In the February of 1848 Turgenev left Brussels for Paris where he joined Bakunin. They had come to see a revolution. Five months later, namely in the sultry afternoon of the 26th of July, Turgenev was out in the streets watching the revolution collapse. He watched, he noted, he deplored. When it was over he did not, for all his love of Liberty, share that sense of personal tragedy which overcame the Herzen circle. Herzen wished now that he had taken a rifle which a workman had offered him and had died upon the barricades. “I would then”, he said, “have taken with me to the grave one or two beliefs.” But Turgenev, who believed in “the homeopathy of science and education”, shrugged his shoulders. “What is history, then? Providence, chance, irony or fatality?” he asked Pauline Viardot. He paid Bakunin his allowance, he made jokes to break the gloom of the Herzen household. The dogmas and violence of active politicians had little attraction for Turgenev though he liked to think that his Sportsman’s Sketches had popularised the idea of freeing the serfs in Russian society.
But it was impossible in that decade for a Russian writer to escape from politics, and seven years later, when his lethargic nature stirred and he sat down to write his first political novel, Turgenev turned again to those sultry days in Paris. Always in doubt about his characters, subject to all the waverings of sensibility, running round to his friends for advice because he had no confidence in his own judgment, Turgenev managed, at last, and like a naturalist, to pin his hero to the paper. In his memory Turgenev saw once more the Faubourg St. Antoine, the barricades and the broken revolutionaries dribbling away from them in furtive groups. As a line battalion came up and the last workmen ran for their lives, he imagined a solitary figure rising up on the barricade. He was “a tall man in an old overcoat, with a red sash and a straw hat on his grey, dishevelled hair. In one hand he held a red flag, in the other a blunt curved sabre, and as he scrambled up he shouted something in a shrill, strained voice, waving his flag and sabre. A Viennese shooter took aim at him—fired.” The tall man fell with a bullet in his heart.
“‘Tiens!’” said one of the escaping revolutionaries to another, “‘on vient de tuer le polonais.’” So, with an ineptitude for his epitaph, died the Russian Dimitri Rudin. He had died, cutting a figure on a foreign barricade for a cause not his own, futile to the end.
I first read Rudin during the Spanish Civil War. It was a good moment. For years we had been talking about the problem of the intellectual for whom society has no use—that is to say we had been talking about all the English intellectuals who had grown up since 1914—for years we had argued the reasons for this isolation, its effects upon their minds and had speculated upon their future. The figure of Rudin seemed to crystallise the case. And when one more angry friend from Bloomsbury packed up his books and his chequered love affairs and went out to be killed in the Spanish war, we could picture the scene at once and swear we heard some Spanish soldier revise Rudin’s insulting epitaph once more, with a “God, they’ve killed the German”. The English have always been Germans in Spain.
It was thought at first that Bakunin had been Turgenev’s model for Rudin, and Turgenev encouraged the belief; but Herzen observed that there was a good deal of Turgenev himself in this minor Hamlet. In fact, Rudin was drawn from several models. He was Bakunin on the barricades and luckier than his original in dying there; he was any gifted young Russian whom political tyranny at home had reduced to futility: and he was Turgenev in love. Perhaps Turgenev was getting the Bakunin family out of his system and all the philosophy of his German period too, for there are unflattering resemblances between Turgenev’s affair with Bakunin’s sister and Rudin’s cold-hearted experiments with the heart of Natalya. There are really two Rudins in the book and the critic must decide for himself whether he is dealing with two irreconcilable beings, the idealist and the cad, or whether Turgenev is showing an eye for the variety and inconsistency of human nature. One thing is plain, as it always is when social types are analysed in fiction, that Turgenev had a theory. We must not ask why Rudin appeared in Russia, one of the characters says, one must merely examine him; but Turgenev leaves one in little doubt about the social and political reasons for his existence.
It is often assumed that tyranny can conquer everything except the intelligence, but the briefest glance at history shows that this residue of optimism is without foundation. The aim and effect of tyranny is to break up the normal social relations between people and to ensure that the only permitted social relationship shall be with the tyrant. Our duty is not to our neighbour, but to the leader, the tyrant, the ruling oligarchy, and this duty isolates us from each other whether we think of ourselves as individuals or as groups. Once isolated like this the mind degenerates, faculties stray and purpose falls to pieces. Upon the intelligence the effect is immediate, for the intellectual man, who seems to be so independent of the mass of mankind because of his brains, in fact needs the moral background of normal social relations more strongly than anyone else. Without them he is like a sculptor who, deprived of stone, is obliged to carve in the air. We see this plainly enough in the lives of the exiles from German and Italian Fascism; we shall see it again if we consider the isolation of the English intellectuals in the Big Business tyranny which impoverished the material, spiritual and intellectual life of England in the years leading up to the present war. There was a choice between two evils: the futility of exile, the futility of a life at home which had been carefully unco-ordinated. In the Russia of the ’forties despotism had driven the active into exile; those who would not or could not leave were obliged to preserve their ideas in a vacuum or to while away their time on mere personal speculation which grew more and more esoteric.
When Rudin arrives at Darya Mihailovna’s country house, he is a man of 35. He is shy at first, sizing up his company. Soon he is drawn into argument with one of those strutting, professional sceptics who hide a general lack of information under the disguise of being plain, downright fellows who say, ‘To hell with principles, give me the facts’. Rudin-Turgenev has not been a philosopher for nothing; he wipes the floor with this eccentric. Rudin’s polish, his heart and his eloquence arouse a generous response in the company and in the reader. We are delighted with him. But he stays on with Darya Mihailovna, and as he stays we get to know him better. A longer acquaintance does not confirm the first favourable impression. Those glorious words of Rudin’s, for example, were not his own; that passionate idealism has no recognisable earthly objective. He can settle to nothing. The enthusiasm which would be admirable in a man of 20 is suspect in a man of 35 who ought to have built up some stability. Bassistoff, the young tutor, cries out that Rudin is a natural genius. “Genius very likely he has,” replies Lezhnyov, “but as for being natural—that’s just his misfortune, that there’s nothing natural in him….” He is a mere oracle of the boudoir and a fake.
In the next phase Turgenev strikes nearer home: Rudin is far too expert in the egoism of romantic love. He knows the whole keyboard from the evocation of “pure souls” to the effectiveness of a melancholy hint at incurable fate:
“Look,” began Rudin with a gesture towards the window, “do you see that apple tree? It is broken by the weight and abundance of its own fruit. True emblem of genius.”
Rudin is as cold as ice and he will do nothing unless his vanity is aroused; then he behaves like a pompous and meddlesome idiot and discovers he has done so half an hour too late. For he is introspective. Philosophy—we have exchanged it for psycho-analysis—has got into his blood and he is interested only in the doomed course of his own development. And this coldness of Rudin which leads him skilfully to awaken the feeling of inexperienced women and particularly those very young ones whose feeling is maternal, and then to take fright before their dullness, is of long-standing. He had been too much adored by his mother.
The Rudin of our generation would have had more to say about this mother. The Russian Rudin says little or nothing, and Turgenev tells only that the cold youth dropped her, as he dropped all his friends. Did he hate her? Turgenev does not say. That field, so fruitful to our contemporaries, is neglected. We know simply that Rudin’s lack of means and career is an excellent excuse for running away from marriage, and we can only guess at a deeper dread of reproducing the pattern that made him. Rudin is homeless politically and emotionally, and if he had had a career and a place in society, he would have had to retreat into more complex justifications—as nowadays the Rudin in us does.
But if he tortures others Rudin tortures himself, too. After the affair with Natalya, there is an interlude of desperate farce. Philosophy (to which he has retired) tells him he should allow himself to fall really in love and so wipe out his guilt, and in Germany he tries out a passion to order with a French dress-maker. Alas, the old Adam remains. Seated in a boat Rudin gazes at the lady, pats her gently on the head—and tells her he feels like a father to her. He had been a brother to Natalya.
And now Rudin is nothing but a cad, Turgenev makes his severest critic, the mature and decent Lezhnyov, take everything back. This is the most exciting point in the novel. This new Rudin is not as vivid as the old one, he has the weakness—perhaps it is due to Turgenev’s old-fashioned, hearsay technique as a story teller—of being a point of view and an afterthought. But a warmth is put into the old outline and the figure is at last taken out of the psychologist’s bottle and related to his environment:
He has enthusiasm; and believe me, who am a phlegmatic person enough, that is the most precious quality of our times. We have all become insufferably reasonable, indifferent and slothful; we are asleep and cold, and thanks to anyone who will wake us up and warm us…. He is not an actor, as I called him, nor a cheat, nor a scoundrel; he lives at other people’s expense, not like a swindler, but like a child….
(Herzen had said almost these very words of Bakunin).
Who has the right to say that he has not been of use? That his words have not scattered good seeds in young hearts, to whom nature has denied, as she has to him, power for action and the faculty of carrying out their ideas?
This is all very nice, and Bassistoff, for the younger generation, cries out, “Bravo!” But is it nature that has denied Rudin the power for action? We come nearer truth (and nearer to-day) as Lezhnyov proceeds:
Rudin’s misfortune is that he does not understand Russia, and that, certainly, is a great misfortune. Russia can do without every one of us, but not one of us can do without her. Woe to him who thinks he can, and woe two-fold to him who actually does do without her! Cosmopolitanism is all twaddle, the cosmopolitan is a nonentity; without nationality is no art, nor truth, nor life, nor anything…. It would take us too far if we tried to trace Rudin’s origin among us.
It was not Rudin’s fault that 1848 was not 1917. It was to his credit that he half-killed himself and his wretched companion when they went “up to the river in the province of K.”, with the hare-brained scheme of making it navigable, several generations before the Five Year Plan gave intelligent men something to do. Rudin not only sowed the seed, but with some courage he accepted the knowledge of foredoomed failure, the destiny and the ridicule that watches over the sower who cannot hope to reap. Mean in his egoism, he was not mean in his imagination.
Turgenev considered the figure of Rudin from an uneasy seat on the liberal fence. By nature timid and hesitant, he resisted the notion of dramatic choice. And we must remember, too, that he wrote of Rudin when there was no flush of belief in Europe. He was writing in 1855, seven years after the “Viennese shooter” had taken aim, in the lethargy of disillusion. When Herzen’s conversion to communism was complete Turgenev broke with him.