You were kind enough to place in the XIXe Siècle my letter about the opening of the exhibition of paintings by Vereshchagin. The success I dared to predict for it, and which even exceeded my expectations, has given me the courage to write to you again. I’m writing to you again about the work of an artist, but an artist who creates with a pen in his hand.
I have in mind the historical novel by my fellow countryman, Count Lev Tolstoy, War and Peace, a translation of which has just been published by Hachette. Lev Tolstoy is the most popular amongst modern Russian writers, and War and Peace, if I may be so bold, is one of the most remarkable books of our time. This expansive work is pervaded by an epic spirit; in it the private and public life of Russia in the first years of our century is recreated by a masterly hand. Before the reader passes a whole epoch, rich with great events and major figures (the story begins not long before the Austerlitz defeat and goes up to Borodino); a whole world unfolds with a multitude of characters belonging to all levels of society, taken directly from life. The manner in which Count Tolstoy develops his theme is as new as it is original; this is not Walter Scott, and, it goes without saying, this is also not Alexandre Dumas. Count Tolstoy is a Russian writer to the core of his being; and those French readers not put off by certain longueurs, and the oddity of certain judgements, will be right in telling themselves that War and Peace has given them a more direct and faithful representation of the character and temperament of the Russian people, and about Russian life generally, than they would have obtained if they had read hundreds of works of ethnography and history. There are whole chapters here in which nothing needs to be changed; and there are historical figures (like kutuzov, Rostopchin and others) whose characteristics have been etched for all time; this will never perish.
As you see, dear Monsieur About, I am expressing myself extravagantly, and yet my words do not fully convey my thoughts. It is possible that the deep originality of Count Lev Tolstoy will impede the foreign reader’s sympathetic and rapid understanding of his novel by its very power, but I repeat – and I would be happy if people trusted what I say – that this is a great work by a great writer and it is genuine Russia.
Please accept, dear Monsieur About, assurance of my devotion.
Ivan Turgenev.112
8
STUDENT, TEACHER, FATHER
Poetry is the fire burning in a person’s soul. This fire burns, warms and brings light… There are some people who feel the heat, others who feel the warmth, others who just see the light, and others who do not even see the light… But the true poet cannot help burning painfully, and burning others.
That’s what it is all about.
Diary entry, 28 October 18701
