Literary Reminiscences, by I.S. Turgenev A Nest of Gentlefolk, and other stories, by I.S. Turgenev Portraits of Russian Personalities Between Reform and Revolution, by Richard Hare

[p022] Turgenev Literary Reminiscences, by I. S. Turgenev, trans: David Magarshack (Faber and Faber 25s.) A Nest of Genitlefolk, and other stories, by I. S. Turgenev, trans. Jessie Coulson (Oxford University Press, The World's Classics, 8s. 6d.) Portraits of Russian Personalities Between Reform and Revolution, by Richard Hare (Oxford University Press, 42s.} . Turgenev was severely criticized in his day by Russian revolutionaries because his novels and stories drew no explicit conclusions regarding the cause of the social evils they depicted. Yet Lenin liked his work. Krupskaya tells us that her husband — had read Turgenev several. times, and we find. him using characters and incidents from this writer in his own work—_ as for instance In Memory of Count Heiden (1907) where he refers to the ‘civilized’ nobleman in A Sporisman’s Sketchbook —

[p023] LABOUR REVIEW who orders his servant to be flogged, but without using the nasty word as his father would have done. The impact of Turgenev’s writings went, indeed, much further. than his political views, as so often happens with a really great writer; and the Tsarist censorship understood better than some narrow-minded critics the dangerous character of . this aristocratic liberal’s little pictures of Russian country life. Edmund Wilson, in his introductory essay to Turgenev’s Literary Reminiscences, reminds us that he was “The first Western writer of fiction to perfect the modern art of imply- ing social criticism through a narrative that is presented objectively’. Turgenev was one of the writers to whom Engeis referred in his letters, against what is now called ‘socialist realism’, to Minna Kautsky—‘the tendency’ should emerge from the situation and the action themselves, without being explicitly formulated, and the writer is not obliged to present. the reader with the ready-made future historical solution of the social conflicts he describes,—and to Margaret Harkness—the more the author’s opinions remain concealed the better it is for the work of art’. Among many other matters of interest the Reminiscences give us Turgenev’s own views on the writer’s position: “Every writer who does not lack talent—that of course is the indispensable condition—every writer I say, tries his best to give a vivid and true reproduction of the impression he has obtained from his own life and from the life of others, and every reader has the right to judge how far he has succeeded in this, and where he has gone wrong; but who has the right to tell him which impressions are of any Believe me, no man of real talent ever serves aims other than his own, and he finds satisfaction in himself alone; the life that surrounds him provides him with the contents of his works; he is its concentrated reflection; but he is as in- capable of writing a panegyric as a lampoon....’ One may compare with this Trotsky’s observations in Literature and Revolution and Art and Politics in Our Epoch (‘Art, like science, not only does not seek orders, but, by its very essence, cannot tolerate them’). * * * In Richard Hare’s collection of brief biographies of Russian public figures of the later nineteenth century the accounts of Turgenev and Tolstoy are perhaps the best. Others depicted inchide Bakunin, Dostoyevsky, the Narodnik Mikhailovsky, with whom Lenin crossed swords, the Christian mystic Solovyov who influenced Pasternak, Kropotkin, Stolypin and Witte. * * * Mrs Coulson, accomplished wordwoman, has given us a new version of A Nest of Gentlefolk—also known here as A ~ Nobleman’s Nest and Liza. The other stories are-A Quiet Backwater, First Love and A Lear of the Steppes. J.B. Polish Trio