The Jew and Other Stories

The Jew and Other Stories

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Title: The Jew And Other Stories
Author: Ivan Turgenev
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THE JEW AND OTHER STORIES
BY IVAN TURGENEV

Translated from the Russian By CONSTANCE GARNETT

TO THE MEMORY OF STEPNIAK WHOSE LOVE OF TURGENEV
SUGGESTED THIS TRANSLATION

INTRODUCTION
In studying the Russian novel it is amusing to note the childish attitude
of certain English men of letters to the novel in general, their
depreciation of its influence and of the public's 'inordinate' love of
fiction. Many men of letters to-day look on the novel as a mere
story-book, as a series of light-coloured, amusing pictures for their 'idle
hours,' and on memoirs, biographies, histories, criticism, and poetry as
the age's serious contribution to literature. Whereas the reverse is the
case. The most serious and significant of all literary forms the modern
world has evolved is the novel; and brought to its highest development,
the novel shares with poetry to-day the honour of being the supreme
instrument of the great artist's literary skill.
To survey the field of the novel as a mere pleasure-garden marked out
for the crowd's diversion--a field of recreation adorned here and there
by the masterpieces of a few great men--argues in the modern critic
either an academical attitude to literature and life, or a one-eyed
obtuseness, or merely the usual insensitive taste. The drama in all but
two countries has been willy-nilly abandoned by artists as a coarse
playground for the great public's romps and frolics, but the novel can
be preserved exactly so long as the critics understand that to exercise a

delicate art is the one serious duty of the artistic life. It is no more an
argument against the vital significance of the novel that tens of
thousands of people--that everybody, in fact--should to-day essay that
form of art, than it is an argument against poetry that for all the
centuries droves and flocks of versifiers and scribblers and rhymesters
have succeeded in making the name of poet a little foolish in worldly
eyes. The true function of poetry! That can only be vindicated in
common opinion by the severity and enthusiasm of critics in stripping
bare the false, and in hailing as the true all that is animated by the
living breath of beauty. The true function of the novel! That can only
be supported by those who understand that the adequate representation
and criticism of human life would be impossible for modern men were
the novel to go the way of the drama, and be abandoned to the mass of
vulgar standards. That the novel is the most insidious means of
mirroring human society Cervantes in his great classic revealed to
seventeenth-century Europe. Richardson and Fielding and Sterne in
their turn, as great realists and impressionists, proved to the eighteenth
century that the novel is as flexible as life itself. And from their days to
the days of Henry James the form of the novel has been adapted by
European genius to the exact needs, outlook, and attitude to life of each
successive generation. To the French, especially to Flaubert and
Maupassant, must be given the credit of so perfecting the novel's
technique that it has become the great means of cosmopolitan culture. It
was, however, reserved for the youngest of European literatures, for the
Russian school, to raise the novel to being the absolute and triumphant
expression by the national genius of the national soul.
Turgenev's place in modern European literature is best defined by
saying that while he stands as a great classic in