The Art of Seeing

...10.00.1 Reviewed by Raymond Rosenthal Critic, translator, "Simone Weil: A Life" There is no definitive Turgenev biography in English, and The Gentle Barbarian will not fill the gap...

...Watching was a necessity and an amusement...

...So if this book has any glaring fault it is an inability to fully explain its subject's amazing political insight and intelligence —to respond, as it were, to Tolstoy's cruel jibe...

...Pritchett makes his point by a bit of clever literary sleuthing, tracking down the most complete portrait the son drew of Turgenev pere, in a story called "First Love...

...It should also be read for the insights it provides into Turgenev's art...

...He is already a collector of the events of the hour as it change* ' Hit upon almost as if by chance, the last phrase of that paragraph...

...There are two masters of seeing in Russian literature: Tolstoy and Turgenev...

...not simply in seeing, but in the waywardness and timefessness of seeing...

...He has the pride of the eye...

...I should rather say more ideological critics, since Pritchett flees the ideological as 19th-century Russian noblemen fled the recurrent epidemics of cholera...

...In his discussion of the writer's family, Pritchett is largely indebted to Edmund Wilson's incisive essay on Turgenev...

...Pritchett is the master of the offhand style, and he has chosen a subject suited to it and to his temperament...

...Thus readers familiar with the Russian novelist's life from existing works will find no great revelations here...

...For example, even in Byezhin Prairie, which he deals with so beautifully, he neglects entirely its mythic power—no mere professorial jargon in this context, for the peasant boys telling ghost stories to keep awake through the night effectively conjure up for us the whole dark and magical world that exists in the towns, fields and woods...

...It is for "finds" of this sort that Pritchett's book will be read with interest even by the "experts...

...He is the perfect chronicler of Turgenev, a man who likewise wandered—through life and art—with a curiously dreamy insouciance and grace...

...and what he sees is still and settled for good...

...He was a deeply autobiographical writer...

...Perhaps the most obvious of these was his lifelong despairing love for the married opera singer Pauline Viardot, a masochistic relationship that harked back to his morbid maternal attachment...

...In fact, when Tolstoy—who loved and hated his fellow novelist as much as Turgenev did his own mother?once said sarcastically, "There he goes wriggling his democratic haunches," he seemed aware that Turgenev's politics were more deeply embedded in him than the surface of his artfully aimless stories would lead one to suspect...

...In one of his letters he quotes with admiration an image of Byron's, 'the music of the face'—the movement from note to note, the disappearance of the thing seen in time as it passes...

...One can ask nothing more of biographical criticism...

...Very early he stared at faces and learned to read the moods and histories that were built into them...

...Yet somehow, in his ostensibly aimless, casual manner, he manages to adroitly capture in a neat and resonant prose a valuable essence that has eluded more methodical critics...

...Toward the beginning of the book he describes the roots of his subject's curiosity and detachment: "At a very early age and as the favorite [of his mother], he found he had two roles to play...

...In all other respects, this work is both profound and delightful...

...Indeed, at times one feels the author is too anxious to establish connections that in their genesis are as elusive as the waning hours Turkenev could describe so eloquently...

...He had the eye of a naturalist...

...Pritchett does, however, devote more attention than previous critics to the father, showing that this "elaborately serene" man—Turgenev's own description of him—left a mark, too...

...a collector of the events of the hour as it changes"—is the key to the man...

...That kind of thinking narrows the concept of politics to its most ordinary meaning, whereas Turgenev's sensitivity to the troubled Russian history unfolding before him was eminently political, in the widest meaning of the term...

...As everyone who has read it is aware, the artist's mother, an intelligent, witty, sadistic, and hysterically theatrical woman who ruled the serfs on her estate with callous brutality, inflicted deep psychic wounds on her son...

...The household was a sort of secret society containing the quarrels between a passionate mother and a cool husband...

...that is to say, there is no daydreaming in it, no Wordsworthian moral content...

...My single objection is that, perceptive as Pritchett often is, his focus on Turgenev's rationalistic intellectual stance gets in the way of a fuller response to his subject...

...But it is not supposed to...

...He arables into the matter at hand, pokes about and seems to be completely at its mercy, like a chip of wood on an ocean...

...and when, for self-preservation, he could get away he went out into hiding places in the gardens and woods to watch the things of nature build their history, from minute to differing minute...

...A similar literalness leads to some curious tangles when Pritchett tries to account for Turgenev's political prescience by painting him as the aloof observer, the essentially a-political person...

...Things seen are exact and yet they flow away or are retrieved: the past and present mingle in a clear stream...

...This, one says, is where his art lies...

...What Pritchett adds to their long and effusive appreciations is a dogged tendency to look for the everyday roots of Turgenev's characteristic "poetry," as though such consummate artistry required a firmer base to be acknowledged in our more hard-headed era...

...Still, his pen-portraits of the writer's achievements are possibly the best that have ever been written...

...V. S. Pritchett has set out to fashion what in his short preface he calls a "portrait": "My chief concern has been to enlarge the understanding of [Turgenev's] short stories and novels and to explore the interplay of what is known about his life with his art...

...Turgenev is also exact but without that decisive pride: what he sees is already changing...

...Produced late in the writer's life, it tells of a father and his young son who fall in love with the same woman...

...Seeing is like light and shadow, playing over what is seen...

...Too anxious, in short, to emphasize facts and practical questions in the midst of so much emotionality...

...he listened and tried to keep the peace by charm and being funny...

...They will bejpleased, though, that the author's effprts to pick from the welter of a life those moments and thoughts that were crucial for the artist's development, and to compress the important spiritual and emotional encounters, have yielded a sharper and deeper critical perspective than one normally encounters in biographical undertakings...

...To those who love the novelist's work these sentences can only thrill and exalt and, more importantly, deepen their appreciation...

...Tolstoy sees exactly as if he were an animal or a bird...

...In his conclusion to an analysis of the profoundly suggestive story, Byezhin Prairie (I prefer the later title, Byezhin Meadow, for its homely ring) he continues, with understandable insistence, on his theme of Turgenev as the brilliant observer and points out how "naturally he catches the moment between noticing and not noticing...

...It was of course that impressionistic omniverousness combined with true poetic feeling that entranced the writers of a later period —Henry James, Ford Madox Ford and George Moore—and convinced them that Turgenev was the most authentic artist among the great Russian writers...