A Lear of the Steppes, etc

A Lear of the Steppes, etc.

An examination of A Lear of the Steppes is of especial interest to authors, as the story is so exquisite in its structure, so overwhelming in its effects, that it exposes the artificiality of the great majority of the clever works of art in fiction. A Lear of the Steppes is great in art because it is a living organic whole, springing from the deep roots of life itself; and the innumerable works of art that are fabricated and pasted together from an ingenious planworks that do not grow from the inevitability of thingsappear at once insignificant or false in comparison. In examining the art, the artist will note that Turgenevs method of introducing his story is a lesson in sincerity. Harlov, the Lear of the story, is brought forward with such force on the threshold that all eyes resting on his figure[vi] cannot but follow his after movements. And absolute conviction gained, all the artists artful after-devices and subtle presentations and side-lights on the story are not apparent under the straightforward ease and the seeming carelessness with which the narrator describes his boyish memories. Then, Harlovs household, his two daughters, and a crowd of minor characters, are brought before us as persons in the tragedy, and we see that all these people are living each from the innate laws of his being, apparently independently of the authors scheme. This conviction, that the author has no pre-arranged plan, convinces us that in the story we are living a piece of life: here we are verily plunging into life itself. And the story goes on flowing easily and naturally till the people of the neighbourhood, the peasants, the woods and fields around, are known by us as intimately as is any neighbourhood in life. Suddenly a breakthe tragedy is upon us. Suddenly the terrific forces that underlie human life, even the meanest of human lives, burst on us astonished and breathless, precisely as a tragedy comes up to the surface and bursts on us in real life: everybody runs about dazed, annoyed, futile; we watch the other people sustaining their own individuality[vii] inadequately in the face of the monstrous new events which go their fatal way logically, events which leave the people huddled and useless and gasping. And destruction having burst out of life, life slowly returns to its old grooveswith a difference to us, the difference in the relation of people one to another that a death or a tragedy always leaves to the survivors. Marvellous in its truth is Turgenevs analysis of the situation after Harlovs death, marvellous is the simple description of the neighbourhoods attitude to the Harlov family, and marvellous is the lifting of the scene on the after-life of Harlovs daughters. In the pages (pages 140, 141, 146, 147) on these women, Turgenev flashes into the readers mind an extraordinary sense of the inevitability of these womens natures, of their innate growth fashioning their after-lives as logically as a beech puts out beech-leaves and an oak oak-leaves. Through Turgenevs single glimpse at their fortunes one knows the whole intervening fifteen years; he has carried us into a new world: yet it is the old world; one needs to know no more. It is life arbitrary but inevitable, life so clarified by art that it is absolutely interpreted; but life with all the sense of mystery that nature breathes around it in its ceaseless growth. ......Buy Now (To Read More)

Product details

Ebook Number: 52642
Author: Turgenev, Ivan Sergeevich
Release Date: Jul 26, 2016
Format: eBook
Language: English

Contributors

Translator: Garnett, Constance, 1861-1946