Phantoms and Other Stories

De: Ivan Turgenieff

Narrado por: Russell Stamets

“Phantoms” and “It is Enough” were written next after “Fathers and Children.” Although one of Turgénieff’s minor works, the critics pronounced “Phantoms” original, wonderfully artistic and philosophical, and wonderfully lyrical.

The author himself called it “a fantasy,” as he did other sketches in which he sometimes poured out, in lyrical form, his sadness evoked by the contrary laws of nature, and man’s aspirations toward the absolute, the eternal. It demonstrates the somewhat mystical romanticism which lay concealed in Turgénieff’s nature, and only occasionally came to the light.

“Yakoff Pasynkoff”—constitutes the author’s response to Heégel’s sentimental romanticism.

The hero of the story is a martyr to: the renunciation of égotismm—a peculiar figure, toward which Turgénieff bore himself with the most fervent sympathy. Yakoff is sympathetic, as well as poetical, but remote from real life. One critic objects that the story is weak and incomplete and, as it were, split into two parts, which are unsymmetrical alone, and badly assorted when taken together.

Another critic says that Yakoff is the very personification of moral purity and selfsac-rifice, devoid of a single drop of conceit, weakness, or egotism; the personification of devotion to a beloved object, reminding us of Schiller’s Graf Toggenburg. Yet he remains uncomprehended, and, despite all his fine qualities, he perishes without leaving a trace, like all Turgénieff’s other “superfluous men.”

Public Domain (P)2023 Russell Stamets