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The Influence of Turgenev on Henry James

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2017

Daniel Lerner
Daniel Lerner*
Affiliation:
New York University
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Extract

This paper studies the influence of Turgenev on Henry James through three main aspects. First, their relationship is traced from the earliest contact of young Henry with Turgenev's works through their residence together in Paris during James's “French Year” (1875–1876). The second section takes up at this point and discusses their basic agreement in aesthetic and theory of the novel. Many of their views were in the air at the time, and the relation of James to other writers has been treated competently elsewhere. This section is chiefly concerned with showing the peculiar organization of particular beliefs — the aesthetic — which James and Turgenev shared and which distinguished them from their contemporaries, particularly the Paris circle in which they lived. The final section illustrates the second by discussion of specific novels in which James borrowed from Turgenev and shows how he used Turgenev in developing his art.

Type
Research Article
Information
Slavonic Yearbook American Series , Volume 1 , 1941 , pp. 28 - 54
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies 1941

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References

1 See Kelley, Cornelia P., The Early Development of Henry James (Urbana, 1930)Google Scholar. That study limits itself chronologically (to 1871) and discusses all influences. Conversely, this paper is chronologically complete (even emphasizes the later period) and limits itself to only one influence. Aside from details, the studies do not overlap.

2 Yarmolinsky, Avrahm, Turgenev — the man — his art — his age (New York, 1926), ch. XXVGoogle Scholar. See also: Noodt, U. H., L'occidentalisme d'Ivan Turgenev (Paris, 1922)Google Scholar; Kaun, A., “Turgenev the European,” Books Abroad (1933), VII, 274 Google Scholar.

For a brilliant statement of the scope James comprehended in the term “cosmopolitan,” see his Letters (New York, 1920), ed. Percy Lubbock, I, 72–73.

3 Burr, Anna R. (ed.), Alice James — her brothers — her journal (New York, 1934), p. 10 Google Scholar.

4 “The best of one's education … had begun to proceed almost altogether by the aid of the Revue des Deux Mondes, a periodical that supplied to us then and for several years after (or again I can but speak for myself) all that was finest in the furniture and fittings of romance.” Notes of a son and brother (New York, 1914), p. 86.

5 Letters of Henry James, I, 45.

6 James, Henry (ed.), Letters of William James (Boston, 1926), p. 185 Google Scholar. This letter reflects the Jameses’ admiration for Turgenev's art: “It is the amount of life which a man feels that makes you value his mind, and Turgénieff has a sense of worlds within worlds whose existence is unsuspected by the vulgar.”

7 Ibid., 182.

8 James, Henry, Partial Portraits (London, 1919), p. 295 Google Scholar.

9 See C. P. Kelley, op. cit., p. 196.

10 Letters ojHenry James, I, 41.

11 “Some member of the family was always either ‘there’ (‘there’ being of course generally Europe, but particularly and pointedly Paris) or going there or coming back from there.” A small boy and others (London, 1913), p. 60.

12 Letters oj Henry James, I, 39.

13 Ibid., p. 102.

14 Roberts, Morris, Henry James's Criticism (Cambridge, 1929), pp. 39–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

15 Letters of Henry James, I, 49.

16 See Halperine-Kaminsky, E. (ed.), Tourguénejf and his French circle (London, 1898)Google Scholar.

17 Atlantic Monthly (January, 1884), LXII, 425.

18 Partial Portraits, p. 300. That James's intention was invidious is clear from his ironic relation of Turgenev to leading Naturalists, viz.: “It is much to the honor of Flaubert, to my sense, that he appreciated Turgenev.” —“Turgenev, who, as I say, understood everything, understood Zola too.”

19 Ibid., p. 292.

20 Letters of Henry James, I. 55.

21 James, Henry, French Poets and Novelists (London, 1919), 220 Google Scholar.

22 Ibid., p. 216.

23 Partial Portraits, 304.

24 Henry James, “Paris Letter,” New York Tribune, May 13, 1876.

25 Halperine-Kaminsky (ed.), op. cit., p. 92. Of Goncourt's La Fille Elise, Turgenev wrote: “Heavens! what mud, what hospital stench, what futile repetition, what a mania for sickly psychology,” p. 179.

26 Quoted by Yarmolinsky, op. cit., p. 101.

27 Quoted by Maurois, André, Tourgéniev (Paris, 1931), p. 207 Google Scholar.

28 Quoted by Moore, George, Impressions and Opinions (London, 1891), p. 67 Google Scholar.

29 Quoted by Holt, Henry, Garrulities of an Octogenarian Editor (Boston, 1923), p. 204 Google Scholar.

30 French Poets and Novelists, p. 217. (The page of each subsequent reference to this volume will be enclosed in parentheses after each quotation.)

31 Colum, Mary M., From These Roots (New York, 1937), p. 226 Google Scholar. Cf. Hueffer, F. M., Henry James (London, 1913), p. 163 Google Scholar.

32 The substance of H. G. Wells’ complaint against James in Boon is just that he has become the novelist's St Peter, that the candidate for artistic immortality must “know what Henry James is doing, and what he is not doing.”

33 Preface to The Tragic Muse, p. 87. All quotations from James’ Prefaces are from the volume edited by Blackmur, R. P., The Art of the Novel (New York, 1934)Google Scholar.

34 Maurois, op. cit., p. 201.

35 James, Henry, Confidence (Boston, 1880), p. 38 Google ScholarPubMed.

36 Maurois: “Il se contente d'un symmétrie presque archaïque: à la femme fatale (Varvara, Irène) s'oppose la femme pure (Lisa, Tatiana); à l'artiste, l'homme pratique … ,” op. cit., p. 203.

37 Preface to The Spoils of Poynton, p. 130.

38 Preface to The Princess Casamassima, p. 72.

39 Preface to The Tragic Muse, p. 80.

40 Maurois: “Les romans de Tourgéniev se passent toujours dans un moment dc crise,” op. cit., p. 202. Cf. Yvor Winters: “This moral sense, this crisis in history, will prove, I believe, to be the source of the essential problem of James1 art,” A merican Review (October, 1937), IX, no. 4, p. 490. See also Preface to The American, p. 23.

41 Quoted by Bourget, Paul, Essais de psychologie contemporaine (Paris, 1912), p. 195 Google Scholar.

42 In the Preface to The Ambassadors, 320–324, James tells how his use of the ficelle developed.

43 Mary Colum, op. cit., p. 341.

44 Partial Portraits, p. 313.

45 Ibid., p. 316.

46 Preface to The Portrait of a Lady, p. 44 (my italics).

47 André Mazon (ed.), “Manuscrits parisiens d'Ivan Tourguénev,” Bibliothèqne de l'Institut français de Leningrad (Paris, 1930). Also, Revue des Etudes Slaves V (1925), 85–112.

48 See Van Doren, Carl, The American Novel (New York, 1940), p. 169 Google Scholar, for support of this writer's belief that Turgenev alone integrated in one personality the separate aspects which James found admirable in other novelists.

49 The Tragic Muse, II, 350. References to James's novels are to the New York Edition.

50 Preface to Roderick Hudson, p. 12.

51 Turgenev was profoundly interested in differences in national morality and mentality. He had developed a theory and planned a novel which was to exhibit these differences exhaustively. See Yarmolinsky, op. cit., p. 323.

52 Preface to The Portrait of a Lady, p. 51.

53 Ibid., p. 48.

54 Beach, Joseph Warren, The Method of Henry James (New York, 1916), p. 176 Google Scholar.

55 James, review of Virgin Soil, The Nation (April 26, 1877), XXIV, 252–254. The quotations that follow are all from these pages.

56 Preface to The Princess Casamassima, p. 72.

57 Turgenev, Virgin Soil (London, 1911), p. 168.

58 Ibid., p. 85. I am deeply indebted to Professor Oscar Cargill, of New York University, who pointed out to me the full symbolic value of the three women in determining Hyacinth's suicide.

59 Beach, op. cit., p. 214.

60 Ibid., p. 266.

61 Mary Colum, op. cit., p. 309.

62 Preface to The American, p. 37.

63 Preface to Roderick Hudson, p. 14.

64 The Ambassadors, Book V, ch. 2 (my italics).

65 Preface to The Ambassadors, p. 315.

66 Preface to The Princess Casamassima, p. 65.