Again, Turgenev's power as a poet comes in, whenever he draws a commonplace figure, to make it bring with it a sense of the mystery of its existence. In _Lear_ the steward Kvitsinsky plays a subsidiary part; he has apparently no significance in the story, and very little is told about him. But who does not perceive that Turgenev looks at and presents the figure of this man in a manner totally different from the way any clever novelist of the second rank would look at and use him? Kvitsinsky, in Turgenev's hands, is an individual with all the individual's mystery in his glance, his coming and going, his way of taking things; but he is a part of the household's breath, of its very existence; he breathes the atmosphere naturally and creates an atmosphere of his own.
It is, then, in his marvellous sense of the growth of life that Turgenev is superior to most of his rivals. Not only did he observe life minutely and comprehensively, but he reproduced it as a constantly growing phenomenon, growing naturally, not accidentally or arbitrarily. For example, in _A House of Gentlefolk_, take Lavretsky's and Liza's changes of mood when they are falling in love with one another; it is Nature herself in them changing very delicately and insensibly; we feel that the whole picture is alive, not an effect cut out from life, and cut off from it at the same time, like a bunch of cut flowers, an effect which many clever novelists often give us. And in _Lear_ we feel that the life in Harlov's village is still going on, growing yonder, still growing with all its mysterious sameness and changes, when, in Turgenev's last words, "The story-teller ceased, and we talked a little longer, and then parted, each to his home."
Note on Turgenev's Life--His Character and Philosophy-- _Enough_--_Hamlet and Don Quixote_--The _Poems in Prose_--Turgenev's last Illness and Death--His Epitaph.
If we have said nothing hitherto about the twenty years of Turgenev's life (1855-1877), in which the six great novels were composed, it is because his cosmopolitan activities, social, political, intellectual, were too many to be chronicled in the compass of a short Study. They may be here indicated in a few lines. Lengthy stays in France, and visits to Germany, Italy, England, were alternated with residence every year at Spasskoe. His attachment to Madame Viardot and her family (which may be studied in _Lettres à Madame Viardot_, Paris, 1907, a series unfortunately not published in its entirety) led to his joining their household at Courtavenel and Paris, and later (1864) to settling with them at Baden. His residence in France brought him into contact with nearly all the celebrated French men of letters, Mérimeé, Taine, Renan, Victor Hugo, Sainte-Beuve, Flaubert, etc., and later with the chiefs of the young naturalistic school, as Zola, Daudet, Guy de Maupassant. Turgenev's political outlook and Liberal creed are best represented in his Correspondence with Hertzen, to whom he communicated Russian news for _The Bell_: his relations and quarrel with Tolstoy, and his enthusiastic appreciation of the latter's genius are recorded in Biriukoff's _Life of Tolstoy_, and in Halperine-Kaminsky's _Correspondence_. For his relations with Russian contemporary men of letters, Fet, Grigorovitch, Nekrassov, Dostoevsky, Annenkov, Aksakov, etc., there exists a mass of documents, letters and reminiscences in the Russian. For a general sketch of Turgenev's life the English reader can turn to E. Haumant's _Ivan Tourguénief_, Paris, 1906; for an account of Turgenev's youth, his relations with the Nihilists, his later life in Paris, etc., to Michel Delines' _Tourguénief Inconnu_, and also to the much-abused but valuable volume, _Souvenirs sur Tourguéneff_, by Isaac Pavlovsky.