4. Ivan Turgenev (1818–83) wrote to a friend, 6 June, describing a meeting he had with TC, evening of 3 June: “He asked a lot of questions about the condition of Russia, and the late tsar, Nicholas, whom he insists on holding up as
a great man— I had to speak English and I can tell you it wasn't easy. In the event I managed, more or less. Carlyle is a
man of great courage and originality, but he is getting old and as he has aged he has become entangled in a paradox; the difficulties
of liberty which he sees clearly, seem intolerable to him and he has started extolling the virtues of obedience, obedience—would
you believe! He loves Russians because, according to him, they have an excellent talent for obedience and it made him very
uncomfortable when I said that the talent was not quite as complete as he had imagined.— You have robbed me of an illusion,
he cried. At the moment he is writing a history of Frederick the Great, one of his boyhood heroes because he knew how to get
people to obey. … I would like to see Carlyle in a Russian's shoes for just one week; he would change his tune. For the rest
he is a likeable and good soul, so is his wife” (trans.; for the original French, see Turgenev's correspondence, 1855–58 [Moscow, 1987] 3:225). Turgenev described the meeting to the critic Hjalmar Boyesen (1848–95) in 1873; TC told him: “This grand moving of great masses, swayed by one powerful hand—that … brings uniformity and purpose into history.”
Turgenev reported that TC found it “wearisome” that in Great Britain “every petty individual could thrust forth his head like
a frog out of its swamp, and quack away at his contemptible sentiment as long as anybody had a mind to listen to him. Such
a state of things could only result in confusion and disorder. I replied that I should only ask him to go to Russia and spend
a month or two in one of the interior governments, just long enough to observe with his own eyes the effect of this much-admired
despotism” (Patrick Waddington, Turgenev in England [1980] 35). Turgenev was probably familiar with Heroes through his friend Vassili Botkin (1811–69), who had translated parts of it in the journal Sovremennik [Contemporary] (1855) 10:92–118 and (1856) 2:33–54 and 92–104. His portrayal of the Carlylean revolutionary hero in his novel Rudin (1855) was possibly influenced by it; see Rudin, trans. Richard Freeborn (Harmondsworth, 1975) 7–12.
