IVÁN S. TURGENEV.

RUSSIAN literature has as yet given to the world but one great name, that of Turgenev. Others there are assuredly in the literature of Russia who command the deep respect and admiration of all who know them and their works. But they belong to their country and not to the world: Iván Sergyéevich Turgenev belongs to both. Naturally, and without an effort, he takes his place beside Scott, Balzac, Thackeray, Dickens, George Sand, George Eliot, to mention the universal novelists of the century. But Púshkin scarcely ranks, or deserves to rank, with the greatest poets, with Byron, for instance, whom he most resembles; nor is Koltsov, the Burns of Russia, universally recognised as a songster of the highest order, which he certainly is. Turgenev alone has become known to readers of every nation; and to most of us Turgenev is Russian literature. It cannot but be regretted that so much ignorance should exist with regard to so fine and curious a

literature as that of Russia; but it is satisfactory to reflect that, if it is to be embodied for us in the person of a single writer, no one so well deserves to be that writer as the author of A Sportsman's Note-book,* and Fathers and Sons, whom Russia has just lost. It is not always that foreign opinion bestows its favour upon the most deserving. This recognition of his pre-eminence is due to real merit, and not to any such trivial causes as his prolonged residence in western Europe, or his mastery of French and German. These may have hastened his attainment of universal fame, but they did nothing more. Of course a prose-writer has an advantage over a poet in being more easily translatable. His thoughts can be expressed in a foreign tongue with such a close adherence to the form in which they were originally set forth, as it is hopeless to attempt to obtain in the case of a poet. It is no easy task, assuredly, to translate the magical prose of M. Turgenev ; it is, however, an incomparably easier one than to translate the poetry of Púshkin, or Koltsóv.

But Russian literature is peculiarly rich in writers of fiction, and as regards foreign recognition they and Turgenev have stood upon the same footing. Goncharov, Pisémski, S. T. Aksákov, Dostoevski, Counts L. and A. Tolstói, and even the great Gógol are scarcely known, or known only by name, to English readers. They are all novelists of very considerable ability; the first and the last three of them

* Zapiski Okhótnika and Ottsúi i Dyétui.

especially would do honour to any literature. But they are not read and enjoyed abroad as is Iván Sergyéevich. Is it that the choice of subjects has made M. Turgénev's novels so peculiarly acceptable to Western readers? Essentially, every one of his novels and stories is Russian. They are Russian in thought and style, and the world in which the characters live and move is a Russian world.

By an astonishing misconception the English translation of M. Turgénev's Smoke* bears the sub-title" Life in BadenBaden." The scene of the novel is laid for the most part at that charming German town-village, where Iván Sergyéevich lived for a long time; but Baden-Baden is in Smoke as Russian at least as St. Petersburg. And the highest art demands that it should be so. M. Turgénev's writings, then, are as Russian as those of Gógol or Goncharóv. It is to no secondary cause that the author of the following stories owes his position; it is to his indisputable genius, and his consummate art. Nikolái Gógol was certainly a satirist and humourist of the highest order; his comedy, the Revisór,† is full of biting satire and humorous situations; and his Dead Souls is a novel abounding in sarcasm, boisterous humour, and tragic scenes. But Gógol had not M. Turgénev's range, nor could he handle his subjects, as does the author of Smoke, in such a way as to efface all differences of nationality between writer and reader.

* Duim.

† Mr. Sutherland Edwards gives an excellent account of this work in his Russians at Home and Abroad.

Mértvuiya Dúshi.