Bright Book of Life : Novels to Read and Reread (9780525657279)

by Bloom, Harold

  Suddenly he started and fell silent, looking fixedly into the undergrowth of the forest. I turned and saw a little peasant-girl of about eight, in a blue dress, with a check handkerchief over her head and a wicker basket over her bare sunburnt arm. She had probably never expected to meet us; she had stumbled on top of us and stood motionless in a green hazel-thicket on a shady patch of grass, looking timorously at me with her black eyes. I had hardly caught sight of her when she darted behind a tree.

  ‘Annushka, come here, don’t be afraid,’ called the old man tenderly.

  ‘I am afraid,’ came her thin little voice.

  ‘Don’t be afraid, don’t be afraid, come to me.’

  Annushka slowly abandoned her hiding-place, walked quietly round, her little feet hardly rustling in the thick grass, and came out of the bushes beside the old man. This was no girl of eight, as I had thought at first, judging by her small size, but one of thirteen or fourteen. Her whole body was small and thin, but trim and graceful, and her pretty little face was strikingly like Kasyan’s own, although Kasyan himself was no beauty. She had the same sharp features, the same strange expression, at once cunning and trustful, reflective and penetrating, and the same movements…Kasyan looked her over; she was standing beside him.

  ‘Well, have you got some mushrooms?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, some mushrooms,’ she answered, with a timid smile.

  ‘Have you found plenty of them?’

  ‘Yes, plenty.’ She looked quickly at me and smiled again.

  ‘Some white ones, too?’

  ‘Yes, white ones, too.’

  ‘Show me, do…’

  She lowered the basket from her arm and half-lifted a broad burdock leaf which covered the mushrooms.

  ‘Oh,’ said Kasyan, stooping over the basket, ‘what fine ones! Well done, Annushka!’

  ‘Is she your daughter, Kasyan, eh?’ I asked. Annushka’s face showed a slight blush.

  ‘She’s a sort of relation,’ said Kasyan, with assumed carelessness.

  ‘Well, Annushka, off you go,’ he added at once; ‘off you go, and good luck to you. And be careful…’

  ‘But why should she walk?’ I interrupted him. ‘We could give her a lift…’

  Annushka flushed the colour of a poppy, clutched with both hands at the string handle of her basket and looked anxiously at the old man.

  ‘No, she’ll get there all right,’ he rejoined in the same indifferent, casual voice. ‘Why should we?…She’ll get there all right…Be off with you.’

  Annushka went nimbly off into the forest. Kasyan looked after her, then lowered his gaze and smiled. In this long smile, in the few words which he had said to Annushka, in the very tone of his voice when he spoke of her, there was more passionate love and tenderness than language can express. He looked again in the direction in which she had vanished, smiled again, wiped his face, and nodded his head several times.

  ‘Why did you send her off so quickly?’ I asked him. ‘I should like to have bought some of her mushrooms…’

  ‘Why, it does not matter to you, you can buy them at home whenever you like,’ he answered me, using the formal ‘you’ for the first time.

  ‘Well, you’ve got a pretty one there.’

  ‘No…well…there it is…’ he answered, as if reluctantly, and from that moment he relapsed into his earlier mood of silence. Seeing that all my efforts to engage him again in conversation were proving vain, I went off to the clearing. Meanwhile it had grown slightly less hot; but my ill-success continued, and I returned to the hamlet with only one corncrake besides my new axle. As we were driving up to his yard, Kasyan suddenly turned to me: ‘Master, I say, Master,’ he began. ‘I’m sorry for what I did to you; you see, it was I who called all the birds away from you.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘It’s my trick. That’s a clever dog you have, and a good one, but all the same there was nothing he could do…When you come to think of it, what are men? Here’s an animal, too, and what have they made of him?’

  Annushka clearly is Kasyan’s daughter, and the charm of her being offsets the tint of the uncanny in Kasyan. Turgenev refreshingly refused all transcendent argumentations and believed only in the possibility of human goodness. For a nineteenth-century Russian writer, that clear atheism had to cause some scandal, but Turgenev somehow reconciled in himself Western and Eastern modes of sensibility, thought, feeling. He was admired by Henry James, Gustave Flaubert, Edith Wharton, Ernest Hemingway, and Willa Cather: they found in him a Russian crafter of fictions who shared their spirit. Cather rewrote First Love in her exquisite A Lost Lady (1923), but it now reads to me as Turgenev in a minor key.

  The most memorable sketch in A Sportsman’s Notebook is “The Live Relic,” in which poor Lukerya has been dying slowly for a long time, or living—if you can call it that—for too long:

  ‘O, I can’t!’ she said suddenly. ‘I haven’t the strength…I’ve been so pleased to see you.’

  She closed her eyes.

  I put my hand on her tiny, cold fingers…She looked up at me—and her dark eyelids, trimmed with golden lashes, like those of an ancient statue, closed again. After a moment, they glittered in the twilight…A tear had moistened them.

  I sat there motionless as before.

  ‘Just look at me!’ said Lukerya suddenly, with unexpected force, and, opening her eyes wide, tried to wipe the tears from them. ‘Oughtn’t I to be ashamed? What do I want? This hasn’t happened to me for a long time…not since the day when Vasily Polyakov was here last spring. As long as he was sitting talking to me—I didn’t mind—but when he went away—I fairly cried away to myself! Where did it all come from?…But tears cost nothing to girls like us. Master,’ added Lukerya, ‘I expect you’ve got a handkerchief…Don’t be put off, wipe my eyes.’

  I hardly know how one reacts to that unbearable poignance. Yet it is only prelude to what hurts far more:

  ‘I need nothing; I’m absolutely content, praise be to God,’ she pronounced, with extreme effort, but also with emotion ‘May God grant health to everyone! And you, master, please speak to your mother—the peasants here are poor—if she would only bring down their rent, just a little! They haven’t enough land, they make nothing out of it!…They would pray to God for you…but I need nothing, I’m absolutely content.’

  I gave Lukerya my word to carry out her request, and was already making for the door when she called me back.

  ‘D’you remember, master,’ she said, with a wonderful brightening of her eyes and lips, ‘what hair I had? D’you remember—right down to my knees! For a long time I couldn’t make up my mind…Such hair it was!…But how could I comb it! In my condition! So I cut it off…yes…Well, good-bye, master! I can’t say more…’

  The same day, before setting out to shoot, I had a talk about Lukerya with the local constable. I learnt from him that in the valley she was called ‘the Live Relic’, also that she caused no trouble; there was not a grumble to be heard from her, not a complaint. ‘She asks nothing for herself, on the contrary she’s grateful for everything; she’s as quiet as quiet can be, that I must say. She’s been smitten by God,’ so the constable concluded, ‘for her sins, no doubt; but we don’t go into that. As for condemning her, for example, no, we certainly don’t condemn her. Let her be!’

  A few weeks later I heard that Lukerya was dead. Death had come for her after all…and ‘after St. Peter’s’. The story went that on the day of her death she kept hearing the sound of bells, although it is more than five versts from Alexeyevka to the church, and it was on a weekday. Besides, Lukerya said that the sound came, not from church, but ‘from above’. Probably she did not venture to say—from heaven.

  Turgenev could not believe in miracles, yet what else is this: the bells of madness and of deprivation, or of a jubilee cele
brating Lukerya as a sad saint meriting an “above” that is not there.

  CHAPTER 20

  First Love (1860)

  IVAN TURGENEV

  IT IS REASONABLE TO SAY that the novella First Love is Turgenev’s most autobiographical work, unless that be the charmingly crazy Spring Torrents (1872). In First Love, the narrator, Vladimir, returns to his experience of an initial sorrow when he was sixteen. The princess Zinaida, then twenty-one, is a capricious and mocking beauty who is ingenious at tormenting her phalanx of frustrated suitors. Vladimir’s father, Pyotr, a skilled horseman and philanderer, is younger than his hysterical and savage wife, whom he married for her money. Pyotr is cold and reserved in manner, and only rarely shows affection for his son. It is revealed to us slowly that Pyotr and Zinaida are immersed in a covert and sadistic erotic affair, and that Zinaida, a kind of moral masochist, is in love with Pyotr.

  Vladimir’s narrative is Turgenev at his best: apparently impersonal, withdrawn in affect, yet always intimating that love and life itself are tenuous and on the verge of vanishing:

  Zinaida guessed at once that I had fallen in love with her, but then I wouldn’t have thought of concealing it. My passion amused her. She made fun of me, played with me, and tormented me. It is sweet to be the sole source, the arbitrary and irresponsible source of the greatest joys and profoundest miseries to someone else. I was like soft wax in the hands of Zinaida; not that I alone had fallen in love with her. All the men who visited the house were hopelessly infatuated, and she kept them all on leading-strings at her feet. She found it amusing to excite alternate hopes and fears in them; to twist them according to her whim. She called this ‘knocking people against each other’; they did not even think of resistance, but gladly submitted to her. In her whole being, vital and beautiful, there was a peculiarly fascinating mixture of cunning and insouciance, artifice and simplicity, gentleness and gaiety. Over everything she did and said, over every movement there hovered a subtle, exquisite enchantment. Everything expressed the unique, peculiar force of the life which played within her. Her face, too, was constantly changing. It, too, was always in play. It seemed at almost the same instant mocking, pensive and passionate. An infinite variety of feelings, light and swift, succeeded each other like shadows of clouds on a windy summer day, in her eyes and on her lips. Every one of her admirers was necessary to her. Byelovzorov, whom she sometimes called ‘my wild beast’, or sometimes simply ‘mine’, would gladly have leapt into the fire for her. With no confidence in his own brains or other qualities, he was constantly proposing marriage to her, implying that the others only talked. Maidanov was responsive to the poetic strain in her soul; somewhat cold by nature, like nearly all writers, he assured her fervently, and perhaps himself too, that he adored her. He composed endless verses in her honour, and recited them with an ardour at once affected and sincere. She sympathized with him and, at the same time, faintly mocked him. She did not really trust him, and after listening to his effusions for a while, used to make him read Pushkin, in order, as she used to say, to clear the air.

  Between the lines you can read a certain Turgenevian reserve in regard to the delightful Zinaida. Is it only the joy of flirtation that requires “knocking people against each other”? Zinaida trusts no one, herself included.

  ‘Yes!’ she said, looking at me as before, ‘it is so. The same eyes—’ she added; then became thoughtful and covered her face with her hands. ‘Everything has become horrible to me,’ she whispered, ‘why don’t I go to the other end of the world! I can’t bear it, I can’t make it come right…and what is there before me?…God, I am so wretched!’

  ‘Why?’ I asked timidly.

  Zinaida did not reply, but only shrugged her shoulders. I went on kneeling and looking at her with infinite distress. Every one of her words pierced my heart like a knife. At that moment I would, I think, gladly have given up my life if only that could end in grief. I looked at her, and still not understanding why she was so unhappy, conjured a vivid image of how, suddenly, in a paroxysm of ungovernable grief, she had walked into the garden and fallen to the ground as though mown down. All round us it was bright and green. The wind murmured in the leaves of the trees, now and then bending the raspberry canes above Zinaida’s head. Somewhere doves were cooing and bees were buzzing, flying low from blade to blade over the sparse grass. Overhead, the sky was blue and tender, but I felt terribly sad.

  ‘Read me some poetry,’ said Zinaida in a low voice, and raised herself on one elbow. ‘I like your reading poetry. You speak it in a sing-song, but I do not mind it, that’s youth. Read me On Georgia’s Hills, only first sit down.’

  I sat down, and recited On Georgia’s Hills.

  ‘ “Which it cannot help but love”,’ Zinaida repeated after me. ‘That is what poetry can do. It speaks to us of what does not exist, which is not only better than what exists, but even more like the truth. “Which it cannot help but love”—it would like not to, but cannot help itself!’ She was silent again and suddenly started and stood up. ‘Let’s go. Maidanov is with Mama. He has brought me his poem, but I left him. He is hurt too, now, but what can one do? One day you will discover…only don’t be too angry with me.’

  She pressed my hand hastily and moved quickly forward. We went back to the lodge.

  Turgenev was a sharp psychologist. Vladimir represses a crucial aspect of his new realization: he both knows and does not know that her lover is his father.

  I returned home to find a disagreeable state of affairs. My mother was trying to ‘have things out’ with my father. She was reproaching him for something, and he, as was his habit, answered with polite and frigid sentences, and soon went away. I could not hear what my mother was saying, nor was I in a mood to listen. I remember only that when the scene was over, she sent for me to the study, and spoke with great disapproval about my frequent visits to the old princess, who, in her words, was une femme capable de tout. I bowed to kiss her hand (I always did this when I wanted to end a conversation) and went up to my room.

  Zinaida’s tears were altogether too much for me. I simply didn’t know what to think, and was on the point of tears myself. I was after all still a child, in spite of my sixteen years.

  Turgenev as a narrator prefers the shallows to the depths, but here he seems to know, at the age of forty-two, that a center of his being will never be older than sixteen.

  But there was something which I now fancied I dimly perceived in Zinaida, something to which I could not reconcile myself…An adventuress my mother had once called her. An adventuress—she, my idol, my goddess! The word seared me like a flame, I tried to escape from it into my pillow. I burned with indignation, yet at the same time what would I not have done, what would I not have given, to be that darling of fortune, the man by the fountain!

  Turgenev had fallen in love at first sight with Pauline Viardot in 1843 and followed her to Paris in 1845. Fifteen years after his Parisian bondage commenced, he composes First Love and recalls his mother terming Pauline a Gypsy and an adventuress.

  I did not dare to question them, but one of the pantry boys, called Philip, who was passionately fond of poetry and a beautiful guitar player, was a particular friend of mine, and to him I turned. From him I discovered that a terrible scene had taken place between my parents. (Every word of it could be heard in the maids’ room; much of it was in French, but Masha, the lady’s maid, had lived for five years with a seamstress from Paris and understood every word.) Apparently my mother had accused my father of being unfaithful to her and of having relations with the young lady next door; my father had at first defended himself but then flared up and said something brutal—‘something to do with Madame’s age’—which had made my mother cry; my mother also alluded to a loan supposed to have been made to the old princess, and then made disagreeable remarks about her and about her daughter too, whereupon my father began to threaten her….

&nb
sp; I sent Philip away and flung myself on the bed. I did not sob; I did not give myself up to despair; I did not ask myself where and how all this had happened; I did not wonder how it was that I had not guessed it earlier—guessed it long ago. I did not even harbour bitter thoughts about my father…what I had learned was too much for me to manage. The sudden revelation crushed me; all was ended. In one swoop all my flowers were torn up by the roots and lay about me—scattered, broken, trampled underfoot.

  Turgenev, like Vladimir, was incapable of not revering his father. His hysterical and possessive mother, clearly a martinet, a koshmar (Russian for “night hag”), gave him a fear of women from the start.

  ‘I?’ I repeated painfully, and my heart began to quiver, as it always did under the spell of her irresistible, inexpressible fascination. ‘I? Believe me, Zinaida Alexandrovna, that whatever you did, however much you make me suffer, I shall love you and adore you to the end of my days.’

  She quickly turned towards me, and opening her arms wide, put them round my head, and gave me a strong, warm kiss. God only knows for whom that long farewell kiss was seeking, but I tasted its sweetness avidly. I knew that it would never come again.

  Sappho famously has a fragment:

  Again limb-loosening Eros shakes me;

  A helpless crawling thing I am, sweet-bitter.

  (trans. Peter Saint-Andre)

  In the street, about forty paces from me, before the open window of a small wooden house, with his back to me, stood my father. He was leaning with his chest over the window sill; inside the house, half concealed by a curtain, sat a woman in a dark dress, talking with my father; it was Zinaida.

  I was utterly stunned. This, I admit, I did not expect. My first impulse was to run away. ‘My father will look round,’ I thought—‘I shall be lost.’ But an odd feeling, a feeling stronger than curiosity, stronger even than jealousy, stronger than fear, gripped me. I stood still and looked. I strained my ears to hear. My father seemed to be insisting on something. Zinaida would not consent. Her face is before my eyes now, sad and serious and beautiful, and upon it the imprint—impossible to convey—of grief, devotion, love, and a kind of despair—I can find no other word for it. She spoke in monosyllables, without lifting her eyes, and only smiled, submissively and stubbornly. By this smile alone I recognized my Zinaida, as she once was. My father gave a shrug of his shoulders, and set his hat straight on his head, which with him was always a sign of impatience…then I could hear the words ‘Vous devez vous séparer de cette…’ Zinaida straightened herself and held out her hand. Then something unbelievable took place before my eyes. My father suddenly lifted his riding-crop, with which he had been flicking the dust off the folds of his coat, and I heard the sound of a sharp blow struck across her arm which was bared to the elbow. It was all I could do to prevent myself from crying out. Zinaida quivered—looked silently to my father—and raising her arm slowly to her lips, kissed the scar which glowed crimson upon it.