The Bright Book of Life by Harold Bloom

ERNEST RENAN was the celebrated author of the absurd Life of Jesus (1863), a work that asserted Yeshua was not a Jew but an Aryan. Sometimes I have the impression that Renan read only the Gospel of John. Nevertheless, Renan was eloquent and spoke at Turgenev's funeral in Paris in 1883. Henry James later quoted and approved Renan's remarks: "Turgenev," said M. Renan, "received by the mysterious decree which marks out human vocations the gift which is noble beyond all others: he was born essentially impersonal. " The passage is so eloquent that one must repeat the whole of it. "His conscience was not that of an individual to whom nature had been more or less generous: it was in some sort the conscience of a people. Before he was born he had lived for thousands of years; infinite successions of reveries had amassed themselves in the depths of his heart. No man has been as much as he the incarnation of a whole race: generations of ancestors, lost in the sleep of centuries, speechless, came through him to life and utterance. "(James, "Ivan Turgenev")The late Randall Jarrell, whom I met only a few times but admired, published The Anchor Book of Stories in 1958, where I first encountered Turgenev's A Sportsman's Notebook. After sixty years I remember my pleasure in Turgenev's stories. They were indeed "essentially impersonal. " "Bezhin Meadow" stayed in my mind, particularly its conclusion:

‘D'you remember Vasily? ' added Kostya suddenly.‘What Vasily? ' asked Fedya.‘The one who was drowned,' answered Kostya. ‘In this very same river. What a fine chap he was! Oh, what a fine chap! His mother, Feklista, how she loved him! It was as if she felt, Feklista did, that his death would come by water. Vasily used to come with us in summer to bathe in the river-and she'd get all in a fluster. The other mothers didn't care a bit, they'd walk past with their washpails, they'd waddle by, but Feklista would put her pail down and start calling him. "Come back, come back," she'd say, "come back, light of my eyes! Oh, come back, my little eagle! " And how he came to drown, Lord alone knows. He was playing on the bank, and his mother was there too, raking hay, and suddenly she heard what sounded like someone blowing bubbles under water-she looked, and there was only Vasily's cap floating in the water. Well, since then, Feklista, too, hasn't been right in the head. She comes and lies at the place where he drowned; there she lies, boys, and starts to sing-d'you remember, Vasily always used to sing a song-well that's the one she sings, too, and cries and cries, and complains bitterly to God.‘Here comes Pavel' said Fedya.