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Finding the Way to Bezhin Meadow: Turgenev’s Intimations of Mortality

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Patricia Carden
Patricia Carden*
Affiliation:
Department of Russian Literature at Cornell University
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Extract

When “Bezhin Meadow” first appeared in Sovremennik in 1851, Turgenev’s friend Feoktistov wrote to him that while the story had “produced an enormous effect on the public in Moscow,” he found it lacked a “general impression,” a “general thread,” that would unify its fragmentary parts and give the reader a clue to its general significance. Well might Feoktistov have been puzzled, for the censor had omitted the story’s ending! The ending was soon available to the reader in the edition of A Hunter’s Notes published in Moscow in 1852: “With sorrow I must add that Pavel died before the year was out. He was not drowned, but killed by a fall from a horse. A pity, he was a splendid lad !“ While indicating a “general thread,” the theme of mortality, the lines produce what may at first appear to be a facile irony.

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 36 , Issue 3 , September 1977 , pp. 455 - 464
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1977

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References

1. The sequence of correspondence suggests that Feoktistov was conveying the common opinion formulated in intense discussions in Moscow literary circles in the days after the publication of “Bezhin Meadow.” On February 21 he had written to Turgenev : “Yesterday the second issue of Sovremennik was received here… . Your story is a marvelous thing! … It is decidedly one of the best things you have written.” Three days later he wrote again praising the story, but with the reservations expressed above. Muscovite critical opinion emphasized the “inadequacy” of characterization, the lack of measure in the story's development (Turgenev tried to “put in too much” ), and the “excessive” detail of the landscape description. A brief description of the first critical reception is given in the notes to the story in I. S. Turgenev, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii % pisem v dvadtsati vos'mi tomakh : Sochineniia, vol. 4 : Zapiski okhotnika (hereafter cited as Sochineniia) (Moscow-Leningrad, 1963), pp. 553-54.

2. My reading of the story is based on the text in Sochineniia, vol. 4, pp. 92-113. Turgenev rid the 1852 edition of the censor's considerable distortions by the expedient of submitting a fresh manuscript to the publisher rather than copies of the published stories.

3. This ending resembles the ending of the episode “The Fatalist” in Lermontov's Hero of Our Time where Maxim Maximich, after scoffing at the notion of fate, reverses himself to allow that there might be something to it.

4. Shatalov, S. E., in Zapiski okhotnika I. S. Turgencva (Stalinabad, 1960), p. 62 Google Scholar, suggests that Russian nature is one of the “characters” of the cycle. Though an extensive literature exists on A Hunter's Notes as a cycle, the literature on individual stories is confined for the most part to reviews at the time of the original separate publication of each story or to reports by Turgenev's contemporaries on possible prototypes. This makes Shatalov's careful readings all the more valuable.

5. Sochineniia, vol. 4, p. 552. Turgenev later reshuffled the names among the boys, but the identifying characteristics of the types remain the same in the final story.

6. Hugh McLean has called my attention to the parallel between these night sounds and the cry of the bittern in Chekhov's V ovrage which also evokes the mystery of a nature in disharmony with “industrial man.”

7. Sochincniia, vol. 4, p. 534. Turgenev removed the comparison from the first book edition, probably in response to his friends’ observation that it was inappropriate.

8. Ibid., p. 554

9. The question is a familiar form of closure in the meditative lyric. See Yeats's “Leda and the Swan” : “Did she put on his knowledge with his power/Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?” or “Among Schoolchildren” : “O body swayed to music, 0 brightening glance, How can we know the dancer from the dance ?”

10. Lydia, Ginzburg, O psikhologicheskoi prose (Leningrad, 1971).Google Scholar

11. This statement must be limited to those sketches that depict peasants, for when Turgenev makes a landowner the central figure, as in “Prince Hamlet of Shchigry, ” he returns to the mode of self-examination.

12. Doktor Zhivago (Paris : Societé d'édition et d'impression Mondiale, 1959), p. 334.

13. Belinskii to Pavel Annenkov, February IS, 1848, in Belinskii, V. G., Polnoe sobranic sochinenii, vol. 12 (Moscow, 1959), p. 466.Google Scholar

14. See V. V. Vinogradov, “Turgenev i shkola molodogo Dostoevskogo, ” Russkaia literatura, 1959, no. 2, pp. 54-63.

15. Belinskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 10, p. 346.

16. Sochineniia, vol. 4, p. 553.

17. Turgenev announced with the publication of “Forest and Steppe” in the second issue of Sovremennik in 1849 that he would “confine myself to the published excerpts.” In fact he added seven more stories to the cycle over a period of twenty-five years. The titles or notes for a number of unfinished sketches exist among Turgenev's papers (see “Prilozheniia” and “Primechaniia, ” Sochineniia, vol. 4).

18. Turgenev also added “The Rendezvous” at the same time, but this peculiar little story had best be examined on its own at another time. In 1872-74 Turgenev added three more stories “The End of Chertopkhanov, ” “Living Relic, ” and “The Knocking, ” that extend the humanitarian aspect of the work.

19. For reasons of censorship Turgenev could only hint at Kas'ian's membership in the illegal sect of “beguny” (see Sochineniia, vol. 4, p. 556).

20. Ibid., p. 553. Turgenev did not follow the chronological order of composition in arranging the cycle. Though written earlier “The Singers” follows both “Bezhin Meadow” and “Kas'ian.”

21. The title was changed by his editor, Nekrasov, very likely for reasons of censorship (see Sochineniia, vol. 4, p. 577).