Asya by Ivan Turgenev

First published: 1858 (English translation, 1877)

Type of work: Psychological realism

Time of work: The mid-nineteenth century

Locale: Germany, a small town on the Rhine

Principal Characters:

• N.N., the narrator, a middle-aged Russian gentleman, who relates certain events of his youth
• Gagin, a Russian gentleman and dilettante artist, sojourning in Germany
• Asya, Gagin’s half sister

The Novel

N.N., a lonely bachelor in his forties, tells the story of the lost love of his youth, twenty years ago. This is his story. A Russian gentleman in his twenties with ample private means, he has been vacationing in a picturesque small town on the Rhine, where he meets by chance two fellow Russians, a young artist named Gagin and a girl of seventeen called Asya (a diminutive of Anna), whom Gagin introduces as his sister. N.N., recovering from an unsuccessful flirtation with a young widow, feels ready for a new relationship. Apparently the only Russians in town, the three soon become close friends.

N.N.’s curiosity is aroused by Asya. She has a mysterious, untamed, elfin quality, now skittish and shy, now embarrassingly forward. Her manners and class markings seem quite different from Gagin’s. The narrator imagines himself to be falling in love with her, but at the same time he is frequently irritated by her unconventional behavior. He suspects that she is not really Gagin’s sister at all, and the belief that he is being deceived irritates him all the more.

This early mystery is soon resolved, however, when Gagin, in a reminiscence, tells his and Asya’s story. Asya is his illegitimate half sister, the result of a liaison between his father and a serf woman some years after the early death of Gagin’s mother. When his father died, Gagin, a young man in his twenties, found himself responsible for this wild creature, to whom he was bound both by ties of blood and by the dying words of his father, who had “bequeathed” her to him, revealing her true identity for the first time. She had been brought up entirely in the country, first by her mother as a peasant, and then, after her mother’s death, by her father as a gentlewoman. After his father’s death, Gagin had placed her for some years in a finishing school in St. Petersburg, and they had only just come abroad together.

The romance between N.N. and Asya continues to develop, reaching a climax on a perfect day marked by a long walk by themselves in a vineyard, followed by an evening of dancing to Gagin’s accompaniment on the piano. The next day, however, Asya is strangely pensive and withdrawn, and N.N. finds himself unable to fathom her feelings or to sort out his own. The following day, he receives a summons from Asya. Gagin, however, intercepts N.N. with the startling announcement that his half sister loves him. She had spent a sleepless night, ultimately confessing her plight to Gagin with much sobbing. She is convinced, however, that N.N. despises her, presumably for her illegitimacy and peasant blood, and she had begged Gagin to take her away at once. Instead, Gagin has decided to talk to N.N. first, for to disappear would be tragic, if it turned out that N.N. also loved her. N.N. is thus forced into a difficult position: He must either propose marriage immediately or break off the relationship. The situation has suddenly become far more serious than he had anticipated, and once again his response is vexation.

In the denouement, N.N. has a secret meeting with Asya, arranged by her. At first, he draws her to him, but then abruptly he pulls back, saying that it is wrong of them to meet without her brother’s knowledge, and she runs away. Later that night, she returns, but not before N.N. and Gagin have worried about her, and the next day N.N. learns that Gagin and his sister have left town without leaving any forwarding address. Now N.N. is filled with remorse and regret that he did not declare his love for her when he had the opportunity, but it is too late. He tries to follow them, to London and beyond, but in vain. All trace of Asya and her brother is lost, and now, twenty years later, N.N. looks back philosophically on this poignant episode of his youth. He suspects that it was all for the best: He would probably not have been happy with Asya.

The Characters

The narrator, N.N., is a familiar figure in Ivan Turgenev’s fiction, similar to the heroes of several other works, such as Pervaya lyubov (1860; First Love, 1884) or Veshniye vody (1872; Spring Floods, 1874; better known as The Torrents of Spring, 1897). The character has obvious autobiographical elements. His age, sex, social position, and “philosophy” are more or less identical with Turgenev’s own, but like other quasi-autobiographical characters, he is not endowed with the author’s literary talent and success. Private means, from estate (and serf) ownership, supply the resources so that these young men can devote themselves entirely to private life; concerns over money seldom obtrude themselves. Like Asya, several of Turgenev’s other stories take place outside Russia, particularly at spas in Germany (where Turgenev himself also spent much of his time until 1870), thus setting them apart from the Russian social concerns Turgenev evoked in such novels as Nakanune (1860; On the Eve, 1871) and Ottsy i deti (1862; Fathers and Sons,1867). Asya’s ambiguous situation, suspended by illegitimacy between two classes, echoes the position of Turgenev’s own illegitimate daughter, Polina, and also that of the illegitimate daughter of his uncle, who was actually called Asya.

N.N. is also typical of other Turgenev heroes. He exhibits a certain sexual fecklessness, an inability to move beyond the early stages of courtship. When the woman, contrary to conventional expectations, takes the initiative in the affair, the skittish male takes to his heels, often evoking some “moral” rationalization for his craven flight. With the episode safely in the past, he then can use it to infuse his life with an aura of nostalgic poetry.

Except for his artistic interests, Gagin is almost a carbon copy of N.N.The reader, however, has no view of Gagin’s inner world. Turgenev stresses the softness and sweetness of the artist’s nature, which he identifies as a national and class trait, and Gagin himself attributes his lack of progress as an artist to his “cursed Slavic lack of discipline.” He does, however, take seriously his responsibilities to Asya.

Asya herself is intended to produce an enigmatic impression; the puzzle of her social origin, solved early in the story, only partly solves the riddle of her character. She is more direct and uninhibited than the ladies of her brother’s social class, but the key to Asya lies in the clash between her naturally outgoing, passionate nature and her pride, which fears rejection and humiliation at the hands of those whose legitimacy and class status are beyond question.

Critical Context

In general, Russian criticism of Turgenev’s time, more oriented as it was toward social commentary than artistic analysis, paid far more attention to the series of topical novels Turgenev produced during this period in his career, such as Rudin (1856; Dimitri Roudine, 1873; better known as Rudin, 1947), On the Eve, and Fathers and Sons than to such novellas as Asya and First Love, which deal with purely private themes. (In contrast, with the exception of Fathers and Sons, late twentieth century readers often prefer these shorter works to the novels in which the topical material, much of it now outdated, is not always well integrated with the plot.) Asya, however, was something of an exception, for the leading radical critic and ideologue, Nikolai Chernyshevsky, used it as the text for a famous article entitled “The Russian at the Rendez-vous” in 1962. Chernyshevsky’s conclusion is that the Russian gentry, typified by N.N. and Gagin, are too lazy, shiftless, and incompetent to provide leadership for the country, which is entering a new era of progress and social change. This article became one of the classic texts of the radical Left.

Though many admired the story’s psychological subtlety and lyricism, other critics have found the book fundamentally flawed. The character of Asya herself strikes some readers as contrived and artificial. The story’s greatest weakness, however, may be a consequence of the first-person narrative. To a modern reader, perhaps standing on Sigmund Freud’s shoulders, it seems clear that N.N.’s romance with Asya did not succeed because the narrator did not want it to succeed. Throughout his account of his encounters with Asya, he repeatedly expresses annoyance, irritation, and vexation with her behavior. He does not want the responsibility of a deep, lasting relationship, and he wriggles free from Asya’s (and Gagin’s) snares. There is, therefore, something spurious about his affectation of anguish and despair at the loss of Asya, his pursuit to London, and the aura of nostalgia that he casts over the memory. What is not clear, however, is the extent to which Turgenev has penetrated his character’s rationalizations. The emotions the narrator claims to have experienced seem somewhat false, an effort at self-deception, but since the author has no voice other than the narrator’s, the reader finds it difficult to know whether Turgenev sees through his creature’s illusions or actually shares them.

On reading Asya, Leo Tolstoy wrote in his diary, “Asya is rubbish.” Hedid not explain this harsh judgment, which may have been motivated by the jealousies of his personal relationship with Turgenev, but the story Semeynoye schastye (1859; Family Happiness, 1888), which he wrote soon afterward, clearly in some sense replies to Turgenev. Though as much a bachelor as Turgenev at that time, Tolstoy resolved in Family Happiness to do two things Turgenev never dared to do. He would present a first-person, reminiscential narrative of a romance from the woman’s point of view, and he would carry the romance to the altar and beyond, into the notably un-Turgenevian region of married life and babies.

Bibliography

Annenkov, Pavel Vasilevich. “The Literary Type of the Weak Man: Apropos of Turgenev’s Story ‘Asja,’” in Ulbandus Review. I (Spring, 1978), pp. 90-104.

Chernyshevsky, Nikolai. “The Russian at the Rendez-vous,” in Belinsky, Chernyshevsky, and Dobrolyubov: Selected Criticism, 1962. Edited by Ralph E. Matlaw.

Dessaix, Robert. Turgenev: The Quest for Faith, 1980.

Freeborn, Richard. Turgenev: The Novelist’s Novelist, 1960.

Schapiro, Leonard. Turgenev: His Life and Times, 1979.

Yarmolinsky, Avrahm. Turgenev: The Man, His Art, and His Age, 1977.