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TURGENEV IN ENGLISH

New York The New York Public Library 1962

Printed at The New York Public Library form p692

Encyclopedia entries, brief notes, theatrical notices, adaptations from Turgenev, and other trivia have as a rule not been included. No special effort has been made to locate book reviews published after 1904, when publication of the Hapgood translation of the collected works was completed. Book reviews published before that time have been included as separate entries in the chronological listing of Turgenev criticism, thus giving an approximate idea of the progress of Turgenev studies in the nineteenth-century Anglo-Saxon world.

Much difficulty was encountered in arriving at a satisfactory listing of the collected editions of Turgenev's works, especially of the Garnett and Hapgood translations. These were published piecemeal as well as complete and the more popular volumes were frequently reissued, printed from the same plates. We have had to be content with listing the first publication of each volume in the collected editions, the dates in which complete sets were reprinted, and then listing whatever separate reprints we have found to exist. Presumably there are several more.

Stories published in periodicals often appeared under very non-Turgenevian titles; as much as possible these have been traced to the more standard English titles and so noted.

The index includes an alphabetical list of authors and translators, and an index of titles containing the transliterated Russian titles and the translated titles of all works listed in this checklist. All title variations of a translated work are listed in this index under the Russian title . For variant titles of a work for which only one English title is known, bracketed reference is made after each English title to the transliterated Russian title.

R. Y.

D. S.

Table of Contents

PREFACE 5

TURGENEV REVISITED 9

WORKS BY TURGENEV: COLLECTED WORKS: Collected editions 17 Selected Stories and Plays 20 SEPARATELY PUBLISHED WORKS 21 ARTICLES, STORIES, AND POEMS PUBLISHED IN ANTHOLOGIES AND PERIODICALS 25

WORKS ABOUT TURGENEV 33

TITLE INDEX 43

Turgenev Revisited

Turgenev was the first Russian writer to conquer large audiences outside his native land. He actually introduced Russian literature to Europe and America which, through him, discovered and admired the originality of Russian genius. The impact of his own work, moreover, was enhanced by his personal influence. For almost three decades Turgenev, who spent more time abroad than at home, was recognized as the ambassador of Russian letters in Europe. Friend of most outstanding representatives of European art and thought, he was a familiar figure in Western capitals, and the honorary degree awarded to him by the University of Oxford was but a small part of the homage paid to him by his devotees.

Yet despite his unique position and his wide following in almost every land, Turgenev's fortunes declined sharply in the twentieth century, when many reservations were formulated about his work and person. Some of these qualifications revived old discussions and repeated arguments known already in Turgenev's lifetime; some of them, however, were of more recent origin and expressed doubts peculiar to our century.

Doubts were also cast on Turgenev's art. In the nineteenth century even those who wondered about Turgenev's national authenticity or his social philosophy and historical accuracy recognized his craft and mastery. Yet the same George Moore who spoke of Turgenev's "unfailing artistry" in the eighties, later reproached him as having "a thinness, an irritating reserve," and repeated the quip of a British journalist who remarked that the Russian was "a very big man playing a very small instrument." The same George Moore echoed the discontent of the younger generation with Turgenev's lack of psychological depth: "he has often seemed to us to have left much unsaid, to have, as it were, only drawn the skin from his subject. Magnificently well is the task performed; but we should like to have seen the carcass disembowelled and hung up." Maurice Baring wrote in the twenties that Turgenev's works were dated, that he was inaccurate as a social historian and did not reflect the true Russia, and that his subject matter was too narrow. Others added in the thirties that Turgenev, this minor Hamlet who depicted unhappy love affairs of aristocratic ladies, covered only a small area of Russian reality. He was not sufficiently dynamic or varied, there was something effeminate about his manner, and his lyrical qualities were superficial. In general his art was too contrived and self conscious, its gentility simply expressing an organic lack of directness and vitality. A German critic of the thirties found "sweet and pleasant this art for convalescents which makes one agreeably drowsy."

While Marxist critics were inclined to see in Turgenev a "literary ghost from a sunken world of landed gentry" whose pessimism expressed the doom of his own class, others attacked the very smoothness of Turgenev's style. Alexis Remizov, an outstanding emigr? novelist who appreciated Turgenev and refused to "simplify" problems deriving from his work, identified him nevertheless with the "Karamzine line of Russian letters": in the opinion of Remizov and many of his followers, Karamzine initiated in the eighteenth century that artificial literary idiom of the upper classes which abandoned the racy genuine language of the people and imitated the literary models of the West. The Karamzine-Turgenev-Chekhov trend of elegance, restraint, and linguistic refinement was opposed by the truly national tradition of pre-Petrine Russia with its down-to-earth realism, Greek-Orthodox and pagan roots, and popular vernacular. From that point of view Turgenev again was declared "unfit for our times, not representative as a Russian writer," edulcorated and conventional as an artist.

While all these criticisms were widespread in literary circles of the thirties, World War II and its aftermath brought about a change of heart and a revision of current judgments of Turgenev. Apparently readers both in Russia and the Western countries as well as throughout Asia showed more stability than the critics: they did not seem to find Turgenev so dated as to drop him. Turgenev emerged as one of the most popular authors in the Soviet Union, particularly in the decade following the war with Hitler. Between 1948 and 1958 the USSR press turned out an average of three to four million copies of his works yearly, and in America and Europe there was a definite revival of interest. His novels and short stories were issued in new translations and found a large following among young and old.

Tolstoy pointed out that Turgenev's quiet tone was the result of control and not indifference. The strength of his understatement, enhanced by the neatness of his composition, was based on his essential humanity. Therefore it is erroneous to rank Turgenev with the representatives of the "well-made novel." Of course, he used the "dramatic technique," followed strictly the rule of the withdrawal of the author from his narrative, and built the latter on the revelation of characters through their actions and words. But he never tried to conceal his aversions and sympathies. The spontaneity of his emotional response and the freedom of his treatment of topics and characters made his works totally different from conventional Anglo-Saxon standards and from the French logical formality in constructing the "well-made novel."

What led to errors of evaluation were his serene diction and his belief that a good work of art must never lose its equilibrium or poise, even when dealing with anxiety and madness. He praised highly the "tranquillity in passion" of the French tragedian Rachel and spoke of her acting as a model of high esthetic fulfillment. Actually, the subject matter of Turgenev's novels and tales is far from idyllic: his love stories inevitably terminate in doom and frustration, and none of his novels has a happy ending, death striking most of his heroes. Throughout his works Turgenev displays an acute sense of the tragic in life and a constant preoccupation with man's condition on earth. Yet this pessimism is far from strident, and the writer's most poignant emotions and reflections are always expressed in an even voice, without outbursts of despair. Turgenev loves order, symmetry, balance, and radiance, and he presents a harmonized picture of life which makes his work appear self-contained. There is a world which can rightly be called "Turgenevian," and it stands in its own right as a complete and rounded achievement.

For another thing, Turgenev, with his method of understatement , is closer to modern literary trends than other realists of his own age. One can easily foresee that his tales--and they are probably the best and most enduring part of his work--will attract the attention and admiration of readers and writers for a long time, because they form a counterpart to the era of exaggerated psychologism which is rapidly approaching its decline. Nobody today will accuse Turgenev of "lack of psychological depth" or of over-simplicity. In his own unobtrusive manner, Turgenev hinted at all the complexities of the human soul and alluded to the hidden roots of human actions. In the dreams in Turgenev's works is an unsuspected wealth of psychological insight.

Virginia Woolf, in her last essays, wrote that "his books were curiously of our own time, undecayed, and complete in themselves.... His novels are so short and yet they hold so much. The emotion is so intense and yet so calm. The form is in one sense so perfect, in another so broken. They are about Russia in the fifties and sixties of the last century, and yet they are about ourselves at the present moment." What struck her as his greatest accomplishment was the union of fact and vision that he aimed at in all his writings. Turgenev himself formulated his ideal in a letter in which he said that the artist should not be simply satisfied to catch life in all its manifestations; he ought to understand them, to comprehend the laws according to which they evolve--even though those laws are not always visible.

While Turgenev's national authenticity has been fully reestablished in the last decade and his universality and perfection often stressed by Western and Russian writers, a revision has also taken place with regard to his "objectivity." The legend of his "impersonality" has been easily denounced by the psychological brand of criticism which found that Turgenev, as an individual, was prey to morbid complexes and obsessions, and suffered from many inner contradictions and fears. Already at the end of the nineteenth century George Moore assumed that "what influenced Turgenev's life is put forward in his books," and went on to argue that Turgenev exposed his own weaknesses and failures through the medium of his heroes and their unlucky experiences with life and women. Extremely representative of this trend in contemporary interpretation is the brilliant essay by Edmund Wilson which examines Turgenev's art in the light of his biography.

Of course the flow of literary fortune is in constant ebb, and the rejection of yesterday's formulae by critics and readers of our time is not final. Yet one has the feeling that we have overcome the biased and inimical judgments of the beginning of the century and particularly those of the twenties and thirties. Turgenev is returning to the Pantheon of world literature, not by sufferance but by merit. His lasting qualities as a story teller, as a painter of Russian life and character, and as an incomparable analyst of love seem more evident to us today than they did to the pre-war generation. He will remain a beloved writer for years to come--as long as elegiac grief combined with his exaltation of love and beauty and his vision of art as an orderly arrangement of emotional values can still quicken the feelings and the esthetic sense of men and women throughout the world.

M. S.

Works by Turgenev

COLLECTED WORKS

COLLECTED EDITIONS

New York, Holt etc 1867-85. 1

This series, although published not as a collected edition but as part of Holt's Leisure Hour series, often has binder's title, "Turgenieff's Works."

Reprinted 1872 by Holt. Also published with Lovell imprint

Reprinted 1873.

Also published 1872 with Lovell imprint. Reprinted 1873.

Reprinted 1875.

Also published 1874 with Lovell imprint.

This edition and the French version both appeared before the Russian edition which was published in 1878.

Turgenev protested against this translation which he felt to be inadequate.

London, New York, Ward, Lock 1889. New ed. 5 v. 2

Vol 9: Tatyana Borissovna and her nephew.--Death.--The singers.--Piotr Petrovitch Karataev.--The tryst.--The Hamlet of the Shtchigri district.--Tchertop-Hanov and Nedopyuskin.--The end of Tchertop-Hanov.--A living relic.--The rattling of wheels.--Epilogue: The forest and the steppe.

Includes First love, and Mumu.

Includes Faust, and Acia.

Includes A tour in the forest, Yakov Pasinkov, Andrei Kolosov, A correspondence.

Includes A strange story, Punin and Baburin, Old portraits, The brigadier, Pyetushkov.

Includes An unhappy girl, The duellist, Three portraits, Enough.

Reprints:

Separate reprintings:

To this collection Heinemann added volumes 16 and 17 in 1921:

Includes Father Alexey's story, Three meetings, A quiet backwater.

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