Virgin Soil | Page 3

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Virgin Soil
by Ivan S. Turgenev
Translated from the Russian by R. S. Townsend

INTRODUCTION
TURGENEV was the first writer who was able, having both Slavic and
universal imagination enough for it, to interpret modern Russia to the
outer world, and Virgin Soil was the last word of his greater testament.
It was the book in which many English readers were destined to make
his acquaintance about a generation ago, and the effect of it was, like
Swinburne's Songs Before Sunrise, Mazzini's Duties of Man, and other
congenial documents, to break up the insular confines in which they
had been reared and to enlarge their new horizon. Afterwards they went
on to read Tolstoi, and Turgenev's powerful and antipathetic fellow-
novelist, Dostoievsky, and many other Russian writers: but as he was
the greatest artist of them all, his individual revelation of his country's
predicament did not lose its effect. Writing in prose he achieved a style
of his own which went as near poetry as narrative prose can do. without
using the wrong music: while over his realism or his irony he cast a
tinge of that mixed modern and oriental fantasy which belonged to his
temperament. He suffered in youth, and suffered badly, from the
romantic malady of his century, and that other malady of Russia, both
expressed in what M. Haumand terms his "Hamletisme." But in Virgin
Soil he is easy and almost negligent master of his instrument, and
though he is an exile and at times a sharply embittered one, he gathers
experience round his theme as only the artist can who has enriched leis
art by having outlived his youth without forgetting its pangs, joys,
mortifications, and love-songs.

In Nejdanov it is another picture of that youth which we see-- youth
reduced to ineffectiveness by fatalism and by the egoism of the lyric
nature which longs to gain dramatic freedom, but cannot achieve it. It is
one of a series of portraits, wonderfully traced psychological studies of
the Russian dreamers and incompatibles of last mid-century, of which
the most moving figure is the hero of the earlier novel, Dimitri Rudin.
If we cared to follow Turgenev strictly in his growth and contemporary
relations, we ought to begin with his Sportsman's Note Book. But so far
as his novels go, he is the last writer to be taken chronologically. He
was old enough in youth to understand old age in the forest, and young
enough in age to provide his youth with fresh hues for another
incarnation. Another element of his work which is very finely
revealed .and brought to a