The Quarrels Between Tolstoy and Turgenev

EDITOR'S NOTE: Eugene Schuyler (1840-90) was an American diplomat and scholar known in his lifetime for his intense and sustained interest in Russia, its language, history, and culture. Born in Ithaca, New York, he began studying at Yale University at the age of fifteen, completing his undergraduate degree there in 1859 and going on to earn a Ph.D. in languages and philosophy two years later. He then studied law at Columbia University and began practicing in New York. After a chance meeting with the officers and crew of the Russian fleet anchored in New York's harbor, he decided to begin the study of Russian.

Schuyler's expanding cultural interests in this area extended to Russia's relations with Central Asia, where that nation was rapidly expanding its power during the 1860s. In 1866 he published an article in the Nation entitled "The Progress of Russia in Asia." His translation of Turgenev's Fathers and Sons appeared a year later; though generally well received at the time, it eventually came to be regarded as only partly successful. His diplomatic career proved more promising: he went on to be appointed American consul in Moscow, and subsequently American minister to the Russian court at St. Petersburg and secretary of legation. He first met Turgenev in the fall of 1867, and the Russian author recommended that he attempt a translation of Tolstoy, who was at that time unknown in England and America. Though Schuyler did not take up the suggestion immediately, ten years later he did publish a translation of The Cossacks, the first of Tolstoy's works to be published in the United States. In the end, however, it took considerably longer to secure Tolstoy's reputation with American readers.

In the course of Schuyler's diplomatic assignments in Russia, he made numerous trips to the newly conquered territories of Russian Central Asia and completed a detailed and often lyrical account of the area, published as Notes of a Journey in Russian Turkistan, Kokand, Bukhara and Kuldja (1876). That same year he was appointed consul general and secretary of legation to Constantinople, where he was urged to investigate the rumored massacre of Bulgarian Christians by Turkish troops—a series of incidents that came to be referred to as the Bulgarian horrors. When his report became public, it served to confirm the rumors in the European and American press, exerting a decisive influence on British policy toward Turkey in the Balkans.

Schuyler was reassigned in 1878 to Birmingham as consul and shortly after as consul general to Rome. In subsequent years, his diplomatic responsibilities took him to Romania, Greece, and Serbia. He returned to the United States in 1884. Schuyler's last diplomatic assignment was to Cairo, in 1889, but he succumbed to a combination of malaria and a weak heart and died the next year in Venice, Italy, at the age of fifty.

The pages that follow are taken from Eugene Schuyler: Selected Essays, with a Memoir by Evelyn Schuyler Schaeffer, published in New York by Charles Scribner's Sons in 1901.

Tolstoy received with evident pleasure the compliments of Turgenev, and spoke of the latter's books with appreciation—"Smoke" had been published not long before—and of the man in terms of affection and sympathy. From nothing that he said, or that Turgenev ever said on the various occasions when he talked to me about Tolstoy, to whom he even gave a letter of introduction, could I have ever imagined that there was then a wide breach between the two friends, and that the quarrel was not made up till ten years later. I learned this only afterwards, and gradually came to the whole story of the rupture. A brief account of their mutual relations may be interesting, and is almost necessary to a proper appreciation of Tolstoy at that time.

Turgenev's admiration of Tolstoy's genius and power never varied, although his criticisms were sometimes harsh, when it seemed to him in special cases that his brother author had taken the wrong road. The first reference to Tolstoy in his letters seems almost...