Not a Single Tear of Hallowed Love Is Fruitless

Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev · Mystic Verse and Insights Series · 7 pages

Seven pages presenting the last two paragraphs of Turgenev's Fathers and Sons (1862) in Charles James Hogarth's translation, framed by an editorial introduction to the novel and by Ernest Rhys's 1921 introduction reproduced in full. Repin's 1874 portrait of Turgenev appears part way through, and the whole is prefaced by Sir Philip Sidney's line about a tale which holds children from play and old men from the chimney corner. The compiler is named as Carol Shelbourne.

The framing matter explains who is being buried. Bazarov is described as a young provincial doctor, habitually eristic and emotionally vacuous, more a cynic than a seeker after wisdom — the character through whom Turgenev, in Rhys's phrase, made a movement into a man and gave the word Nihilism its currency. Rhys records how badly the book was received on both sides: the portrait resented in Russia as a cold travesty, the retired aristocrats fairing no better, and the bitterest criticism coming from the revolutionaries, even though Turgenev declared himself at one with Bazarov in nearly all his ideas and called him his favourite child. Bazarov dies of typhus contracted at a post-mortem. The pages that matter are the last two. In a remote corner of Russia lies a small, neglected country cemetery — weeds over the fences, mouldering wooden crosses, displaced stone paths, sheep wandering over the tombs — and in it one grave that no man molests and no animal treads on, railed in iron with two young fir trees at head and foot. Two aged and decrepit people come from the neighbouring manor house, supporting one another, kneel at the railing and weep, dust the stone, lay a sprig of fir on it and offer a last petition. The closing question is the one the file is named for: are those tears and prayers fruitless, is that hallowed, selfless love wholly unavailing — answered with no, and a thousand times no, on the ground that the flowers blooming there speak of the eternal calm of nature as an image of the Eternal Reconciliation and of the Life which shall have no end.

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