Thoreau had no time to waste in making money. Early in life he decided to do not what society suggested for him, but what he himself wanted. At various times he earned his bare keep by schoolmastering, surveying, pencil-making, gardening, and manual labor. He also appointed himself to certain jobs such as inspector of snowstorms and rainstorms. He wrote tire- lessly (this man was no idler—he worked harder than any fifty leading board chairmen), mainly at a vast journal, some of it still in manuscript. From his books and journalism he earned little. His first book was printed in an edition of one thousand copies, of which fewer than three hundred were sold. He remarked, "I have now a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which I wrote myself.,> He spent his life in occasional converse with Emerson [69] and the avail- able Concord literati and transcendentalists; more often talk- ing to hunters, trappers, farmers, and other plain folk who lived close to the natural world he loved; most often with himself, tramping the woods and fields around his home, noting, with two of the sharpest eyes that ever existed, the behavior of the earth, water, and air, of which our lives seemed to him extensions; and at ali moments thinking.
He really lived the life Emerson so beautifully preached, of self-reliance, nonconformity, simplicity, plain living, and high thinking. Of externai events there were few: a pallid, unsuccess- ful romance (there is no question that, though Thoreau was a great man, he was a defective male); the two crucial years at Walden Pond, where he built a house for twenty-eight dollars and fended almost completely for himself; the overnight jailing for a refusal to pay his poli tax to what he considered an immoral government; his brave public defense of John Brown.
Thoreau needs little commentary; he is an expert at explaining himself. But let there be no misunderstanding: This man is dangerous. He is not a revolutionary but something far more intense—a radical, almost in the sense that Jesus was. He does not, like Marx, want to overturn society. He would say that Marxs life-denying state is no better than any other life- denying state. He simply opposed himself to the whole trend of his time, as well as to that of ours, whose shape he foresaw. By withdrawal, he set his face against invention, the machine, motion, industry, progress, material things, associations, togetherness, cities, strong government. He said it ali in one word: Simplify. But if that word were taken by ali of us as liter- ally as Thoreau himself took it, our civilization would be trans- formed overnight.
Knowing that "the mass of men lead lives of quiet despera- tion" (how often the phrase is quoted nowadays), he deter- mined to live entirely by his own lights, in fact to live rather than to adjust, accumulate, join, reform, or compete. His private notion of living may not appeal to those of us who lack his genius for enjoying and interpreting nature; but the force of his general doctrine of the meaning of human life does not rest on the private notion.
It is a fair guess that this queer Yankee semihermit, this genuinely rugged individualist who distrusted the state and treated July 4 like any other day, may turn out to be, oddly enough, not only the most American of ali our writers, but one of the most enduring.
IVAN SERGEYEVICH TURGENEV фl
IVAN SERGEYEVICH TURGENEV
1818-1883 Fathers and Sons
Of the four great nineteenth-century Russian novelists, Turgenev seems to wear the least well. Perhaps that is because, as authorities tell us, his style is of such delicacy and evocativeness that no translation does it justice. Or it may be that some of his themes have lost their attractive power: the "superfluous men," the charming but effete Russian gentry of the 1840S and 1850S; the struggle, if the term is not too strong, between the dominating female and the weaker male; the pale beauty of early love, of frustrated love, of remembered love; and his recurrent motif, the mutations of failure.
Turgenev's mother was a witch out of a dreadful fairy tale. The terror and despair she inspired in her son never left his mind and crept into much of his work. His lifelong passion for the famous, ugly, but apparently fascinating singer Pauline Viardot-Garcia offered no compensation for his bruised spirit. He followed her about Europe like a dog, enjoyed (if he did) her ultimate favors only briefly, and obtained what happiness he could by living near her or at times with her and her hus- band. There is no doubt that she distorted his view of women; he seems either to fear them or to sentimentalize them.
Turgenev shuttled between his Russian estates and Western Europe for many years, and spent the last twenty or so mainly in Paris and Baden. He was an expatriate, rather like Joyce [110]. Like Joyce, he widened his own country s perspective by throwing open to it a view of cosmopolitan culture. Also like Joyce, this "Westernizer" continued to draw his central inspiration from his native land, no matter how distanced his externai life became. Turgenevs political position, throughout the century that was preparing for 1917, was that of the unen- gaged, liberal, enlightened, humane skeptic. Hence his books, while at once winning the admiration of the cultivated, often failed to please either the reactionaries or the radicais.
Some of his shorter works (particularly many of the Sportsmans Sketches) are indeed beautiful. But probably his reputation will continue to rest mainly on Ґ others and Sons, also translated as Fathers and Children. As its title suggests, it was intended to be a study of the conflict between the generations. The theme, in my opinion, has been more powerfully treated by other novelists, including Samuel Butler in The Way of ali Flesh.
To us, however, Fathers and Sons appears more interesting as the first classic presentation of that element in the Russian character which surfaced in our time and which, let us hope, will become less aggressive as the Russians move toward a democra- tic culture. Turgenev lacks Dostoyevsky's intuitive, indeed terri- fying grasp of the revolutionary-terrorist temperament [87]. Yet in Bazarov, the center of his masterpiece, he does give us a clear, almost Olympian picture of the mid-nineteenth-century nihilist (the word is Turgenevs invention). In Rъssia, as the years went by, the nihilist type was to assume a number of different forms: the terrorist, the anarchist, the atheist-materialist, the science worshiper, and at last the dedicated Communist. Though the book exhibits in relief most of Turgenev's other admirable qual- ities—particularly his economy and his un-Russian clarity of form—it will stand or fali, I think, with Bazarov.
C.F.
82
KARL MARX
1818-1883
FRIEDRICH ENGELS
1820-1895
The Communist Manifesto
Ideas have consequences. In no case can this be more clearly shown than in that of Karl Marx. He would perhaps have denied it. He would have said that, the victory of the prole- tariat being inevitable, his life and work were devoted merely to clarifying the issues and perhaps slightly accelerating the outcome of the struggle. Nevertheless, the history of the world since 1917 seems to have confirmed the judgment expressed in the first sentence of Isaiah Berlin^ Karl Marx: His Life and Environment—"No thinker in the nineteenth century has had so direct, deliberate and powerful an influence upon mankind as Karl Marx." It is for that reason alone that a reading of The Manifesto of the Communist Party (for which his coworker Engels is partly responsible) is here suggested. Marx was a highly unpleasant person, and most of us reject his doctrines, but to have no acquaintance with him or them is to remain partially blind.