Ahab, poor benighted man, great driven spirit, searching through the wide world for the answers to questions that have no answers, and which answers we would probably not like if we could have them: Ahab is a magnificent creation, but a fearful one, too. You may not remember him with any affection; he may seem too much the exile, having isolated himself from all humanity, all warm, colorful, common life. Such a man is frightening. But if you can rise above that, then you will feel a deep sympathy for this soul, damned while still alive, condemned to follow the track of an unspeakable mystery whose end can only be disaster. Such sympathy, if you can feel it, may make you a better human being—and a wiser one; for there are surely Moby Dicks still in this world, even if there are no more White Whales.
Melville ceased to be a “public” writer after publishing his fine Civil War poems in 1866. He disappeared from view, struggling, as now seems likely, with his own Moby Dick—whatever that was to him. He died in 1891. During his last months he wrote one remarkable story, which has suggested to some wise critics that he had resolved his problem and “sailed through,” as W. H. Auden wrote in his beautiful poem about Melville, “into an extraordinary mildness.”
That story is called “Billy Budd, Foretopman,” and any lover of Melville, and of Moby Dick, should read it, too.
IVAN TURGENEV
1818–1883
First Love
Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev was born in central Russia in 1818 and died in France in 1883. He received a desultory early education and did not come alive, as he said, until the three years that he spent at the University of Berlin from 1838 to 1841. His writing career began at that time, and he wrote for the rest of his life, a period of some forty years. First Love was written in 1860, very nearly the midpoint of those years.
Turgenev has to be counted as one of the greatest Russian writers of the nineteenth century; only Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov may be considered his equals or his betters. Yet he was very different from all of them. He was almost alone in being sensitive to Europe; and he was also alone in believing that the future of Russia lay in a steady liberalization of its society, its culture, and its economy, instead of in a revolutionary cataclysm. In fact, his hopes for his country underline the tragedy of its real history; if there had been more men like him, the world, to say nothing of Russia itself, would now be a better place than it is.
Above all Turgenev believed in literature, in poetry, in the importance of beauty in the lives of men and women and of a great country. For Henry James, it is reported, he was “the only real beautiful genius.” But this genius did not recommend Turgenev to his contemporaries, especially in Russia. His fellow countrymen thought he was weak and uninterested in the really important things, like progress, power, and revolution. He knew very well that there were even more important things than those.
His works have a delicacy, almost a fragility, that is unique among great Russian writers. They are cool and objective—sometimes, it must be admitted, to a fault. They possess a lapidary excellence that is very rare, and not just in Russia. Perhaps only Flaubert can rightly be compared to him in his own time. But Flaubert lacks his charm.
In 1860, when he wrote First Love, Turgenev had already begun to look back at his childhood and youth as a better time than the present. It had been a world, he knew, that was gone forever, a world of great landowners and peasants, of serfs and of the men and women who owned them. Serfdom was abolished in 1861, but its memory would linger on, just as the memory of slavery has lingered in the United States for more than a century. But, unlike America, Russia was not half slaveholding society, half modern industrial society; all of Russia depended on the work of serfs, and those who owned them, their fellow human beings, felt themselves almost universally to be, taking the title of a famous story of Turgenev’s, “superfluous men.” The fine and delicate problem of creating a life when there is really nothing that you have to do is the subject of many of Turgenev’s stories. Since that is the way most of us will live in the future, when machines are our slaves, we will do well to read Turgenev. By itself that would not be a good enough reason. Turgenev’s love stories will last the longest, I think, simply because love will probably survive all changes and revolutions. And Turgenev, although he never married, was in love for most of his life, always with the same woman, a beautiful and renowned French singer. There are worse ways to spend a lifetime if you are a writer. Or so they say.
First Love is a story about a young man and an older one who love the same woman, and about the conflict this situation creates in her and about how she resolves it. It is touching, beautiful, and, at the end, shocking. The jolt of understanding that strikes Vladimir Petrovich also strikes the reader, and makes him tremble. Reading the story is quite an experience.
Turgenev’s masterpiece, it is said, is the long novel Fathers and Sons (or Fathers and Children, as it is now more commonly called). Fathers and Sons possesses a political dimension lacking in First Love; it is a work on a higher and grander plane. First Love is, instead, a small but perfect jewel of a story. It is my favorite work of Turgenev. Even if you eventually decide that you prefer Fathers and Sons, or the famous play, A Month in the Country, or any other of his major works, I am certain that First Love is a very good place to begin reading Turgenev.
FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY
1821–1881
Crime and Punishment
For two centuries the autocratic Russian state has punished those citizens who defy it by sending them, as prisoners and laborers, to Siberia, there to work out their destiny—and save their lives if they can. The Gulag, in short, was no invention of Stalin; nor did the idea die with Stalin that brutal punishment, just short of execution, but often leading to death, would “improve” men’s souls. And in fact it is hard to see how any reasonable person would ever have thought that it would succeed. Yet it did succeed in the case of Fyodor Dostoevsky. Perhaps he is the extraordinary exception who proves the rule.
He was born in 1821, the son of lower-middle-class parents—his father, the son of a priest, had run away from home to join the army and later, having retired to a dissolute life on his small estate near Moscow, was murdered by his serfs, whom he had treated with more than customary brutality. Fyodor endured a meager education among poor and downtrodden people. Though he was destined for the army as an engineer, he spent most of his time reading and writing. His first novel, Poor Folk, 1845, was highly praised. He was pleased with himself but soon fell into revolutionary thinking and joined a group that was savagely persecuted by the authorities. Together with several associates, Dostoevsky was tried in 1849 and sentenced to be shot, a fate averted at the last moment by a courier from the tsar who commuted the punishment to four years at hard labor. Dostoevsky was sent in chains to Siberia, where he lived surrounded by filth, lice, and disease, among poor folk who hated him for his relatively high birth.