Tag: Ivan Turgenev

Famine and Affluence; Fathers and Children

The idea of this piece is to compare the radicalism Turgenev portrays in Fathers and Sons with Peter Singer’s ideas about charity as discussed in his 1972 essay “Famine, Affluence, and Morality”. The comparison is in some sense arbitrary, but I hope to use it to make the claim that what Singer suggests – essentially, that we in the developed world ought to give a large part of our income away to aid those less fortunate than ourselves – is not particularly radical at all, while Bazarov’s “nihilism”, the demand to “deny” everything, to take nothing on faith, remains a call that most of us would struggle to answer.

I am writing this piece in part for myself. The conclusion, that we probably ought to listen to Singer and give a non-trivial amount of our income away to charity, appears to me to be manifestly correct. But at the same time, I am not doing it and do not see myself doing it in the near future. I cannot argue against him – I am not a philosopher and my ability to reason my way out of abstract arguments is limited. But perhaps by throwing down onto the page what I think about him I may find a handhold by which I may begin to pull myself out of the prison cell of my own guilt at my failure not to act.

I will leave you to judge. First, we will summarise Singer, then we’ll go through Turgenev, and finally, we will attempt to bash the two of them together.

Famine, Affluence, and Morality

Peter Singer’s essay was written in 1971, during the Bangladeshi War of Independence. A large part of that country’s population was living and dying in terrible conditions caused by the war. Rich nations were sending aid, but Singer notes that the aid was not substantial. Britain sent little over 5% of the amount it had then spent on developing the Concorde airplane, while Australia’s contribution amounted to less than a twelfth of the cost of the Sydney opera house. Singer denies neither the value of culture nor rapid intercontinental air travel, but he notes that we would probably consider human life more valuable than either of those things. At least in theory.

Singer does not only criticise the response of states. He notes that people have failed too – “people have not given large sum to relief funds; they have not written to their parliamentary representatives demanding increased government assistance; they have not demonstrated in the streets, held symbolic fasts, or done anything else directed toward providing the refugees with the means to satisfy their essential needs.” While there were exceptions, the average citizen’s response was inaction. And the scale of the famine and its coverage in the media meant that inaction could not have been from ignorance.

Singer argues that such inaction is unjustified. His argument in the short essay, which can be read here, is that “if it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it.” He gives the famous example of a drowning child:

“If I am walking past a shallow pond and see a child drowning in it, I ought to wade in and pull the child out. This will mean getting my clothes muddy, but this is insignificant, while the death of the child would presumably be a very bad thing.”

If we agree with the principle about preventing bad things from happening, distance should be of no importance, nor should whether we alone can help or whether many can – either way, we should do something. In centuries past, I would scarce have known about suffering on a different continent, let alone how to avert it. But – and Singer is writing in 1971, recalling – “instant communication and swift transportation have changed the situation.” We may say that we are better able to judge who needs the help when we help those closest to us, such as the local homeless. But even this is a somewhat leaky defence. Experts are able to assess the effectiveness of charities, providing reassurance that our money would be put to good use. We do not need to judge, and in fact, we probably lack the tools to judge as effectively as someone whose work has had them spend years honing their judgement.

What this means is that our excuses are inadequate. This leads Singer on to his next point, namely that we have an idea of charity that is wrong. Western societies think of charity as something extra, rather than as a duty. (Whereas it is one of Islam’s five pillars). Because it is something extra, we do not expect people to do it, though we may praise them if they do. However, if we spend our money on fast cars instead of helping those who are literally dying in ways that could be prevented by that same money, we are – according to the premises of Singer’s argument – in some sense guilty. We should give and take action, and we should condemn those who do neither. Giving is not “supererogatory” – it is not something above and beyond goodness, but a constituent component of goodness itself.

That human beings are selfish is not really a good reason not to accept the argument. That nobody else gives is also not a good reason – that is merely a form of cowardice.

And so, Singer draws his rather simple conclusion: “a great change in our way of life is required.” He presents a strong and a weak version of his argument. The former: that we should “prevent bad things from happening unless in doing so we would be sacrificing something of comparable moral significance”, and the latter: “We should prevent bad occurrences unless, to do so, we had to sacrifice something morally significant.” To use an example that has been beaten to death already, the loss of a cup of coffee at one’s local chain is certainly not “something morally significant”. But one could put that money to a good cause and achieve thereby something that truly is morally significant. You know, malaria nets or whatever the charitable flavour-of-the-week is.

In a couple of places, Singer has suggested that giving 5% of our income is a reasonable starting point for answering the question of how much we should give. This is all part of the big Effective Altruism movement and is not worth us fussing over now. For the purposes of this piece, we can summarise Singer’s argument as being that we ought to give more and sacrifice things that do not really matter in comparison with what that money could achieve.

Fathers and Children

Turgenev’s novel, Fathers and Sons, was published in 1862. Russia had suffered a crushing defeat in the Crimean War, with the result that the Empire was taking a long look at itself. The serfs were emancipated in 1861, but with terms that left them still very much shackled to their old masters. Localised revolts caused by peasants who could not read and had been too optimistic in their interpretation of the Tsar’s proclamation were punished with the usual state-sanctioned murder. At the same time, angry with the government’s unwillingness to take further steps to advance Russia into at least the 18th century, young men – and women – became increasingly radicalised. In the same year that the serfs were emancipated the Land and Liberty League was founded, whose most famous act was the murder of the chief of police. Tsar Alexander II himself, who had started his reign with such reforming vigour and then very quickly forgotten all about it, would be blown to pieces a few years after that.

This is all after the novel’s publication, but the best literature tends to identify nascent themes of an age before they become generally apparent, and Fathers and Sons is no exception. It dramatizes a shift in the idea of progressive politics between the older generation, particularly in the figure of Pavel Kirsanov, and the younger, in the figure of Bazarov. The book’s original epigraph gives an idea of the shift we are dealing with:

“Young Man to Middle-Aged Man: “You had content but no force.” Middle-Aged Man to Young Man: “And you have force but no content” – From a contemporary conversation

The older generation in real life had such illustrious figures as Alexander Herzen, whom I’ve written about previously, but it managed to achieve precious little in practice. The new generation was impatient and wanted change now. The anarchist Bakunin (famous phrase, “a destructive urge is also a creative one”) was the most famous member of the older generation to “cross-over”. The young people themselves do not provide many heroic examples. The first one who comes to mind is Sergei Nechaev, who is the model for Pyotr Verkhovensky in Dostoevsky’s Demons, having murdered an innocent man for the sake of trying to improve his revolutionary cell’s cohesion (it did not work).

Pavel Kirsanov, like Dmitry Rudin in Turgenev’s earlier novel of that name, was something of a revolutionary in his youth – both of them fought at the barricades in a France witnessing a revolution. Such action is, funnily enough, reactionary, or at least reactive. They joined a revolution, rather than trying to foment it. The narodniki (this later generation) actually went around the peasants, attempting to stir them into revolt. In practice, the peasants were just as conservative as the Tsars, and most attempts at getting them to revolt failed. Alexander Etkind has noted that the young revolutionaries often followed a particular pattern – “fascination with texts led to fascination with sects; disillusionment with sects led to violence”. Young men from seminaries saw Russia’s long tradition of religious dissent as being the secret to organising political dissent, not realising that the sects simply wanted to be left alone. Disillusioned, they turned to violence.

Within the novel, Bazarov enacts “going to the people”, as it was later called, in miniature. He speaks to the peasants on the Kirsanov estate, where much of the story takes place. But when he actually tries to discuss politics with them, they are bemused and think of him “as a kind of holy fool”. Still, Bazarov’s failure as a revolutionary is not the reason that he has become one of the most well-known characters in Russian literature. Instead, it is his passionately held beliefs that are responsible. He declares that we must deny “everything”. Whereas the other characters are wet and wishy-washy sops who like poetry and music, Bazarov’s language early in the novel is declarative, clear, and forceful.

And what does he suggest, apart from denial? Well, that’s the problem. “We clear the ground”, he says – the most important thing is to destroy. Everything that exists must be subjected to rational criticism as if it is a theory in a book, and if its foundations are unstable, it must be toppled. Religion, the Empire itself – these are things that at that time could certainly have done with a healthy dose of criticism. But Bazarov offers nothing in their place, only the promise that rationality will sort everything out.

Bazarov’s forceful character is in its way inspiring. But that same character disintegrates over the course of Turgenev’s novel. Bazarov falls apart when he falls in love. After all his declarative sentences suddenly it’s all mush with him. And then he dies. Turgenev, who was accused by both conservatives and progressives for his novel, ultimately considered himself a rather boring moderate. “I am, and have always been, a “gradualist”, an old-fashioned liberal in the English dynastic sense, a man expecting reform only from above.” This quote comes from a letter written to a newspaper, but even so, it’s hard to find much in Turgenev’s writing that contradicts it. He dislikes everything that diminishes human life, whether it be authoritarian or radical. But he admires the radicals of the new generation all the same.

Fathers and Sons ends with Bazarov buried and two weddings having taken place. The first of these is between Bazarov’s friend Arkady and Katya, the sister of the woman Bazarov falls in love with; the second is between Arkady’s father and his mistress, a peasant girl. There are few events better reflective of compromise and cohesion than a wedding. Whereas Bazarov’s love for an interesting woman fails, Arkady’s love for a boring girl who gives him an heir is more successful. At the same time, the ending suggests a certain amount of progress, for the second marriage shows that rigid social hierarchies do need to be adjusted from time to time. 

Comparison

We may consider both Singer and Bazarov to present radical ideas, but there is a great difference of degree. Singer asks us to reconsider our idea of duty, whereas Bazarov demands the complete reconfiguration of societies’ fundaments. Although there is an honest desire to improve the lot of the peasant in Bazarov’s views, or at least in the views he is supposed to represent, there is also something horrible. I can’t remember now who said it, and it may be that nobody knows, but one of the nihilists (Pisarev?) once said that a cobbler was worth more than Pushkin. This is blatantly false – it assumes an unbelievably limited view of human nature, one where art has no place. A cobbler is practically valuable, but Pushkin has had a far greater impact than even the best cobbler – he reaches to the soul.

When we go around destroying things, we soon discover that it’s much easier to break than to build. We might agree that religion is generally bad, and most would agree that an Empire is not the best political structure. But we are unlikely to agree about what to replace them with, and Russia’s experience has been that every time they break something, filled with hope, they have replaced it with something worse. Turgenev’s gradualism, as with any gradualism, is something of a cop-out. Martin Luther King Jr’s comments that the greatest enemy of black emancipation is the white moderate are pertinent here. Moderation all-too-easily becomes inaction. And many of the issues people face do cry out for action, not twiddling our thumbs.  

Emotionless Bazarov leads a life that can hardly be called rich. Those emotions that he does have are very much linked to the very structures that he would like to critique – family, love, and so on. I do not think that we cannot love without society, but it would certainly be different, and perhaps not nearly as nice. Perhaps that’s why I found the ending to E.M. Forster’s Maurice so unsatisfying. In that novel, the main character ends up in a relationship with a lower-class man with whom he has nothing in common except their shared homosexuality. This is not a healthy base for a relationship; instead, society needs to be changed so that they can experience full lives within it.

Singer does not say that we need to change society. Or rather, he does not demand the destruction of our values in the same way that Bazarov does. Instead, he asks merely that we readjust our idea of charity and give a little more away. Society, and indeed the world, would be very different if we all started giving to good causes. But our values would not be much changed, though we would almost certainly be better people for it. Bazarov’s ideas retain their radicalism today because they reflect a fundamental impatience to improve things. There are many problems with modern society that I think are in need of urgent redress – wealth inequality, various societal divisions, global warming, mental health, political and institutional distrust, etc etc – but I am not entirely convinced that we are capable of solving them as quickly as their severity demands. Probably we’d make things worse.

Taken over time, everyone giving to charities that actually work to improve people’s lives would actually improve people’s lives. Richer, happier people would build better institutions and feel more engaged in their societies, solving a whole host of problems. Engaging in charitable work will build social cohesion within developed countries too, and deal with some of our own many and varied problems. In short, in a boring way, Singer’s view can be considered gradualist. Our own world is arguably getting better already (I mean discounting climate change and growing wealth inequality, generally we are becoming richer and better educated worldwide). Redistributionist charitable giving (because any giving is redistributional, after all) will only speed things up.

And yet I know that there are Bazarovs among us. One of the main criticisms of Singer’s work is that it reinforces existing systems, rather than proposing new ones. In this view the reason we are all depressed and in unequal circumstances on a burning planet is because our current economic paradigm (capitalism) has brought us to this, and unless we change things up, it will continue to do so. Giving money away doesn’t help this. I am not sure how far I can agree with this view. I like to blame capitalism for everything as much as the next person, but it’s hard to deny the concrete good that charitable giving can achieve. Ideally, we should probably both aim to change the system while supporting people within it.

I myself have an instinctive preference towards local solutions, but it’s hard to defend this view without saying I care more about the people around me than those further away. If we work to engage with the local community, we build strong structures of the sort that can’t quite be quantified – things like trust. We make places better to live in for ourselves and others. And if everyone acted like this, we would all be happier. This is essentially what someone like Wendell Berry is all about. But the difficulty I see with this is that we cannot focus on the local issues without being aware of the global ones. Global news and global charities mean that Pandora’s box has been opened – now we humans have considerably more power, and alas, more responsibility. Too much, in fact, which is why we have failed, and Peter Singer and others yell at us.

Conclusion

Which brings us to the problem. “Famine, Affluence, and Morality” doesn’t really ask that much of us, but it asks more of us than we are probably willing to do. It does not ask us to give up all luxuries (at least the weak form of the argument, which is already asking enough), it still allows us art and music and friendship and fun. But it would deny us much that we have grown used to and think we cannot live without.

A society where we all give, even a little, is clearly a better and more moral society than one where we do not. It is a more responsible one too. We can argue that giving doesn’t work because it doesn’t correctly deal with pernicious systems, or that a local approach is better – but there is one way that we cannot, I think, argue. We cannot say that doing nothing is morally alright. One can try, of course. But it seems that we must, if we are to go to sleep guiltlessly, act.

The things that make life worth living – our friends, our families, our communities, our learning, our experiencing this rich and wondrous world – are not lost by giving. If anything, the loss of excess luxuries, of things we can go without, would only strengthen them all. With fewer distractions we would have a better, more direct, appreciation for friends and partners, have more time for communities and art. It is not a great ask, but at the same time, it is almost impossible. For I am a selfish one: I want to save and invest, I think already about my own descendants, about my own future. I think about all this even though I know I will have a roof over my head whatever happens, whereas the same cannot be said of those who today go to sleep hungry.

I want grand, heroic, solutions – if blowing up a pipeline or two would save the world, I’d be there planting the C4. But I don’t even appear capable of the unflashy and easy solution right in front of me – siphoning off a little of my large-enough pay check.

The world is a mess, but it is our mess, and I am desperately fond of it really. But it can be better. And Singer’s piece offers a clear guide on how to make it so. I cannot despise it for that. We must have things to hope for, and ways of making that hope come to pass.

And perhaps I should be fairer to myself too. All told, I have received my salary twice, and given the job has required me to move abroad, my getting-started expenses have been quite high. Perhaps it’s too early to say whether I will fail to do Singer proud. Time will tell, and one day this blog will shiftily or proudly display the answer.

As for you, readers, how do you sleep at night? Do you give, do you volunteer? If not, what can you say to undermine Singer’s argument?

A Human Adultery Tale: Waves / Wellen by Eduard von Keyserling

Eduard von Keyserling is the latest German writer who publishers seem to have decided needs a revival. This is explained partly by his dates – he was born in 1855, and died in 1919 – which means there has been a flurry of attention upon him anyway thanks to the centenary of his death. My own edition of his late novels, which Waves / Wellen is included among, is a lovingly crafted hardback, filled with notes and the impressions of his contemporaries. The only problem is that it’s written in German. There are also new English translations of his works coming out all the time, Wikipedia suggests, including one of Waves itself which was released in 2019 and translated by Gary Miller.

Keyserling is interesting not only because he happened to die a hundred-ish years ago, though. He’s also the most well-known Baltic German writer. The Baltic Germans were the ethnically German ruling class who once inhabited Latvia and Estonia, a people who have now vanished for a variety of reasons. Keyserling is therefore interesting for representing a now vanished people, a now vanished way of life. But since every writer does that in some sense, we should perhaps look for reasons to read him elsewhere.

Waves, the short novel I finished yesterday, is a tender exploration of the life of a woman who has left her husband. It’s interesting to compare the life of Doralice, the heroine, with the heroines of the 19th century “adultery classics” – Anna Karenina, Emma Bovary, and Effi Briest. While those novels showed adultery ending in unpleasant deaths, here Keyserling tries to ask what life is like instead.

A Woman’s Story

Theodor Fontane, my favourite German novelist of the 19th century, once remarked that women were far more interesting to write about than men. At least at that time, he was on to something. The realist tradition often takes as its spiritual core the battle between the individual and his or her society, and since women in that period saw their lives and freedoms more constrained by society than men did, their lives generally provided a more interesting canvas for writing on than did those of men. It’s just a shame that our occasionally well-intentioned 19th century male authors did not realise that the “interesting lives” of women did not necessarily have to be about adultery or marriage. I forgive them, sometimes, this.

Waves, or Wellen in the original, was published in 1911. Taking place on the Baltic coastline, it centres around two groups of people. The first is Doralice and her partner, Hans Grill. Doralice, who only a year before the story begins had been living as the Countess of Köhne-Jasky in a big castle, abandoned her much older husband to be with Hans, who she met while he was painting her portrait. The second group centres around the aristocratic and respectable Buttlär family – father, mother, the mother’s mother, and various children – most importantly, Lolo, whose fiancé Hilmar joins them a little into the story. These two groups, forced together by the small size of the beach setting, are what leads to the novel’s central conflict.

Eduard von Keyserling is often called an Expressionist. So is Edvard Munch, whose paintings match the slightly expressive mood of Waves.

Doralice, or Countess of Köhne-Jasky?

Doralice, or the Countess of Köhne-Jasky, is our main character. By the time the story begins she has already left her husband for Hans Grill, who is a humble painter. Together they are relaxing in on the coast, making use of her money. But Waves begins not with Doralice, but with Mrs General von Palikow and her daughter, Baroness Buttlär. We are introduced to Doralice through the rumours about her and the fear that she inspires in other characters. Baroness Buttlär is so terrified of the influence this free woman could have upon her children that she forces them to go to bed early so that they might not hear about her past. The adults of the family are “like two fortresses, keeping out all those who do not belong to their kind”. (all translations are mine)

Of course such attempts do not work, and the children are fascinated by the beautiful countess. Waves is a novel about misperceptions, as much as anything else, and for the children their misperception is that this woman is a Romantic heroine. Doralice is far less passionate and far more human than they make her out to be. Even her love for Hans is startlingly normal, which is the problem. At times we are left asking whether she left her husband because of how awful he was, or because of how nice Hans was. Doralice herself sits and dreams of her old life, with its luxury and respectability. In meeting the Buttlärs she is confronted with what she has lost forever.

A Woman’s Identity

What is sad is that all around Doralice are people who, if not bad, are still unwilling to let her develop in her own way. From the words she remembers from her parents – “”when you will be married”” – to her old husband’s habit of saying “we” when he really means “you”, and even to Hans Grill himself (though in a less oppressive form), Doralice’s identity is always being determined by those around her. When she finally has her “freedom”, it is unpleasant. Locked out of society, but still by birth an aristocrat, her days at the beach are marked by idleness and English novels.

This is in stark contrast to the fishermen of the village, who are always hard at work, and to Hans himself. Although it seems unfair, Hans is right when he says: “Work and action – this is what we need in our lives”. For idleness is fallow ground for the imagination, and imagination (especially when English novels are involved) can lead to tragedy.

An Adulteress

When Hilmar, the dashing Lieutenant who is Lola’s husband-to-be, turns up, things take a turn for the dangerous. Where the aristocrats think Doralice is someone to be feared, and the children admire her, Hilmar sees her as someone to seduce. And within the world he lives in, his view is logical. Here, an adulteress is a woman who has shown herself to be a loose woman with loose morals. Within German society at the time there was very little opportunity to say that actually, one can make a mistake in marriage, and that the second love may be more successful than the first. And so, even though he breaks his fiancée’s heart, Hilmar sets about seducing Doralice. He takes her out sailing, he finds her alone while she’s reading… you know, the usual.  

Their meeting while she is reading in the forest is one of the saddest moments in the story. For Doralice is lonely, desperately lonely in her new life. And yet Hilmar, a new face, can only see her as an object.

““I was once told by a young Attaché that he thought it was impolite for him to spend more than a moment alone with a young lady without declaring his love for her””.

Doralice’s words made me laugh, but they also contain a deep sense of the emptiness of even what first appears to be passionate feeling. She inhabits a world – all of the characters inhabit a world – where behaviour is almost completely conditioned by society, and true feelings are repressed so deeply that they may never come out again. Hilmar of course denies that he is here to declare his love. But Doralice knows better – she doesn’t want to play his game. “”All of my ties with the world have been cut. You can either talk about the weather with me, or you can declare your love for me instead.”” Everything is socially determined, and Doralice’s deep loneliness is the result.

More Munch. Both artists, Keyserling and Munch, have an excellent sense for the intensity of loneliness.

Conclusion: Waves, Loves, and Other Things

One of the aspects of Waves that I haven’t been able to talk about yet is the style. Although much of it is written in the same realist style of Fontane or Turgenev, when dealing with passionate emotions Keyserling is not afraid to go into long, intense and very expressive paragraphs. Waves as a title calls to mind Woolf’s The Waves, and the beach setting and style occasionally reminded me of To the Lighthouse. Like Woolf, Keyserling can write a beautiful, thoughtful description when he wants to. In this he is a transitional figure between the realisms of his youth and the modernisms that took over in his late middle age.

And I think that this is an important part of why this story is interesting in the first place, and why it’s worth reading if you can find a translation (or read German). Keyserling really gives Doralice a soul – he lets her feel. She is not as cunning as Emma Bovary, or as passionate as Anna Karenina. Instead, she is a human being who was forced into a marriage and life that were wrong, and who made the brave decision to walk away from it. Her story is the working out of a difficult relationship with the man she left her husband for, rather than one of passion and punishment. And after so many adultery tales, it’s nice to read one that sees the adulteress for what she really is – a human like the rest of us, instead of a lamb to be sacrificed to make a point about society.

That’s why Waves is worth your time. And did I mention it’s under two hundred pages?

“Asya” by Ivan Turgenev

I’ve never liked Turgenev. What I mean is that I’ve never been particularly impressed by him. Among the major Russian writers of the 19th century he bears the fewest marks of the land of his birth. This is fair enough, for a man who corresponded with Theodor Storm and Gustave Flaubert, and spent much of his life in Europe rather than Russia. But it doesn’t change the fact that I’ve always found Turgenev boring. Unlike Dostoevsky, ideas don’t seem to interest him, and though he tries to write passionate characters he can’t actually write characters who ideas seem to interest them either. In On the Eve, we have a classic Turgenev tale of a revolutionary who forgets about his convictions when love appears. Fathers and Sons is not much better.

If I were feeling charitable, I’d say Turgenev’s stories are mostly about the failures of an ideological way of living. His characters are shown, time and again, to fail to achieve their goals because of their own hesitations and inaction. They think they believe something, but it always turns out that they don’t quite know themselves. It’s either love spoiling the young revolutionary, or his own weakness of will. Either way, hesitancy leading to quiet failure is the common thread in Turgenev’s work. No character really feels strongly enough to actually do anything, so opportunities are always being missed and everyone ends up sad. In “Asya”, the novella which I finished this week, the formula is little changed.

“Asya”: an Introduction to the Plot

“Asya” was completed in 1858 and shows Turgenev’s Europeanness rather plainly by being set in Europe. Our narrator and the two other principal characters are Russians, but the action takes place somewhere along the Rhine in the German lands. N. N. is our narrator, and “Asya” is ostensibly a recollection by an older and wiser N. N. of a time in his youth – “First Love”, another Turgenev novella, has a similar structure. Our hero is about twenty five at the time of his story, carefree and travelling “without any goal or plan”. He enjoys observing others, and he has recently attempted a tryst with a widow only to get rebuffed. But we shouldn’t worry for the sake of N. N.’s soul – he says himself that the wound she left “wasn’t very deep”.

In any case, he winds up in the town of Z., on one bank of the Rhine. On the other is another town, L., which can be reached by ferry. Neither of them is on the track usually beaten by Russians holidaying in Europe. Having nothing else to do, one day N. N. heads over there, and to his surprise comes across two other Russian tourists, a seventeen-year-old girl by the name of Asya, and her brother, who goes by Gagin. Gagin is a bad artist but a friendly fellow, and the two men strike up an acquaintance. Asya, however, is a wild thing – and Turgenev is constantly comparing her to a wild animal, or a child – and the narrator isn’t quite sure what to make of her. At one moment she’s enthusiastic and buoyant, at another she dresses demurely and shuns contact. One thing N. N. is certain of, however – she’s not Gagin’s real brother.

Well, he’s right. He overhears her making a confession of love to her “brother”, but it turns out she’s not actually his secret lover – as we might suppose – but actually his half-sister. She was born to one of the servants employed by Gagin’s father shortly after his wife died. Gagin for a long time never knew his sister’s identity, and her mother kept her out of the big house where the aristocrats lived. However, once her mother dies Gagin’s father took Asya into his own house, and on his deathbed he admits to Gagin that she’s actually his sister. So anyway, that’s how the two of them got to know each other.

Gagin and his sister go to Petersburg soon after, and he puts her into a boarding school – after all, he can’t keep her with him. Then, he decides he’s sick of work and wants to travel, so the two of them head to Europe for a wander, as you do.

Social Monster or Victim – Who or What is Asya?

The Russian name “Asya” is a shortened version of quite a lot of names. I know an Anastasia who uses that name, and an Arsenia. Turgenev’s Asya is, however, an Anna – which is quite unusual. It is a simple example of her rather confused, mixed identity. She is half aristocrat, half peasant – not just by parentage, but also by the amount of time she has spent in each milieu. If she stayed in Russia she would immediately be identified as not belonging, but in Europe there’s a little more leeway for her, a chance to determine her own identity. Turgenev plays up her unnaturalness by comparing her to a “little beast” and a “boy” on various occasions. N. N. notices in Asya something unnatural, though he’s unable to put his finger on what until Gagin tells him.

Asya is playing a role – she is trying to be the aristocrat she isn’t, and the effort is draining. Just like Maslova in Tolstoy’s Resurrection, because Asya is the product of two social groups she struggles to sit easily in either of them, causing great spiritual strain – like Maslova, she also struggles with having had an absent mother in her life. N. N. once comes across her reading a French novel and complains of her taste, not realising what her reading means to her: “She wanted to be no worse than other ladies, and so she gave herself to books”. Later, she desperately asks him “Tell me what I should read! Tell me what I should do!”

Youth, Love, and a Complete Inability to Do Anything

Unsurprisingly, after a few days together both Asya and N. N. fall hopelessly in love with each other. Asya, a girl who “doesn’t experience emotions by halves”, arranges a rendez-vous between them. They meet, but N. N. has already spoken with Gagin about it, and he comes prepared to play a role himself. She wants him to marry her, and he refuses. He doesn’t even say what he feels for her. Shortly afterwards, she and Gagin disappear, never to be seen again.

The narrator’s reluctance to marry her stems from his class prejudices, from the need for respectability. It also stems from his word of honour, given to Gagin, that he wouldn’t let his emotions get the better of him. But once Asya has gone he realises his love for her and feels that it is stronger than anything else. However, he had missed his opportunity, and he will never have another such chance again. He grows old, feeling sad and regretting what he lost.

Honour, class, are apparently left worthless when love has escaped our grasp. But Turgenev’s novella tells us all this with enough irony to keep us guessing. First of all, we might think of the structure – why is N. N. telling this story? He says at the end “that I didn’t feel sad about her for too long”, that probably she’d have been a bad wife. At the beginning of his story he talks of youth as like a “biscuit that we think is hearty bread”, and says that like flowers we should never bloom too long. But I think his words are ultimately a kind of self-deception. The man is alone, living on his memories, and perhaps worth feeling sorry for. As he says, “happiness has no tomorrow”, and he missed his “today”.

Location and Literature

“Asya” doesn’t strike me as a particularly complex story, but there are a few things going on behind the scenes that are interesting enough to mention. I quite like the idea of the two towns, separated by the river. The crossing from one end to another is a nice visual metaphor for what happens to N. N. as he enters Asya’s world. I also like the way Turgenev uses literary references in “Asya”. We have Gretchen (Goethe’s Faust), Tatyana (Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin), and the Lorelei myth, which has featured in lots of poems by various Germans including Goethe and Heine. The Tatyana one is quite interesting. Asya says “I would have liked to be Tatyana” – a woman who loved a man who didn’t love her back, and then rejected him once he did. The comparison with Pushkin’s heroine ties Asya to her homeland (something N. N. remarks on elsewhere, saying she’s the most Russian creature he’s ever seen), but it also makes her a little immature for wanting to be a tragic heroine. Although N. N. is mostly to blame for the failure of the relationship, Asya herself is not without fault for her decision to appoint mysterious rendez-vous and make overly harsh demands of N. N. – her final note said if he’d said he’d loved her she would have stayed. So much for second chances or taking things slowly!

This tragic nature makes us think the story will end with a melodramatic death scene. Indeed, there’s a frightening moment when N. N. goes searching around the town for her, and it seems certain she’s about to take her own life (as Lorelei did, by jumping into the river). It turns out that she didn’t, and just went home instead. While Turgenev can’t escape traditional descriptions of women or boring men he is at least wise enough to know that not every story involving a girl needs to end with suicide.

Conclusion

There’s no doubt Turgenev was a sensitive soul. He wrote some beautiful nature passages which I had to force myself to analyse in my first year at university, but in some sense that’s about it. His characters are limp and forgettable. I don’t actually remember Fathers and Sons, though I’ve read it twice. I only remember Bazarov because he’s significant in Russian literary history, not because he actually shines in his own story. “Asya” was very okay. While it’s true I was surprised by it in a few places, at the end of the day it’s just another story about two young people who fall in love and end up unhappier for their trouble. There are a few interesting ideas in here, but not really enough to make this story particularly exciting. In the end, “Asya” is as limp as its narrator. And that’s just doesn’t make for an awesome reading experience.

Still, it’s a nice story to have in my mental repertoire. There are some worthwhile comparisons to be made between Asya and Lelenka in Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaya’s “Boarding School Girl” – both are almost the same age, and both of them are faced with the challenges of forming their own identity against the identity that society wants to force upon them. But Turgenev is not particularly interested in the Woman Question, and anyway I can’t write about him on that topic in my exam because he’s not a woman to begin with.

If you’re out here looking for some Turgenev to read that’s not Fathers and Sons, I’d recommend Rudin over “Asya”. It’s not too long but it’s much more interesting. But if you have nothing else to read except “Asya”, then be my guest. After all, if you’re dying of thirst then even the lukewarm bottle of water you left out on the table overnight will do for a drink.