Russian Literature – Children Books – Russian Poetry – Ivan Turgenev – A Correspondence – Contents
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VI
From Alexyéi Petróvitch to Márya Alexándrovna
Petersburg, May 2, 1840.
Hurrah! Thanks, Márya Alexándrovna, thanks! You are a very kind and indulgent being.
I begin, according to my promise, to speak of myself, and I shall speak with pleasure, verging on appetite…. Precisely that. One may talk of everything in the world with fervour, with rapture, with enthusiasm, but only of one’s self can one talk with appetite.
Listen: an extremely strange incident happened to me the other day: I took a glance at my past for the first time. You will understand me: every one of us frequently recalls the past—with compunction or with vexation, or simply for the lack of something to do; but only at a certain age can one cast a cold, clear glance at his whole past life—as a traveller, turning round, gazes from a lofty mountain upon the plain which he has traversed … and a secret chill grips the heart of a man when this happens to him for the first time. At any rate, my heart contracted with pain. So long as we are young, that sort of looking backward is impossible. But my youth is over—and, like the traveller on the mountain, everything has become clearly visible to me….
Yes, my youth is gone, gone irrevocably!… Here it lies before me, all of it, as though in the palm of my hand….
’Tis not a cheerful spectacle! I confess to you, Márya Alexándrovna, that I am very sorry for myself. My God! My God! Is it possible that I myself have ruined my own life to such a degree, have so ruthlessly entangled and tortured myself?… Now I have come to my senses, but it is too late. Have you ever rescued a fly from a spider? You have? Do you remember, you placed it in the sunshine; its wings, its legs were stuck together, glued fast…. How awkwardly it moved, how clumsily it tried to clean itself!… After long-continued efforts, it got itself to rights, after a fashion; it crawled, it tried to put its wings in order … but it could not walk as it formerly did; it could not buzz, care-free, in the sunshine, now flying through an open window into a cool room, again fluttering freely out into the hot air…. It, at all events, did not fall into the dreadful net of its own free will … but I!
I was my own spider.
And, nevertheless, I cannot blame myself so very much. Yes, and who—tell me, for mercy’s sake—who ever was to blame for anything—alone? Or, to put it more accurately, we are all to blame, yet it is impossible to blame us. Circumstances settle our fate: they thrust us into this road or that, and then they punish us. Every man has his fate…. Wait, wait! There occurs to my mind on this score an artfully-constructed but just comparison. As clouds are first formed by the exhalations from the earth, rise up from its bosom, then separate themselves from it, withdraw from it, and bear over it either blessings or ruin, just so around each one of us and from us ourselves is formed—how shall I express it?—is formed a sort of atmosphere which afterward acts destructively or salutarily upon us ourselves. This I call Fate…. In other words, and to put it simply: each person makes his own fate, and it makes each person….
Each person makes his own fate—yes!… but our brethren make it far too much—which constitutes our calamity! Consciousness is aroused in us too early; too early do we begin to observe ourselves…. We Russians have no other life-problem than the cultivation of our personality, and here we, barely adult children, already undertake to cultivate it, this our unhappy personality! Without having received from within any definite direction, in reality respecting nothing, believing firmly in nothing, we are free to make of ourselves whatsoever we will…. But it is impossible to demand of every man that he shall immediately comprehend the sterility of a mind, “seething in empty activity” … and so, there is one more monster in the world, one more of those insignificant beings in which the habits of self-love distort the very striving after truth, and ridiculous ingenuousness lives side by side with pitiful guile … one of those beings to whose impotent, uneasy thought there remains forever unknown either the satisfaction of natural activity, or the genuine suffering, or the genuine triumph of conviction…. Combining in itself the defects of all ages, we deprive each defect of its good, its redeeming side…. We are as stupid as children, but we are not sincere like them; we are as cold as old men, but the common sense of old age is not in us…. On the other hand, we are psychologists. Oh, yes, we are great psychologists! But our psychology strays off into pathology; our psychology is an artful study of the laws of a diseased condition and a diseased development, with which healthy people have no concern…. But the chief thing is, we are not young,—in youth itself we are not young!
And yet—why calumniate one’s self? Have we really never been young? Have the vital forces never sparkled, never seethed, never quivered in us? Yet we have been in Arcadia, and we have roved its bright meads!… Have you ever happened, while strolling among bushes, to hit upon those dark-hued harvest-flies, which, springing out from under your very feet, suddenly expand their bright red wings with a clatter, flutter on a few paces, and then tumble into the grass again? Just so did our dark youth sometimes expand its gaily-coloured little wings for a few moments, and a brief flight…. Do you remember our silent evening rambles, the four of us together, along the fence of your park, after some long, warm, animated conversation? Do you remember those gracious moments? Nature received us affectionately and majestically into her lap. We entered, with sinking heart, into some sort of blissful waves. Round about the glow of sunset kindled with sudden and tender crimson; from the crimsoning sky, from the illuminated earth, from everywhere, it seemed as though the fresh and fiery breath of youth were wafted abroad, and the joyous triumph of some immortal happiness; the sunset glow blazed; like it, softly and passionately blazed our enraptured hearts, and the tiny leaves of the young trees quivered sensitively and confusedly above us, as though replying to the inward tremulousness of the indistinct feelings and anticipations within us. Do you remember that purity, that kindness and trustfulness of ideas, that emotion of noble hopes, that silence of plenitude? Can it be that we were not then worthy of something better than that to which life has conducted us? Why have we been fated only at rare intervals to catch sight of the longed-for shore, and never to stand thereon with firm foothold, never to touch it—
Not to weep sweetly, like the first of the Jews
On the borders of the Promised Land?
These two lines of Fet[10] have reminded me of others,—also by him…. Do you remember how one day, as we were standing in the road, we beheld in the distance a cloud of rosy dust, raised by a light breeze, against the setting sun? “In a billowy cloud” you began, and we all fell silent on the instant, and set to listening:
In a billowy cloud
The dust rises in the distance….
Whether horseman or pedestrian—
Cannot be descried for the dust.
I see some one galloping
On a spirited steed….
My friend, my distant friend—
Remember me!
You ceased…. All of us fairly shuddered, as though the breath of love had flitted over our hearts, and each one of us—I am convinced of that—longed inexpressibly to flee away in the distance, that unknown distance, where the apparition of bliss rises up and beckons athwart the mist. And yet, observe this odd thing: why should we reach out into the distance?—we thought. Were not we in love with each other? Was not happiness “so near, so possible”? And I immediately asked you: “Why have not we gained the shore we long for?” Because falsehood was walking hand in hand with us; because it was poisoning our best sentiments; because everything in us was artificial and strained; because we did not love each other at all, and only tried to love, imagined that we did love….
But enough, enough! Why irritate one’s wounds? Moreover, all that is past irrevocably. That which was good in our past has touched me, and on this good I bid you farewell for the time being. And it is time to end this long letter. I will go and inhale the May air here, in which, through the winter’s stern fortress, the spring is forcing its way with a sort of moist and keen warmth. Farewell.
A. S.
[10] Afanásy Afanásievitch Shénshin (1820-1892) always wrote under this name.—Translator.
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Russian Literature – Children Books – Russian Poetry – Ivan Turgenev – A Correspondence – Contents
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