Turgenev Letters

...This article-now offered as a reprint-is must reading for teachers, principals, administrators, or just parents concerned about the education their children are receiving...

...In a newspaper he bought to scan while walking the familiar route to the prison, he saw an advertisement placed by the Academy of Dijon in which announcement of a prize was made for the best essay addressed to the question: "Has the progress of the arts and sciences done more to corrupt or purify morals...

...If some critics tend to overlook this, it is because his writings by and large lack that quaintness and exoticism Western critics have come to associate with "real Russian" prose...

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...Norton/$19.95 John Lewis Gaddis 36 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1983...

...Why did this masterful portrayer and avowed lover of Russian, life, especially rural life, choose to spend the bulk of his adult life in the West...

...Still, the composite picture of Turgenev which emerges from this small portion of his actual correspondence goes far in dispelling the denigrating myths about the man who was not only a great writer, but one of the most civilized and attractive members of the European republic of letters of his time...

...Rousseau relates in the Confessions that when he reached Vincennes to see Diderot he was "in a state of excitement bordering on delirium...

...k MANHATTAN REPORT...,.,., ----------r -------------------------------------------Please send me the following Manhattan Reports along with my subscription: w r ~uMd`I.rr Ow~Mpd~ slam, _ o Industrial Policy Parts I and II D Resource Transfers and the Third World o Government Funding of the Ms D Towards a New Macroeconomic Consensus D Is Money a Public Good...

...S .75 for one S 6.00 for ten S12.00 for twenty-five S45.00 for one hundred $200.00 for five hundred Name Address 34 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1983 tial in a great author: "After all, the writer is a teacher of the people, surely that's what we have always understood...

...Rock music groups crooned his virtues, T-shirts bearing his likeness blossomed on youthful chests, and Gerald Ford-no Truman admirer in his earlier days-now pointedly hung his portrait...

...This was the period, of course, in which in addition to the articles he wrote on music and politics for the Encyclopedia, he was composing the aforementioned essay on the corrupting effects of the arts and sciences and then the masterful discourse on the origins of inequality, also in response to a prize-offer by the Academy of Dijon...

...His most recent book is Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy (Oxford University Press...

...Canada res...

...The dilemma is well expressed by Leonard Schapiro in his perceptive work Turgenev: His Life and Times (1978), when he states that new materials about the great writer still leave him something of an enigma, though they do not change his "familiar picture" as "weak, uncommitted politically and unhappy about it, critical of the radicals but an admirer of their courage and honesty, humane and unpompous...

...Over and beyond his literary genius, Dostoyevsky's life story will always intrigue us by the political martyrdom of his youth, and then the gambling passion and intolerant nationalism of his later years...

...human vices...

...ten-labeled "hopeless" by the professional social workers-how to read and write...

...Did or didn't they...

...Presidents' reputations always depend, to some extent, upon the performances of their successors...

...It is not by such means that we ought to move ahead...

...The last is entirely credible, all things considered...

...To hell with all nationalistic feelingl" he wrote...

...I I city I Zip L he tried to improve her mind...

...Yet both the gossip monger's and the biographer's voyeuristic impulses have been thwarted by the writer's reticence concerning his exact relationship with the great love of his life, the singer Pauline Viardot...

...In some ways he is very much a Russian intelligent of the nineteenth century, as in his craving for personal intimacy based not only on personal friendship but also on shared intellectual and artistic interests...

...He was born, or rather reached his manhood, at a time when an enlightened Russian could well believe that his country, and without any violent convulsions, could be steered onto the path of freedom and civilized governance...

...But Mr...

...Turgenev did not aspire to...

...And so we have Turgenev writing in 1861: "There is a rumor in Paris that a revolt has erupted in Warsaw...

...That issue, like earlier reports on Government Funding of the Arts, Social Justice and the Reagan Budget, and The State Against Blacks, is provoking thought and action on significant issues of public policy...

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...There were cogent reasons for Turgenev to soon replying to such charges-by wha ethical code can an innocent man bi required to invite persecution at the hands of an authoritarian regime' Why should Turgenev's mere writinl MANHATTAN REPORT _ . _  Yffaff IffitIITS And there's no reason to believe that modern-day proponents of an American industrial policy" would succeed in redeploying resources effectively, either So says author and economist Melvyn Krauss in a recent issue of the Manhattan Report dealing with the industrial policy debate...

...My friend, return to literary activity...

...Schapiro feels constrained, though ever so gently, to reprove his hero, then it is no wonder that the adherents of the sensationalist genre of biographical writings find Turgenev an unpromising subject...

...The tsarist government's attempts to bestow a modest degree of political autonomy in Poland had only increased political turbulence in that unhappy land...

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...This reprint Is especially timely In wake of President Reagan's renewed effort to Improve standards...

...His long absences from the country of his birth cannot be attributed merely to his passion for Pauline (and after that passion receded, he still continued to crave her and her family's companionship...

...After one of his earlier clashes with the irascible genius, Turgenev wrote to him pathetically, "You are the only person with whom I have had such misunderstandings: that has happened precisely because I did not want to limit myself just to simple friendly relations with you-I wanted to go further and deeper...

...He tells us that it was on one of these walks that he had an illumination comparable to Paul's on the way to Damascus...

...Against theirs, Turgenev's life might seem almost banal, devoid of those spiritual wrestlings and personal dramas to which the other two made the whole world their witness...

...0 Harry S Truman, in retrospect, owes something to Richard Nixon...

...As White House correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune during the Truman presidency, Donovan was able to observe at first hand many of the events he describes...

...All of this only reinforced a conclusion historians had come to sometime earlier: that Truman had indeed been one of the more impressive...

...My friend, great writer of the Russian land, heed my request...

...In a word I doubt that we will ever be friends in the Rousseauian sense of the word, but each of us will love the other and rejoice at his successes . . . ." Many years later, on his deathbed, Turgenev once again tried to'reach "dear Lev Nikolayevich," in a letter some have found pretentious and affected but given the circumstances must be seen as both frank and deeply moving: "I am writing you...

...The writer himself was appalled by the controversy over his book, a book that transcends the passionate arguments of the moment and whose main motif is a compassionate and insightful depiction of the perennial conflict of generations...

...And indeed when the Imperial authorities came to investigate the writer's connec tions with the political exiles, he chose to answer their inquiries circumspectly and not entirely truthfully...

...It seemed not to bother Rousseau that he was exclaiming before the man who had made it possible for him to earn money and renown by writing articles for the Encyclopedia in which the value of the arts and sciences was stressed...

...The foremost of the great triad, Tolstoy, attracted worldwide attention not only because of his imperishable masterpieces, but also (and probably in his, lifetime more so) because of his Promethean struggle against practically every established institution of his day...

...For a person with a heart there is only one fatherland-democracy, and if the Russians are victorious, it will be delivered a mortal blow...

...and third, a prevision of the emancipatory and redemptive kind of political order he would describe a little later in his article on political economy in the Encyclopedia and then the historic Social Contract...

...Hurt An Economist for this Century D How Fares the European Welfare State...

...The older Turgenev is far from a Russian chauvinist, but he no longer believes that violence and rebellion are desirable pathways to freedom...

...He had already composed the essence of his answer to the question, and Diderot forced himself to listen to Rousseau's almost ecstatic disquisition on how the major effects of the arts and sciences had been to corrupt man...

...That Rousseau could have access to the glittering world of the philosophes, which they could not, only added to their devotion to him as egalitarian and potential revolutionist...

...From Cranston we gain a clear view of the progress in Rousseau's mind of a strain of thought that would make him unique in the Enlightenment: first, awareness of what Rousseau came passionately to believe to be the intrinsic baseness of culture in such a society as he lived in, a society filled with "hypocrisy," as Rousseau saw it...

...Not only Republicans but Democrats as well-to Truman's disgust-ran against his record in 1952...

...and a great writer is so to speak a second government...

...God save us from such a disasterl j in the [Polish] Tsardom, li revolt and any conspiracy, c, bring harm both to Polat Russia...

...It is astounding to read in the introduction to this very anthology of his letters that, except for his Fathers and Sons and "two or three short stories," he is of interest only to a literary historian: "By and large, the vast body of Turgenev's prose fiction, not to mention his poetry and dramatic compositions, strikes us as singularly dated...

...In any event Th6risse would give Rousseau the special kind of sexual satisfactions he desired, would give him several children (all to be deposited in due time in an orphanage), and companionship at least of a sort for the rest of his life...

...Eulogies of the 33rd President therefore contrasted sharply with revelations about the 37th, with the result that Truman became a kind of instant folk-hero...

...How some of these problems keep reappearing in our own time l The still quite young Turgenev confesses in 1849 to his life-long companion, Pauline Viardot, how shattered he was at news that the Russian army was defeating the Hungarians rebelling against the Habsburg autocracy...

...The letters, then, help us gain a better perspective on the man who in many ways epitomized, just as his stories often masterfully describe, the vexing problems of nineteenthcentury Russian life...

...Years later, upon his retirement from the Los Angeles Times, he embarked upon the perilous course of writing history, not solely from his own personal recollections-indeed, these rarely intrude in either volume-but rather TUMULTUOUS YEARS: THE PRESIDENCY OF HARRY S TRUMAN Robert J. Donovan/W.W...

...The government now turned to repression and partial backtracking on the reforms: the young radicals were now more and more drawn to conspiracies and terrorism...

...Maurice Cranston will in due time write of this Rousseau, and on the basis of this extraordinary, illuminating biography of the young Rousseau, we can take great pleasure in anticipating the second and final volume of the biography...

...in the White House...

...D Markets and Minorities D The State Against Blacks o Social Justice and the Reagan Budget D Property Rights D WH...

...During the decade that followed his return to Paris, Rousseau established himself thoroughly in the intellectual life of the city and also became, as Robert Darnton has recently highlighted in his valuable study of the intellectual underground in Paris, a veritable demigod in the estimations of the penniless and generally unscrupulous hacks who made up Paris's Grub Street...

...an American natural: the last unpasteurized, un-homogenized, noartificial-ingredients politician...

...Others thought it a deliberate caricature of the "new men" and their idealistic strivings...

...he simply wanted his country to be governed in a civilized and sound way...

...When, as Cranston relates in the very final part of his book, Rousseau went back to Geneva in 1754, which he had apostrophized in the discourse on the origin of inequality, it was with the certain knowledge, albeit still in large part unconscious, that his identity had been established and his mission in the world clarified...

...be a "second government...

...As is almost inevitable in any anthology, the process of selection employed here has not been uniformly successful...

...He had been entreated to stay and was tempted to do so: "But why, to what purpose...

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...This great novel was for some a eulogy of the young radicals, and of their creed-the term it gave notorietynihilism...

...These are not the words of an envious rival or a poseur...

...Still Turgenev's inherent generosity of spirit led him to reproach gently, rather than to pay Herzen back in his own money: "Yes, the Emperor who did not know me at all nonetheless realized that he was dealing with an honest person...

...Marva Collins is a black schoolteacher to Chicago, whose only crime is her extra ordinary success In teaching ghetto child...

...Box 11246, Station H Nepean...

...Well, it is difficult even for a great man to transcend the conventions of his time particularly concerning a woman he loved...

...Personal reasons apart, he found the atmosphere of Russia after the mid-1860s when the great era of reforms came to an end intolerable...

...It requires an effort, then, to recall that Truman himself left office after a humiliating rebuff by the Supreme Court (in the street seizure case of 1952), under accusations that he was perpetuating American involvement in a no-win war without congressional approval, that he had tolerated and even " sought to conceal official misconduct, and that he had, as a consequence, brought the presidency into disrepute...

...In the April 1983 Issue of The American Spectator, Rita Kramer reported on Mrs...

...With his friends Turgenev was quite matter of fact about his sexual encounters with women of the lower social orders, an almost inevitable reflection of his upbringing in a serfowning society, and of the social stratum from which he came...

...Well, one is drawn to the melancholy reflection that the intelligentsia's "cult of personality" of the literary great (and of the not-so-great, e.g., Chernyshevsky) did not greatly help Russian society in its struggle for freedom...

...Thus his relationship with Tolstoy...

...Collins's fine work, noting her Insistence an standards and diligence, comparing her to other famous classroom Innovators of the past...

...to tell you how glad I was to be your contemporary-and to express to you my last sincere request...

...I MANHATTAN REPORT . . lnlkry.i,,l Icy, P.u* Iw~rvhn.I>ra+~Min ;W I Rik...

...Truman also had the good sense to hold back until after his death his most pungent personal correspondence and diaries, so that when these were released-and published to a wider and more appreciative audience than one might expect for presidential documentsthey appeared, not as an old man's vindictive spleen-ventings, but as the frank and feisty, pronouncements of John Lewis Gaddis teaches history at Ohio University...

...and old friends, who one would think knew me well, had no doubts about attributing baseness to me and trumpeting it in print-" Turgenev's dilemma, that of a civilized and compassionate man in a society permeated by violent political passions, of a believer in progress and reform in an intellectual milieu increasingly polarized between the partisans of revolution and those of reaction, was seen especially in the response to his Fathers and Sons...

...Tackling one key economic topic per issue, it's an in-depth briefing in a concise format-a serious small journal whose style and method is unique in the field...

...The tendency to downgrade Turgenev has even extended to his literary reputation...

...Rousseau claims for Thdrese, on the other hand, that she had a sound store of common sense, which enabled her to give him good advice in difficult situations and sometimes to protect him from the dangers to which his own passionate and impulsive nature exposed him...

...0 proponents of this genre would have us believe constitute the main interest a modern reader has concerning the lives of famous men and women...

...Marva Collinsthe lady upsetting the NEA, the Chicago Tribune, and the assorted fat cats of our bloated educational bureaucracy...

...Subsequently the writer was vilified by Bakunin (who had beet sponging off him for years) and evet the usually noble-minded Herzen sari fit to hold his old friend to public obloquy in his Bell...

...A few Russian radicals have used a stronger term regarding his personal ties with political dmigrds and revolutionaries like Herzen and Bakunin...

...second, the foundation of this repugnant form of culture and society in the "fatal deflection" of man's moral and mental progress out of the state of nature from equality to inequality-the true source of all Just as his own contemporaries, so the modern biographer finds it difficult to feel entirely comfortable with Ivan Turgenev...

...I was born too late or too early...

...Robert Donovan has had two distinguished careers, and this book-together with its companion volume, published in 1977-is the product of both of them...

...Given the probable consequences of complete openness on the subject, and the fact that Turgenev by this time had distanced himself from Herzen's political views (not to mention Bakunin's), his attitude if not heroic was at least understandable...

...And how especially disappointing to find a great Russian writer so sensible and unwhimsical in his behavior...

...his approval rating at the time he left office approximated that of Richard Nixon in 1974...

...Much of the criticism of Turgenev's work in his lifetime turned on his alleged timidity...

...D Privatizing Public Lands Name Address City State Zip Subscription rate is S10 00 a year Send coupon to Manharran Institute for Policy Research 20 West 40th Street, Now York, N Y 10018 2t2-354.4144 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1983 of a letter to the Emperor entitle Herzen (who at one time himself addressed Alexander II in most eulogistic terms) to describe him opprobriously as "the grey haired Magdalene whose teeth and hair fell out from repentance...

...twentieth-century Presidents, both because of his role in laying down the foundations of postwar American foreign policy, and because of his anticipation-though not achievement-of domestic reforms Lyndon Johnson would put into effect as the Great Society two decades later...

...If a writer as traditional in his approach as Mr...

...As his political opinions, so has Turgenev's life been subjected to much criticism and occasional sneers...

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...Truman had the good sense to pass away late in 1972, just before the full extent of the Watergate scandal became clear...

...Cranston's final chapters deal admirably with the often confused and confusing interrelations between the course of Rousseau's thought during this period and his personal relationship with others in Paris...

...What lay ahead of course was more than a decade for the writing of such world-shaping books as The Social Contract, Emile, and the Nouvelle Ht loTse, not to mention those such as the Confessions which would be published after his death...

...Where are those political eccentrici ties and sexual aberrations which Adam B. Ulam is Gurney Professor of History and Political Science at Harvard University...

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...The great merit of Robert Donovan's second volume in his history of the Truman Administration is that it reconstructs, better than anything else in print today, the reasons why contemporaries regarded Truman's final term as a failure...

...The Manhattan Report is often imitated but always one step ahead, providing insights and data on today's fast-breaking policy battlegrounds...

...In fact, though, Turgenev is closer to us both as an artist and person than most writers of the great age of pre-revolutionary Russia...

...In 1749 Diderot was imprisoned for intellectual offenses, and Rousseau became his regular visitor in the prison at Vincennes, frequently walking there from his own home in Paris...

...In 1879 he would summarize his impression from a recent visit home in one word: "compassion-profound compassion for our marvellous young peoplesmale and female-who are simply suffocating from the lack of air...

...He also lacks the prophetic quality Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn deems essen THESAURUS AT PLAY THE LAST WORD IN WORD GAMES TURGENEV LETTERS: VOLUMES 1 AND 2 Edited and translated by David Lowe Ardis Publishers / $25.00 each Adam B. Ulam THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR Reprint Department P.O...