Turgenev's Aesthetic and Western Realism

Abstract

IN THE PRESENT paper I seek to summarize Turgenev's aesthetic ideas with a view to their application in his art, and confront them with the ideas of those of his Western contemporaries with whom his name is most often associated: the group of realists who in the 1870s used to gather around Flaubert on Sunday afternoons. A catalog of them is given in Guy de Maupassant's etude, Gustave Flaubert.' The more important of them were (in the order in which they appear in Maupassant's sketch) Hippolyte Taine, Alphonse Daudet, iAmile Zola, Edmond de Goncourt. I add one name not listed by Maupassant (who, of course, was one of those present), Henry James. Significantly, Turgenev himself is listed as the very first arrival. Shared artistic preferences were, no doubt, the principal reason why these writers sought each other's company. Paul Bourget, who points this out,2 also draws attention to some more general attitudes shared by Turgenev and his friends-a certain cosmopolitanism, a thoroughgoing pessimism and taedium vitae,3 and a tendency toward analyticism and psychological introspection. As to the last trait, both Turgenev and Flaubert would have themselves refused to acknowledge it.4 But the evidence is on hand-Turgenev wrote his Diary of A Superfluous Man and other similar pieces long before Dostoevskij produced his Notes fromt the Underground. There are some differences also. For example, Flaubert is a determined opponent of postivism (and