Had he invented them all and
also every stick and stone, brook and hill and field in which they move,
his personages would have been just as true and as poignant in their
perplexed lives. They are his own and also universal. Any one can
accept them with no more question than one accepts the Italians of
Shakespeare.
In the larger, non-Russian view, what should make Turgenev sympathetic
and welcome to the English-speaking world, is his essential humanity. All
his creations, fortunate and unfortunate, oppressed and oppressors, are
human beings, not strange beasts in a menagerie or damned souls knocking
themselves to pieces in the stuffy darkness of mystical contradictions.
They are human beings, fit to live, fit to suffer, fit to struggle, fit
to win, fit to lose, in the endless and inspiring game of pursuing from
day to day the ever-receding future.
I began by calling him lucky, and he was, in a sense. But one ends by
having some doubts. To be so great without the slightest parade and so
fine without any tricks of "cleverness" must be fatal to any man's
influence with his contemporaries.
Frankly, I don't want to appear as qualified to judge of things Russian.
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