gives us at every turn, I should speedily add that he offers it not in the least as a synonym, in our Western sense, of resolution and prosperity. It wears the form of the almost helpless detachment of the short-sighted individual soul; and the perfection of his exhibition of it is in truth too often but the intensity of what, for success, it just does not produce”.
STYLE, CHARACTER AND PLOT IN THE WRITINGS OF JAMES AND TURGENEV
As James had established in London, he sedulously worked at making himself a purer Anglo-Saxon that he believed he could be anywhere along the periphery of the race, forget-
ful, it seems, that Anglo-Saxons are explorers and colonizers no less than huggers of the insular hearth. As an American with proper introductions he went into penetralia of English society which novelists in the Islands do not easily reach unless they are born to them. He learned, after a struggle and occasional relapses, to like both the weather and the manners of Britain, exposing himself to both those cooling experiences, except for a few brief visits to France and Italy, during five remarkably busy years. The critical doctrines which sustained him he collected and put in French Poets and Novelists (1888), much of it written during earlier years on the Continent. “Realism”, he said, “seems to us with ‘Madame Bovary’ to have said its last word”; but he felt that the most part Flaubert’s knowledge was greater than his imagination. James admired George Sand’s magnificent flow and color, which he oddly compared to that of Spenser in The Faerie Queene, but he thought she had too little form and too much optimism: “We suspect that something even better [than optimism] in a novelist is that tender appreciation of actuality which makes even the application of a simply coat of rose - color seem an act of violence”. Balzac, of course, James greatly preferred to either Flaubert or George Sand, for his great range and close texture. “He has against him”, James however added, “that he lacks that slight but needful thing - charm”. The informing imagination absent from Flaubert, the substantial texture absent from George Sand, the charm absent from Balzac - all these James found in his great master and favorite Turgenev, whom in 1874, so little he had been translated further west than Paris, it was still possible to include among French novelists. Turgenev had, it seemed to James, “a deeply
intellectual impulse toward universal appreciation”; he had form and grace and tenderness and irony. When James says that “the blooming fields of fiction” can hardly show “a group of young girls more radiant with maidenly charm” than Turgenev’s, or when he says that these girls “have to our sense a touch of the faintly acrid perfume of the New England temperament - a hint of Puritan angularity”, the remark throws a long light ahead on James’s own deep concern with the characters of women. And he must have had in mind a parallel between Turgenev and himself when he wrote that “Russian society, like our own, is in process of formation, the Russian character is in solution, in a sea of change, and the modified, modernized Russia, with his old limitations and his new pretensions, is not, to an imagination fond of caressing the old, fixed contours, an especially grateful phenomenon”. James still drew considerably, and was long to draw, upon the “sprawling continent” at his back; but he was “fond of caressing the old, fixed contours” of Europe [7].
Style cannot be said to exist on paper; it is the way the mind of the author expresses itself in words. This is why we said that “style expresses the man”. “The veiled style of Henry James, with subtleties, equivocations, and qualifications, perfectly reflects his complicated and subtle mind and his abiding awareness of ambiguity of human motives” [7].
Turgenev sought words that would precisely convey his meaning, literature was an art as well as a craft for him, his style emerged from the deliberate, painstaking practice.
Turgenev and James are both thought to be realists. In many respects their understanding of what a novel is coincided, they both believed that the focus should be on the life of
mind rather than of action. The novels of these two writers are psychological in that the crucial events occur in the souls of the protagonists. Obviously psychological approach guarantees a lack of action and excitement.
Here is the list of statements mostly dealing with interdependence of plot and character, essential to realism of Turgenev and James:
Character is more important than action and plot; complex, ethnical choices are often the subject.
Characters appear in the real complexity of temperament and motive; they are in explicable relation to nature, to each other, to their social class, to their own past.
Humans control their destinies; characters act on their environment rather than simply reacting to it.
Events will usually be plausible. Realistic novels avoid the sensational, dramatic elements of naturalistic novels and romances.
INSTEAD OF CONCLUSION
Ivan Turgenev and Henry James are novelists, whom I admire and can read over and over again. Their writing always strikes me as charming and elegant, the books’ action reveals itself as passionate and gripping. Reading their books is like listening to Turandot, or La Boheme or La Traviata. You know exactly what’s going to happen and yet... you want to feel it again. Each time you feel it more and more deeply.
Summing up I’d like to recall their first meetings in Paris in 1874 - 1875. By that time Turgenev had already been a mature writer of European recognition and fame, quite determined in his stylistic preferences. From Turgenev James received confirmation of his 152
own view that a novelist need not worry about “story”, and that in focusing on character, he would arrive at the life experience of his protagonist. Thus James introduced a new vision of reality, style and character unprecedented and unmatched in American literature [8].
Reading their books is not for sensual and esthetic pleasure only. As classics Turgenev belongs to Russia and James - to England and America first of all, but they also belong to the rest of the world.
They say it’s only the simpler manners of men which live forever, but I’m more than sure that the worlds Turgenev and James constructed will never fade.
At least for me.
References
1. James Henry. Ivan Turgenieff • Ivan Turge-nieff 1818 - 1883 // The portable Henry James / Edited by Morton Dauwen Zabel. L., 1977.
2. Edel Leon. Henry James: The Conquest of London 1870 - 1881. Philadelphia, Lippincott, 1962.
3. Тургенев И.О. Собр. соч. в 12 т. М., 1958.
4. Van Doren Carl. The American Novel. NY, 1921.
5. Edel Leon, Dan H. Laurence. A Biography of Henry James. L., 1961.
6. Freeborn Richard H. Turgenev, a Study. L., 1996.
7. Holder-Barrel Alexander. The Development of Imagery and Its Functional Significance in Henry James’s Novels. Bern, 1959.
8. Гиленсон Б.А. История литературы США. М., 2003.
