Virgin Soil | Page 4

rare point of characterisation in Virgin Soil,
is the prophetic intention he had of the woman's part in the new order.
For the real hero of the tale, as Mr. Edward Garnett has pointed out in
an essay on Turgenev, is not Nejdanov and not Solomin; the part is cast
in the woman's figure of Mariana who broke the silence of "anonymous
Russia." Ivan Turgenev had the understanding that goes beneath the old
delimitation of the novelist hide-bound by the law--"male and female
created he them."
He had the same extreme susceptibility to the moods of nature. He
loved her first for herself, and then with a sense of those inherited
primitive associations with her scenes and hid influences which still
play upon us to-day; and nothing could be surer than the wilder or
tamer glimpses which are seen in this book and in its landscape settings
of the characters. But Russ as he is, he never lets his scenery hide his
people: he only uses it to enhance them. He is too great an artist to lose
a human trait, as we see even in a grotesque vignette like that of
Fomishka and Fimishka, or a chance picture like that of the Irish girl
once seen by Solomin in London.
Turgenev was born at Orel, son of a cavalry colonel, in ISIS. He died in
exile, like his early master in romance Heine--that is in Paris-on the 4th
of September, 1883. But at his own wish his remains were carried
home and buried in the Volkoff Cemetery, St. Petersburg. The grey
crow he had once seen in foreign fields and addressed in a fit of
homesickness
"Crow, crow, You are grizzled, I know, But from Russia you come; Ah

me, there lies home!"
called him back to his mother country, whose true son he remained
despite all he suffered at her hands, and all the delicate revenges of the
artistic prodigal that he was tempted to take.
E. R.
The following is the list of Turgenev's chief works:
ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS OF WORKS: Russian Life in the interior:
or, the Experiences of a Sportsman, from French version, by J. D.
Meiklejohn, 1855; Annals of a Sportsman, from French version, by F.
P. Abbott, 1885; Tales from the Notebook of a Sportsman, from the
Russian, by E. Richter, 1895; Fathers and Sons, from the Russian, by E.
Schuyler, 1867, 1883; Smoke: or, Life at Baden, from French version,
1868, by W. F. West, 1872, 1883; Liza: or, a Nest of Nobles, from the
Russian, by W. R. S. Ralston, 1869, 1873, 1884; On the Eve, a tale,
from the Russian, by C. E. Turner, 1871; Dimitri Roudine, from French
and German versions, 1873, 1883; Spring Floods, from the Russian, by
S. M. Batts, 1874; from the Russian, by E. Richter, 1895; A Lear of the
Steppe, From the French, by W. H. Browne, 1874; Virgin Soil, from
the French, by T. S. Perry, 1877, 1883, by A. W. Dilke, 1878; Poems in
Prose, from the Russian, 1883; Senilia, Poems in Prose, with a
Biographical Sketch of the Author, by S. J. Macmillan, 1890; First
Love, and Punin and Baburin from the Russian, with a Biographcal
Introduction, by S. Jerrold, 1884; Mumu, and the Diary of a
Superfluous Man, from the Russian, by H. Gersoni, 1884; Annouchka,
a tale, from the French version, by F. P. Abbott, 1884; from the Russian
(with An Unfortunate Woman), by H. Gersoni, 1886; The Unfortunate
One, from the Russian, by A. R. Thompson, 1888 (see above for
Gersoni's translation); The Watch, from the Russian, by J. E. Williams,
1893.
WORKS: Novels, translated by Constance Garnett, 15 vols., 1894- 99.
1906. Novels and Stories, translated by Isabel F. Hapgood, with an
Introduction by Henry James, 1903, etc.
LIFE: See above, Biograpical Introductions to Poems in Prose and First
Love; E. M. Arnold, Tourgueneff and his French Circle, translated
from the work of E. Halperine-Kaminsky, 1898; J. A. T. Lloyd, Two
Russian Reformers: Ivan Turgenev, Leo Tolstoy, 1910.

VIRGIN SOIL
"To turn over virgin soil it is necessary to use a deep plough going well
into the earth, not a surface plough gliding lightly over the top."--From
a Farmer's Notebook.
I
AT one o'clock in the afternoon of a spring day in the year 1868, a
young man of twenty-seven, carelessly and shabbily dressed, was
toiling up the back staircase of a five-storied house on Officers Street in
St. Petersburg. Noisily shuffling his down-trodden goloshes and slowly
swinging his heavy, clumsy figure, the man at last reached the very top
flight and stopped before a half-open door hanging off its hinges. He
did not ring the bell, but gave a loud sigh and walked straight into a
small, dark passage.
"Is Nejdanov at home?" he called out in a deep,