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

by Bloom, Harold

  Turgenev’s mother was notorious for severely whipping female serfs, and males also. One can only speculate how Turgenev behaved in his own erotic encounters with his female serfs, one of whom bore him a daughter. Yet there is clearly sexual sadism in Turgenev’s makeup. Freud would have wondered at the boy Vladimir’s transposition of his mother’s nature to his father.

  Unseeingly I stared at the river, unconscious of the tears which were streaming from my eyes. They are beating her, I thought, beating, beating….

  That night I dreamt a strange and frightening dream. I fancied that I entered a low, dark room. My father was standing there, holding a riding-crop in his hand, and stamping with his feet. Zinaida was cowering in the corner, and there was a crimson mark, not upon her arm, but upon her forehead…

  The traditional mark upon the forehead seems to make poor Zinaida into a female Cain. Is young Vladimir the brother she has somehow murdered? The actual victim, soon enough, is the father:

  Two months later, I entered the University, and six months after that my father died (as the result of a stroke) in St Petersburg, where he had only just moved with my mother and me. Several days before his death he had received a letter from Moscow which upset him greatly. He went to beg some sort of favour of my mother and, so they told me, actually broke down and wept—he, my father! On the morning of the very day on which he had the stroke, he had begun a letter to me, written in French. ‘My son,’ he wrote, ‘beware of the love of women; beware of that ecstasy—that slow poison.’

  My mother, after his death, sent a considerable sum of money to Moscow.

  That letter, whether fictive or real, prophesies the ecstasy and slow poison that Pauline Viardot brought to Turgenev.

  Maidanov gave me Zinaida’s address. She was staying in the Hotel Demuth. Old memories began to stir within me…I promised myself to pay a visit to my ‘flame’ on the very next day. But various things turned up. A week passed, and then another, and when I made my way to the Demuth, and asked for Madame Dolsky, I was told that she had died four days before, quite suddenly, in childbirth.

  I remember how several days after that on which I had learnt of Zinaida’s death, I myself, obeying an irresistible impulse, was present at the death of a poor old woman who lived in the same house with us. Covered with rags, lying on bare boards, with a sack for a pillow, her end was hard and painful. Her whole life was spent in a bitter struggle with daily want, she had had no joy, had never tasted the sweets of happiness—surely she would welcome death with gladness—its deliverance—its peace? Yet so long as her frail body resisted obstinately, her breast rose and fell in agony under the icy hand that was laid upon it, so long as any strength was left within her, the little old woman kept crossing herself, kept whispering ‘Lord forgive me my sins…’ and not until the last spark of consciousness had gone, did the look of fear, of the terror of death, vanish from her eyes…and I remember that there, by the death-bed of that poor old woman, I grew afraid, afraid for Zinaida, and I wanted to say a prayer for her, for my father—and for myself.

  Pyotr suffers a fatal stroke, quite possibly augmented by his extraordinary outburst into tears on receipt of a letter from Zinaida. Their relationship, with its sadomasochistic aura and undoubted ecstasy, has slowly poisoned Pyotr, while Zinaida, however battered, survives long enough to make a financially favorable marriage that unfortunately soon slays her in childbirth. Turgenev, too subtle to be explicit, allows his readers to decide what has destroyed Pyotr. My surmise is that the fiercely repressed father and husband, confronted by his own collapse into weeping, could not sustain this loss of an assumed identity, and underwent a psychic fragmentation so intense that it ended him.

  Yet that seems inadequate to Vladimir’s consuming study of the nostalgias. One wants to begin in the spirit of W. B. Yeats:

  But is there any comfort to be found?

  Man is in love and loves what vanishes,

  What more is there to say?

  That is one of the verse passages that I over-quote to myself as I move around my house on a walker or laboriously chug up the stairs to my third-floor study. Thinking about Turgenev’s First Love, I become rather sad, since most of us have some such memories.

  There is a tradition that the dying Turgenev, in great pain, threw an inkwell at Pauline Viardot, who was attempting to comfort him. Scholars sometimes regard this as a metalepsis, a trope in which a word is substituted metonymically for a word in a previous trope, so that a metalepsis can be called, maddeningly but accurately, a metonymy of a metonymy. The precedent trope is a notorious heave of an inkwell by the horribly great Martin Luther at some poor devil or other. Turgenev’s sadistic mother always termed Pauline a Gypsy. Permanent infatuation necessarily has its ambivalences, and as he aged, the increasingly desperate Turgenev began to believe that Pauline was partly Jewish. We cannot know what dominated his consciousness in the act of dying. It may well have been a resentment of the passion he could never forsake.

  CHAPTER 21

  The Cossacks (1863)

  LEO TOLSTOY

  TOLSTOY ORIGINALLY WISHED to call this short novel Young Manhood but revised both the book and the title after rereading the Iliad. The ostensible protagonist is Olenin, a young nobleman who had been wasting his life in drinking, gambling, love affairs, and aristocratic society. The young Tolstoy went considerably beyond that and was wildly promiscuous, frequently with whores and peasant women, gambled ruinously, struggled with gonorrhea, and I suspect married Sophia Behrs in September 1862 not because he fell in love with her but in the hope of changing his life. He was thirty-four; Sophia was eighteen. In Anna Karenina, Levin, Tolstoy’s surrogate, is also thirty-four when he marries Kitty, who is eighteen, but he loves her profoundly.

  It is a paradox that Tolstoy, almost Shakespearean in his creation of women, was viciously misogynistic. With his permission, I quote from a letter sent to me by David Bethea, clearly the outstanding scholar of Pushkin:

  With regard to Tolstoy and women, yes, he portrayed them as accurately as anyone ever has but at the same time they could enrage him with their power over him, especially their sexual power. He never came to terms with this: even in later years he’d see a comely peasant woman on a ladder and he’d want to drag her into the bushes and this brought his anger and resentment to a boil. Why should she, with no reasoning power to speak of, possess this animal attraction to make him want to couple with her? Somehow that must be her or “their” fault. Hélène Kuragin’s bare shoulders and bust. That’s why the anger played out to an extreme logical conclusion (The Kreutzer Sonata): rejection of biology through abstinence.

  I wrote about The Kreutzer Sonata in a book called The Western Canon (1994), essentially saying that I was appalled and yet sentenced to read it over and over again. Sometimes I think that the authors I most admire are the ones who can badly hurt me. I teach The Merchant of Venice every year, have written essays on it, cannot ever give it up, yet it depresses and infuriates me. My friend and former student Kenneth Gross wrote a strong brief book, Shylock Is Shakespeare (2006), arguing that Shylock was Shakespeare’s breakthrough, a revelation of his own powers and a reach toward surer control of his audience. That may be. If I were a director, I would have The Merchant of Venice played as a farce, akin to Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta. Shylock would have a red wig and a false nose and would be played by a great comedian. And yet I myself would not be able to bear watching it.

  Olenin is good-natured, generous, kind—“clay with aspirations,” as my late friend Philip Roth would say—but he is also colorless and hopelessly absurd in his desire to become a Cossack, marry the beautiful Maryánka, and live a life of hunting, horsemanship, military raiding, absorbing mountain and river scenery, staying close to the natural in every way:

  ‘But what though the grass does grow?’ he continued thinking. ‘Still I must live and be hap
py, because happiness is all I desire. Never mind what I am—an animal like all the rest, above whom the grass will grow and nothing more; or a frame in which a bit of the one God has been set,—still I must live in the very best way. How then must I live to be happy, and why was I not happy before?’ And he began to recall his former life and he felt disgusted with himself. He appeared to himself to have been terribly exacting and selfish, though he now saw that all the while he really needed nothing for himself. And he looked round at the foliage with the light shining through it, at the setting sun and the clear sky, and he felt just as happy as before. ‘Why am I happy, and what used I to live for?’ thought he. ‘How much I exacted for myself; how I schemed and did not manage to gain anything but shame and sorrow! and, there now, I require nothing to be happy;’ and suddenly, a new light seemed to reveal itself to him. ‘Happiness is this!’ he said to himself. ‘Happiness lies in living for others. That is evident. The desire for happiness is innate in every man; therefore it is legitimate. When trying to satisfy it selfishly—that is, by seeking for oneself riches, fame, comforts, or love—it may happen that circumstances arise which make it impossible to satisfy those desires. It follows that it is these desires that are illegitimate, but not the need for happiness. But what desires can always be satisfied despite external circumstances? What are they? Love, self-sacrifice.’ He was so glad and excited when he had discovered this, as it seemed to him, new truth, that he jumped up and began impatiently seeking some one to sacrifice himself for, to do good to and to love. ‘Since one wants nothing for oneself,’ he kept thinking, ‘why not live for others?’ He took up his gun with the intention of returning home quickly to think this out and to find an opportunity of doing good. He made his way out of the thicket. When he had come out into the glade he looked around him; the sun was no longer visible above the tree-tops. It had grown cooler and the place seemed to him quite strange and not like the country round the village. Everything seemed changed—the weather and the character of the forest; the sky was wrapped in clouds, the wind was rustling in the tree-tops, and all around nothing was visible but reeds and dying broken-down trees. He called to his dog who had run away to follow some animal, and his voice came back as in a desert. And suddenly he was seized with a terrible sense of weirdness. He grew frightened. He remembered the abreks and the murders he had been told about, and he expected every moment that an abrek would spring from behind every bush and he would have to defend his life and die, or be a coward. He thought of God and of the future life as for long he had not thought about them. And all around was that same gloomy stern wild nature. ‘And is it worth while living for oneself,’ thought he, ‘when at any moment you may die, and die without having done any good, and so that no one will know of it?’ He went in the direction where he fancied the village lay. Of his shooting he had no further thought; but he felt tired to death and peered round at every bush and tree with particular attention and almost with terror, expecting every moment to be called to account for his life. After having wandered about for a considerable time he came upon a ditch down which was flowing cold sandy water from the Térek, and, not to go astray any longer, he decided to follow it. He went on without knowing where the ditch would lead him. Suddenly the reeds behind him crackled. He shuddered and seized his gun, and then felt ashamed of himself: the over-excited dog, panting hard, had thrown itself into the cold water of the ditch and was lapping it!

  That is the authentic Tolstoyan weather of the mind. It surpasses almost every other writer in its grasp of the tang of the actual. I mean “tang” not as flavor but the secondary meaning of a knife blade so shaped that it can be held securely by the handle. I do not often hear Tolstoy being humorous, and the delight I take in the following may be what I owe to the translators: “He took up his gun with the intention of returning home quickly to think this out and to find an opportunity of doing good.”

  It is a little difficult to see what good Olenin can do for the Cossacks Daddy Eroshka, Lukáshka, and Maryánka. He hunts and drinks with Eroshka, deceives himself into believing he is in love with Maryánka, and makes her an offer of marriage. She is betrothed to Lukáshka, the most daring “brave” among the Cossacks, and waits only for her father’s permission to marry. Olenin, with excessive generosity, gives Lukáshka a horse, resulting in the young Cossack’s trading it for an even better horse, and rightly becoming suspicious of Olenin’s interest in Maryánka.

  Probably no writer can match Tolstoy in depicting violent action. There is an amazing clarity, unmarked by pathos, when Lukáshka is severely, perhaps mortally wounded:

  Another moment passed and the Cossacks with a whoop rushed out on both sides from behind the cart—Lukáshka in front of them. Olenin heard only a few shots, then shouting and moans. He thought he saw smoke and blood, and abandoning his horse and quite beside himself he ran towards the Cossacks. Horror seemed to blind him. He could not make out anything, but understood that all was over. Lukáshka, pale as death, was holding a wounded Chéchen by the arms and shouting, ‘Don’t kill him. I’ll take him alive!’ The Chéchen was the red-haired man who had fetched his brother’s body away after Lukáshka had killed him. Lukáshka was twisting his arms. Suddenly the Chéchen wrenched himself free and fired his pistol. Lukáshka fell, and blood began to flow from his stomach. He jumped up, but fell again, swearing in Russian and in Tartar. More and more blood appeared on his clothes and under him. Some Cossacks approached him and began loosening his girdle. One of them, Nazárka, before beginning to help, fumbled for some time, unable to put his sword in its sheath: it would not go the right way. The blade of the sword was blood-stained.

  The Chéchens with their red hair and clipped moustaches lay dead and hacked about. Only the one we know of, who had fired at Lukáshka, though wounded in many places was still alive. Like a wounded hawk all covered with blood (blood was flowing from a wound under his right eye), pale and gloomy, he looked about him with wide-open excited eyes and clenched teeth as he crouched, dagger in hand, still prepared to defend himself. The cornet went up to him as if intending to pass by, and with a quick movement shot him in the ear. The Chéchen started up, but it was too late, and he fell.

  We are never told whether Lukáshka survives, though it seems unlikely. Tolstoy employs the wounding to awaken Olenin from his reveries of transformation into a Cossack.

  ‘Maryánka,’ said he, ‘I say, Maryánka! May I come in?’ She suddenly turned. There was a scarcely perceptible trace of tears in her eyes and her face was beautiful in its sadness. She looked at him in silent dignity.

  Olenin again said:

  ‘Maryánka, I have come —’

  ‘Leave me alone!’ she said. Her face did not change but the tears ran down her cheeks.

  ‘What are you crying for? What is it?’

  ‘What?’ she repeated with a rough voice. ‘Cossacks have been killed, that’s what for.’

  ‘Lukáshka?’ said Olenin.

  ‘Go away! What do you want?’

  ‘Maryánka!’ said Olenin, approaching her.

  ‘You will never get anything from me!’

  ‘Maryánka, don’t speak like that,’ Olenin entreated.

  ‘Get away. I’m sick of you!’ shouted the girl, stamping her foot, and moved threateningly towards him. And her face expressed such abhorrence, such contempt, and such anger that Olenin suddenly understood that there was no hope for him, and that his first impression of this woman’s inaccessibility had been perfectly correct.

  Olenin said nothing more, but ran out of the hut.

  We are to suppose that Maryánka, a true Cossack, would have given Olenin quite a severe blow. It would have been an instruction in reality. Tolstoy is too great an artist to go beyond implication when more seems unnecessary.

  On the scale of War and Peace the reader will find only a miniature in The Cossacks. Keen as it is, The Cossacks lacks the ebullience of Hadji M
urat. Tolstoyan perfection demands the earth’s own exuberance, a vitalism matching Tolstoy’s own. Not yet fallen into the abyss of prophetic pretensions, Tolstoy can say farewell to his own youth with calibrated stateliness. It does not much matter that poor Olenin is only a shadow of his godlike creator. Lukáshka remains vivid as an image. Maryánka is another ultimate image of Tolstoy’s desires. I complete a rereading of The Cossacks and I think of Yeats’s “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen,” a meditation on the time of the Irish Revolutionary War between the IRA and the British:

  He who can read the signs nor sink unmanned