Enough Page #3

"Enough" is a novel by Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev that explores themes of existential discontent and the search for meaning in life. The story revolves around the character of a young man, who grapples with feelings of dissatisfaction and frustration as he navigates his relationships and societal expectations. Turgenev delves into the complexities of human emotions, the struggles of the individual against societal norms, and the quest for personal fulfillment. The narrative combines lyrical prose with deep psychological insight, illustrating Turgenev's mastery in portraying the inner lives of his characters and their responses to the challenges they face.

• Novel

								

Shakespeare could be born again he would have no cause to retract his
Hamlet, his Lear. His searching glance would discover nothing new in
human life: still the same motley picture--in reality so little
complex--would unroll before him in its terrifying sameness. The same
credulity and the same cruelty, the same lust of blood, of gold, of
filth, the same vulgar pleasures, the same senseless sufferings in the
name... why, in the name of the very same shams that Aristophanes jeered
at two thousand years ago, the same coarse snares in which the
many-headed beast, the multitude, is caught so easily, the same workings
of power, the same traditions of slavishness, the same innateness of
falsehood--in a word, the same busy squirrel's turning in the same old
unchanged wheel.... Again Shakespeare would set Lear repeating his
cruel: 'None doth offend,' which in other words means: 'None is without
offence.' and he too would say 'enough!' he too would turn away. One
thing perhaps, may be: in contrast to the gloomy tragic tyrant Richard,
the great poet's ironic genius would want to paint a newer type, the
tyrant of to-day, who is almost ready to believe in his own virtue, and
sleeps well of nights, or finds fault with too sumptuous a dinner at the
very time when his half-crushed victims try to find comfort in picturing
him, like Richard, haunted by the phantoms of those he has ruined...

But to what end?

Why prove--picking out, too, and weighing words, smoothing and rounding
off phrases--why prove to gnats that they are really gnats?

XV

But art?... beauty?... Yes, these are words of power; they are more
powerful, may be, than those I have spoken before. Venus of Milo is, may
be, more real than Roman law or the principles of 1789. It may be
objected--how many times has the retort been heard!--that beauty itself
is relative; that by the Chinese it is conceived as quite other than the
European's ideal.... But it is not the relativity of art confounds me;
its transitoriness, again its brevity, its dust and ashes--that is what
robs me of faith and courage. Art at a given moment is more powerful,
may be, than nature; for in nature is no symphony of Beethoven, no
picture of Ruysdäel, no poem of Goethe, and only dull-witted pedants or
disingenuous chatterers can yet maintain that art is the imitation of
nature. But at the end of all, nature is inexorable; she has no need to
hurry, and sooner or later she takes her own. Unconsciously and
inflexibly obedient to laws, she knows not art, as she knows not
freedom, as she knows not good; from all ages moving, from all ages
changing, she suffers nothing immortal, nothing unchanging.... Man is
her child; but man's work--art--is hostile to her, just because it
strives to be unchanging and immortal. Man is the child of nature; but
she is the universal mother, and she has no preferences; all that exists
in her lap has arisen only at the cost of something else, and must in
its time yield its place to something else. She creates destroying, and
she cares not whether she creates or she destroys--so long as life be
not exterminated, so long as death fall not short of his dues.... And so
just as serenely she hides in mould the god-like shape of Phidias's Zeus
as the simplest pebble, and gives the vile worm for food the priceless
verse of Sophokles. Mankind, 'tis true, jealously aid her in her work of
of slaughter; but is it not the same elemental force, the force of
nature, that finds vent in the fist of the barbarian recklessly smashing
the radiant brow of Apollo, in the savage yells with which he casts in
the fire the picture of Apelles? How are we, poor folks, poor artists to
be a match for this deaf, dumb, blind force who triumphs not even in her
conquests, but goes onward, onward, devouring all things? How stand
against those coarse and mighty waves, endlessly, unceasingly moving
upward? How have faith in the value and dignity of the fleeting images,
that in the dark, on the edge of the abyss, we shape out of dust for an
instant?

XVI

All this is true,... but only the transient is beautiful, said Schiller;
and nature in the incessant play of her rising, vanishing forms is not
averse to beauty. Does not she carefully deck the most fleeting of her
children--the petals of the flowers, the wings of the butterfly--in the
fairest hues, does she not give them the most exquisite lines? Beauty
needs not to live for ever to be eternal--one instant is enough for her.
Yes; that may be is true--but only there where personality is not, where
man is not, where freedom is not; the butterfly's wing spoiled appears
again and again for a thousand years as the same wing of the same
butterfly; there sternly, fairly, impersonally necessity completes her
circle... but man is not repeated like the butterfly, and the work of
his hands, his art, his spontaneous creation once destroyed is lost for
ever.... To him alone is it vouchsafed to create... but strange and
dreadful it is to pronounce: we are creators... for one hour--as there
was, in the tale, a caliph for an hour. In this is our pre-eminence--and
our curse; each of those 'creators' himself, even he and no other, even
this I is, as it were, constructed with certain aim, on lines
laid down beforehand; each more or less dimly is aware of his
significance, is aware that he is innately something noble, eternal--and
lives, and must live in the moment and for the moment.[1] Sit in the mud,
my friend, and aspire to the skies! The greatest among us are just those
who more deeply than all others have felt this rooted contradiction;
though if so, it may be asked, can such words be used as greatest, great?

[Footnote 1: One cannot help recalling here Mephistopheles's words
to Faust:--

  'Er (Gott) findet sich in einem ewgen Glanze,
   Uns hat er in die Finsterniss gebracht--
   Und euch taugt einzig Tag und Nacht.'
                                        --AUTHOR'S NOTE.]

XVII

What is to be said of those to whom, with all goodwill, one cannot apply
such terms, even in the sense given them by the feeble tongue of man?
What can one say of the ordinary, common, second-rate, third-rate
toilers--whatsoever they may be--statesmen, men of science,
artists--above all, artists? How conjure them to shake off their numb
indolence, their weary stupor, how draw them back to the field of
battle, if once the conception has stolen into their brains of the
nullity of everything human, of every sort of effort that sets before
itself a higher aim than the mere winning of bread? By what crowns can
they be lured for whom laurels and thorns alike are valueless? For what
end will they again face the laughter of 'the unfeeling crowd' or 'the
judgment of the fool'--of the old fool who cannot forgive them from
turning away from the old bogies--of the young fool who would force them
to kneel with him, to grovel with him before the new, lately discovered

								Rate this book:0.0 / 0 votes