THE TURGENEV FAMILY (179 pp.)—V. Zhitova—Roy ($2.75).
TURGENEV: A LIFE (328 pp.)—David Magarshack—Grove ($6).
"[In Russia], the habits of slavery are too deeply implanted." says a Russian in Ivan Turgenev's novel Smoke. "We must have a master in everything . . . This master is mostly a living person, but sometimes a so-called movement gets the upper hand . . . Why and on the strength of what reasons we [Russians] become slaves is a mystery, but such, it seems, is our nature."
Such, too, was the nature of Novelist Turgenev (Fathers and Sons, On the Eve, Rudin), with the vital difference that he spent a lifetime analyzing and fighting it. Too gentle to be as dogmatic as the proud Tolstoy, too rebellious to accept the resignation of Dostoevsky, Turgenev made his place in literature as a genius who dwelt in a house divided against itself, half slave and half free.
Two new books will be invaluable keys both to Turgenev and to the "mystery" of Russian slavishness. The Turgenev Family, an eyewitness report written in 1884 by Varvara Zhitova, adopted daughter of Turgenev's mother, is like the beginning of a psychiatrist's case history: it deals with the patient's heredity and early environment. Turgenev: A Life, by David Magarshack. a competent. Russian-born biographer (Chekhov: A Life), is more a full-dress analysis of his great artistic achievement and personal unhappiness.
Mother Dictator. Turgenev was the slave of a mother who had herself suffered all the ignominies of enslavement. As a young girl, she was abused with "drunken violence" by her stepfather until she was 16 years old. She ran away and took refuge in the house of a "severe and miserly" uncle, who, says Biographer Magarshack, threatened not only to throw her out of his house but also to disinherit her. But when he died, she inherited his vast estates, married Turgenev's father—and set out to get her own back for the miseries she had suffered.
Father Turgenev was a landowner who spent his life chasing women; he kept out of the home and let his wife "do anything she liked." What she liked, according to Magarshack, was to make her household resemble the Czarist government as closely as possible. She gave her serfs court titles: "Maid of Honor," "Court Chamberlain." When her family physician came to treat her little adopted daughter, he was told: "Remember! If you don't cure her . . . Siberia!" Mother Turgenev discouraged marriage among her serfs because she liked their undivided attention for herself, so her women bore illegitimate children instead and either drowned them at birth in the estate lake or brought them up secretly for years in locked rooms. "A maid who did not offer her a cup of tea in the proper way was sent off to some remote village and perhaps separated from her family forever; gardeners who failed to prevent the plucking of a tulip [were] flogged . . ."