Book Review: Spring Torrents (1871) by Ivan Turgenev

The first thing you notice about a Turgenev novel is that it's a lot leaner than those of his Russian contemporaries. Turgenev didn't write sprawling Tolstoyan epics; his specialty was short stories and perfectly formed novels that have a very modern feel, especially in their treatment of women. Most 19th century novels, even those by women, tend to describe female characters in the simplest terms: good women are pure and saintly, bad girls are wicked and slatternly right to the bone. Turgenev, who had problematical (to say the least) relationships with all the women in his life, created female characters that are strikingly real. Spring Torrents highlights Turgenev's skill in this area, as well as his ability to describe the pains and pleasures of love.

The plot is deceptively simple. It begins in  St. Petersburg where Dmitry Sanin, a wealthy, bachelor landowner is looking gloomily at his empty life. Cue the flashback. Sanin recalls a trip he made to Frankfurt thirty years ago when he was twenty-two and taking a tour of Europe. Sanin wanders into a pastry shop run by an Italian family and almost immediately falls in love with Gemma, the 19-year-old daughter of the shop's owner, a widow named Lenore. Gemma is, however, engaged to a pompous German shopkeeper. In short order Sanin fights a duel to defend Gemma's honour, and she breaks off her engagement in favour of Sanin. Everything's looking good until Sanin meets an acquaintance from school now married to Maria, a brauty who says she's willing to purchase Sanin's estate so that he'll immediately have the money to marry Gemma and begin his new life in Germany. It turns out that Maria is mostly interested in seducing Sanin, which she accomplishes in fairly short order. Sanin is left consumed with shame and writes a letter to Gemma to tell her that he's not worthy of her love. He returns to Russia to live with his regret, but in the final pages of the novel he tracks down Gemma, who is now living in New York with her husband and family. The last we see of Sanin he's heading to New York.

Gemma and Maria are the twin stars of the novel. Most 19th century novelists (Dickens being the most obvious example) would have made Gemma a vapid paragon of virtue. Turgenev makes her funny, a touch eccentric, and not given to attacks of the vapours or any other kinds of behavior common to literary heroines of the time. The love affair Gemma becomes involved is implausible, but she is very real. Maria is even more the star of the show. She's trouble and it's spelled f-e-m-m-e f-a-t-a-l-e. What's unique about her character is that Turgenev makes her so damn charming. She seduces Sanin just to win a bet with her husband (it's very clear he's gay), and it's something she's done before. As bad as this behavior is, it's almost impossible not  to still like Maria, she's that charming.

Turgenev is also at the top of his game in his analysis of the psychology of love, a subject that he was a master of. Here he is describing first love:

First love is exactly like a revolution: the regular and established order of life is in an instant smashed to fragments; youth stands at the barricade, its bright banner raised high in the air, and sends its ecstatic greetings to the future whatever it may hold -- death or a new life, no matter.

It's that kind of writing that knocks the edges off this novel's melodramatic plot and makes it feel, in parts, very modern. Turgenev's sense of humour also helps in that regard. He can't resist mocking all things German, including having Gemma's pompous fiance read from a German book called Merry Quips or You Must and Will Laugh. That book actually existed, and Turgenev was clearly in on the joke that Germans have a difficult relationship with humour. The more things change...

If your view of Russian literature has been formed by dour literary giants like Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, give Turgenev a try. He's no less a genius than the other two, but his prose style is a lot more agreeable to 21st century readers.

Book Review: Oblomov (1859) by Ivan Goncharov

Nobody does psychological insight like nineteenth-century Russian novelists. Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Chekhov and Turgenev liked to take characters and pass them under an electron microscope of analysis and evaluation. Not for them the flash and dash plotting of Zola or Balzac; the Russians settle down with one or two characters and peel away their layers as if they were onions. One of the best, if lesser known, examples of this is Oblomov. The main reason for its relative anonymity is, I'm guessing, that Ilya Oblomov, the character under dissection in Oblomov, is not, at first glance, wrestling with the big existential questions writers like Dostoevsky and Tolstoy liked to challenge their characters with. Oblomov is simply lazy.

Oblomov is in his early thirties and owns an estate with 350 serfs. He hasn't been to his estate in many years, and instead lives in St. Petersburg off the income he derives from the work of the serfs. By any measure Oblomov's a parasite. What's worse, especially for him, is that he's indecisive, a prevaricator, bone idle, racked by uncertainty, hesitant, lethargic, irresolute, and unmotivated. In short, he's a bundle of passively negative qualities. In the brilliant opening section of the novel, set over the course of a typically uneventful day in Oblomov's life, we see him demonstrate every one of his negative qualities. Oblomov basically wants to live in a kind of endless daydream of quiet comforts, good food and discreet pleasures, and to that end he avoids any actions or decisions that threaten to break the bovine trajectory of his life. Even Oblomov's serf/manservant, Zakhar, is profoundly lazy.

Oblomov's best and only friend is Stolz, who decides to rouse his friend out of his waking slumber by putting him in the orbit of Olga, a bright young woman who sees that underneath the inertia Oblomov is a kindly, good-hearted creature. Slowly, Oblomov comes out of his shell and falls in love with Olga and she with him. It looks like Oblomov is going to turn the corner and become a functioning member of society and a husband, but his indecisiveness and fear of taking action takes hold once again and he begins a long, slow decline into a near-vegetative state and an early death. Along the way he ends up in the clutches of embezzlers, marries his lower-class landlady, and finishes his days in a ramshackle house in the suburbs. Olga ends up marrying Stolz.

The power and charm of Oblomov comes from the fact that the title character lies inside each and every one of us. Everybody has an inner Oblomov dying to lie down, have a bit of a nap, mull things over, put off making a decision, have one more cookie, think about getting started on a project, and, well, you get the picture. Few of us wrestle with the demons Dostoevsky throws at his characters, but most everyone fights against Oblomovitis (as it's termed in the book) on a daily basis. I've read Oblomov three times over the years and one of the reasons I do so is because it's more motivational than a gross of Tony Robbins CDs.

Oblomov isn't just about a ridiculously lazy man. Goncharov makes it clear that Oblomov is a by-product of serfdom. He and his immediate ancestors have been made rich, fat and useless by having serfs available to do everything, up to and including putting their socks on for them in the mornings. In Goncharov's  view, serfdom is a curse on both the serfs and their owners. Goncharov provides the antithesis to Oblomov in the character of Stolz. Stolz is a constant go-getter, always working, learning and traveling; filling his life with knowledge and experience. Rather pointedly, Goncharov makes Stolz half-German, apparently indicating that Russians need to take a more European approach to life. Just to further underline his point, the author makes all his male Russian characters idlers or schemers.

If Oblomov was just a singular, eccentric character the novel would be no more than a farce. Goncharov is also using the character to symbolically describe the inertia and backwardness of Russia itself. Stolz urges Oblomov to take an interest in current events, and, on the odd occasions he does, mention is always made of the French and British inventing, exploring or getting into scrapes with other countries. Russia is notable by its absence. Part of Oblomov's lassitude stems from the fact that he's asked himself the question, what is life for? He senses and even realizes that the only true answer is a life of activity and achievement, but at a certain level he sees all that rushing about as being essentially meaningless. If one's working to earn earthly comforts, why not skip the work and wallow in the comforts? In this sense the novel does tackle one of the big questions: is industriousness meaningful or just a way of marking time?

Goncharov should also get credit for presenting his female characters with far more depth than is usually found in nineteenth-century novels written by men. Olga is shown as a complex being, and the description of her married life with Stolz is startling because the author takes great pains to show that she and her husband are true partners in the relationship. That's pretty enlightened for 1859. This brings up the only flaw in the book: the overly long description of Olga and Stolz's courtship and marriage. This section of the novel is thinly disguised editorializing, and it's a bit of a slog to get through. Putting aside this slice of the novel, Oblomov is funny, maddening, fascinating, challenging, and an overlooked gem of Russian literature.