Virgin Soil (Garnett)/Volume 1/Introduction
INTRODUCTION
The last words of Virgin Soil─
'A long while Paklin remained standing before this closed door.
"Anonymous Russia!" he said at last'─
lay bare the inner meaning of the book. Anonymous Russia! It was Anonymous Russia, as Turgenev saw, that had at last arisen to menace the doors which shut out Russia from political liberty. And it is of the spontaneous formation of the Nihilist party, and of the hurried and uncertain steps it took preparatory to the serious Terrorist struggle, that Virgin Soil treats with equal skill and force. The educated advanced Russian of the seventies had begun to live an underground life : Turgenev studied this phenomenon, and difficult though this study was, so well did he foresee the future of Young Russia that Virgin Soil remains the best analysis made of the national elements that were mingled in its loosely-knit secret organisations. Virgin Soil gives us the historical justification of the Nihilist movement, and the prophecy of its surface failure: it traces out the deep roots of the necessity of such a movement; it shows forth the ironical and inevitable weakness of this party of self-sacrifice. This effect is obtained in this novel by a series of significant suggestions underlying the words and actions of the characters.
These suggestions are delicate and fleeting like the quiet swirl of water round the sunken rocks in a stream. And so delicately is the Nihilist rising shadowed forth, that a foreign reader can enjoy the novel simply for its human, and not for its political, interest. Delicate, however, as is the technique of Virgin Soil there is a large, free carelessness in the spirit of its art which reminds one much of the few last plays of Shakespeare, notably of Cymbeline, where the action, so easy-going is it, is almost too natural and effortless to be called art. In reality this large carelessness is a sign that the stage of the artist's maturity has been reached, and a little passed. Virgin Soil was the last of Turgenev's great novels, and appropriately ends his career as novelist: it was his last word to the young: it was the cause of his final disgrace with the Government, it was his link with most of Russia's great writers: they were exiled in life: Turgenev was exiled after death. A public funeral was forbidden him, no public honour might be shown him, and public comments on his labours were discreetly veiled and discreetly suppressed by the Government, that had feared his power in life. And this fatuous act of the autocracy is the best commentary on the truth of Virgin Soil.
To examine the characters of the novel is to see how perfectly representative they are of Russian political life. Nezhdanov, the poet and half-aristocrat, is one of the most important. Turgenev makes him the child of a mésalliance, and he is, in fact, the bastard child of Power allied to modern Sentimentality. Born with the brain of an aristocrat, he represents the uneasy educated conscience of the aristocrats, the conscience which is ever seeking to propitiate, and be responsible for, 'the people,' but is ever driven back by its inability to make itself understood by the masses, which have been crystallised by hard facts, for hundreds of years, into a great caste of their own. Nezhdanov understands instinctively how impossible, how fatal, is the task of 'going to the people': his sympathy is with them, but not of them. Banished, by his attitude, from his own caste, he seeks refuge in poetry and art; but there is not enough of reality, not enough of the national life, in his art for him to feel himself more than a dilettante. He feels he must identify himself with the real movements around him, or perish. He fails in his impossible task of winning over 'the people,' and perishes. The Nezhdanovs still exist in Europe: they are the sign of a dislocation of the national life and of the artificial conditions of the society in which they appear; and the Russian Nezhdanov of the seventies was a type very much in evidence in the Nihilist party, and by making his hero perish Turgenev wished to show that hope for the future lay with far different men with the Mariannas, the moral enthusiasts, and with the Solomins, the practical leaders who must come from 'the people' itself.
In drawing Nezhdanov, Turgenev was on his own ground: the type was very sympathetic to him, for he too felt all his life with despair that the gulf, that separated 'the people' from those who would lead them, was too great to be successfully crossed; and his own inner life was a turning away from the politicians, who traduced him and watched him with suspicion, to art as a refuge from reality. But in drawing Solomin, the leader coming from the people, Turgenev did not achieve an artistic success. The truth is, this type was then a scarce one, and to-day it is not prominent. It is this type of man that Russia needs more than any other, the man of firmness and character. By temperament Turgenev was antagonistic to it, and accordingly Solomin is a little too doubtful, a little too undetermined, a little too wooden. One cannot see precisely what is in him, and he does not present enough of the rich contradictions and human variations of a living man. True, Solomin typifies the splendid sturdiness of the Russian people, the caution and craftiness of the peasant-born and the intellectual honesty of his race; but these qualities need a more individual soul behind them to combine them into a great artistic creation. And in fact the Russian Solomins have not yet left the factories: they are the foremen who do not speak up enough for 'the people' in the national life.
Marianna, however, the young girl, the Nihilist enthusiast, is the success of the book. The splendid qualities shown by the Nihilist women in the Terrorist campaign, a few years later than the publication of Virgin Soil, are a striking testimony to Turgenev's genius in psychology. The women of Young Russia were waiting to be used, and used the women were. Marianna is the incarnation of that Russian fight for progress, which, though half-hidden and obscure to foreign eyes, has thrilled the nerves of Europe. This pure girl with passionate, courageous soul is, in fact, the Liberty of Russia. Without experience or help, with eyes bandaged by her destiny, she calmly goes forward on the far journey whence there is no return. By necessity she must go on: she lives by faith. In her figure is personified the flower of the Russian youth, those who cast off from their generation the stigma of inaction─that heart-eating inaction which is the vice of the Russian temperament, as her great writers tell us,─those who cast fear to the Sipyagins and the Kallomyetsevs, to the bureaucrats their enemies, and went forth on that campaign, sublime in its recklessness, fruitful in its consequences to their country, and fatal in its consequences to themselves. Marianna personifies the spirit of self-sacrifice which led her comrades forth against autocracy. The path was closed; behind them was only dishonour and cowardice; onward, then, for honour, for liberty, for all that makes life worth living to the courageous in heart. But the closed doors, the doors on which they knocked, were the doors of the fortress: the fortress closed upon them, upon their brothers and sisters: their leaders were sentenced, deported, exiled: fresh leaders sprang up, each circle had its leaders, whose average life, as free men, was reckoned not by years but by months. The lives of Marianna and her generation were spent in prison or in exile. But by the very recklessness of their protest against autocracy, by their very simplicity in 'going to the people,' by their self-immolation for their principles, Europe knew that there was no liberty in Russia save in its prisons, and that the bloody reprisals that followed were those of Marianna's brothers, who saw her helpless in the hands of a great gendarmerie─a gendarmerie that had long shamelessly abused the power it held, that had silenced brutally all who had protested, all, all the independent spirits, all their great writers, all their men. Marianna, Marianna herself must seek the prison. Turgenev foresaw this, and Virgin Soil tells of her preparation for the ordeal, of the why and the wherefore she went on her path.
And if anything remains obscure in Virgin Soil, the English reader must remember that Turgenev was writing under special difficulties There must always be a little vagueness in one's speech, when Silence is written in an official writing above the doors. Anonymous Russia! Anonymous Russia had arisen to mine the doors: the doors must be shattered by secret hands that Europe might for once gaze through. It was for a transgression of this perpetual Silence that the crowd was forbidden to speak, when Turgenev was carried to his tomb. It was for Marianna's transgression of this Silence that Turgenev has glorified her in Virgin Soil.
II
What was the Nihilist party of the seventies? It began, as we have said, with the Socialistic movement of 'going to the people.' This movement, again, was the natural outlet for the many liberal ideas which, germinating in 'advanced' heads, had been gathering in intensity with each generation. With the liberation of the serfs Alexander II.'s liberal policy had abruptly ended. To understand Russian politics is to know that though there are many cliques there are only two great parties, the one orthodox, the other unorthodox─the party of Governmental Action, and the party of Liberal Ideas. There are no safe politics in Russia outside the official world. If you can win over the officials to your plans in various local work, well and good; if not, your efforts are labelled 'subversive'; and it is thus that sooner or later every disciple of liberal ideas finds himself placed in direct opposition to the Government. Though there are many liberal-minded men among the officials, still, in Solomin's words, 'the official is always an outsider,' and therefore it is that the unofficial thinking part of Russia, the writers, the professors, the students, the press, and the more intelligent of the professional world, form an unorganised but permanent opposition. To this party gravitate naturally the discontented spirits from all classes─nobles, military men, those who have been hardly dealt with, and those who have an axe of their own to grind, the Markelovs, and the Paklins. Accordingly, the autocracy, by the solid, impermeable front it has presented for twenty-five years to reform and to the education of the peasants, may be said to hold the varying opposition together. The action of the Government, too, in forbidding the public to comment on such matters as the late strike of factory hands in St. Petersburg, where also the masters were 'forbidden' to yield to the men's demands, constantly creates a hostile public And it was in this manner that the Nihilist party of the seventies was formed.
It was natural enough for the last generation of Young Russia 'to go to the people,' for it is in the matter of the education of the peasants that Russia's hope of social and political reform lies. Besides, this plan of action meant for Young Russia the taking of the path of least resistance. The other paths had been closed by reactionary decrees. But to go actually among the peasantry and work for them and learn from them had never been attempted, and by a natural impulse the Young Russian theorists threw themselves into this Utopian campaign. The movement, of course, was foredoomed. Not only did the Government enact harsh penalties against the Socialists, but the peasants themselves were too ignorant, too far off in their life, to understand what Young Russia meant. And the exiling and imprisonment of the leading propagandists, when it came, could not fail to bring the Nihilists into a direct war with autocracy itself.
The whole quarrel between the autocracy and the liberal opposition, a quarrel which the Nihilists of the late seventies brought to a head, is a question of liberty. Is Russia to be more Orientalised or more Europeanised ? If you believe in liberty of speech and of the conscience, in a free press and the education of the peasants, if you would reform the peculation and corruption of the official world, if you wish to circulate European literature without hindrance, if you detest the persecution of the Jews and the Stundists,─then you must keep silent, or be prepared at any moment for bureaucratic warnings, deprivations, detentions, and possible exile. If you are a Slavophil you will acquiesce in every possible action of the bureaucracy, as 'necessary.' It is simply a struggle between a very strongly organised bureaucracy, armed with the modern weapons of centralised power, and the public opinion of a large body of educated subjects with advanced views. Though enormous power is in the hands of the Government, and the gross credulity and ignorance of the peasants, and the self-interest of the officials, all work to preserve the status quo, nevertheless there is in the Russian mind, side by side with its natural Slavophilism, a great susceptibility to European example, and therefore the work of the Nihilists of yesterday and the liberals of to-day was, and is, to awaken the public mind. It does not matter very much how this work is performed, so long as it is performed. The Russian mind is naturally quick and sensitive; it moves quickly to conclusions when once it is started, as we see in the quickness with which Russia was semi-Europeanised by Peter the Great, and how easily the Emancipation of the Serfs was effected owing to the weakness of the autocracy at the close of the Crimean war. There is reaction now in Russia, but this may be broken up by the pressure of a series of fresh economic difficulties superimposed upon the old.
It can only, therefore, be claimed for the Nihilists of the seventies that they represented an advanced section of the community, and not the nation itself, in their struggle with the bureaucracy. They must be regarded as enthusiasts who awoke public opinion when it had begun to slumber. They vindicated the manliness of the nation, which had always gone in fear of the official world: it was now the bureaucracy that was afraid! The Nihilists became martyrs for their creed of progress; they drew the attention of Europe to the strange spectacle that Russia presents in its well-equipped bureaucracy of caste slowly paralysing the old democratic institutions of the peasantry. A strong Governmental system is absolutely necessary for the holding together of the enormous Russian Empire; but the fact that the work of freeing and educating the peasants has (with only the rarest exceptions) been always violently or secretly opposed by the high officials, suggests that the bureaucracy is like a parasite which strangles, though appearing to protect, the tree itself. And the attitude of the official world to its sun and centre, the autocracy, is something like that of threatening soldiers surrounding the throne of a latter-day Cæsarism.
Whether or no the Nihilists' belief in revolution in Russia was justified by their measure of success, their rising was but a long-threatened revolt of idealism and of the Russian conscience against Russian cowardice; it was the fermentation of modern ideas in the breast of a society iron-bound by officialism; it was the generous aspiration of the Russian soul against sloth and apathy and greed. The Nihilists failed, inasmuch as the battle of Liberty is yet to be won: they succeeded, inasmuch as their revolt was a tremendous object-lesson to Europe of the internal evils of their country. And the objection that they borrowed their ideas of revolution from the Commune, and were not a genuine product of Russia, Turgenev has answered once for all in Virgin Soil. Liberty must spring from the soil whence Marianna springs.
In the words of that great poem of Whitman:
The battle rages with many a loud alarm and frequent advance and retreat.
The infidel triumphs, or supposes he triumphs,
The prison, scaffold, garotte, handcuffs, iron necklace, and lead balls do their work,
The named and unnamed heroes pass to other spheres,
The great speakers and writers are exiled, they lie sick in distant lands,
The cause is asleep, the strongest throats are choked with their own blood.
The young men droop their eyelashes towards the ground when they meet.
But for all this Liberty has not gone out of the place, nor the infidel entered into full possession.
When Liberty goes out of a place it is not the first to go, nor the second or third to go,
It waits for all the rest to go, it is the last!
There is no going back for the Mariannas of Russia. They must go forward, and to-day they are going forward. Honour to them and theirs, to them who, if forbidden by authority to work in the light, are ready again to work in the dark. Honour to that great party with whom their country's liberties have remained─Anonymous Russia!
EDWARD GARNETT.
July 1896.