HOME OF THE GENTRY
IVAN TURGENEV, Russian novelist, was born in Oryol in 1818, and was the first Russian writer to enjoy an international reputation. Born into the gentry himself, and dominated in his boyhood by a tyrannical mother, he swore a ‘Hannibal’s oath’ against serfdom. After studying in Moscow, St Petersburg and Berlin (1838–41), where he was influenced by German Idealism, he returned to Russia an ardent liberal and Westernist. He gained fame as an author with a series of brilliant, sensitive pictures of peasant life. Although he had also written poetry, plays, and short stories, it was as a novelist that his greatest work was to be done. His novels are noted for the poetic ‘atmosphere’ of their country settings, the contrast between hero and heroine, and for the objective portrayal of heroes representative of stages in the development of the Russian intelligentsia during the period 1840–70. Exiled to his estate of Spasskoye in 1852 for an obituary on Gogol, he wrote Rudin(1856), Home of the Gentry(1859), On the Eve(1860), and Fathers and Sons(1862), but was so disillusioned by the obtuse criticism which greeted this last work that he spent most of his life at Baden-Baden (1862–70) and Paris (1871–83). His last novels, Smoke(1867) and Virgin Soil(1877), lacked the balance and topicality of his earlier work. He died in Bougival, near Paris, in 1883.
RICHARD FREEBORN, is at present Professor of Russian Literature at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University of London. He was previously Professor of Russian at Manchester University, a visiting Professor at the University of California at Los Angeles, and for ten years he was Hulme Lecturer in Russian at Brasenose College, Oxford, where he had graduated. His publications include Turgenev, A Study(1960), A Short History of Modern Russia(1966; 1967), translations of Sketches from a Hunter’s Album(Penguin Classics, 1967) and Rudin(Penguin Classics, 1973), a couple of novels and The Rise of the Russian Novel(1973)· He has also edited Russian Literary Attitudes from Pushkin to Solzhenitsyn(1976) and Russian and Slavic Literature(Slavica Publishers, 1977).
Ivan Turgenev
HOME OF THE GENTRY
TRANSLATED BY
RICHARD FREEBORN
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This translation first published 1970
Reprinted 1971, 1974, 1975, 1977, 1979, 1982, 1985, 1987
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Copyright © Richard Freeborn, 1970
All rights reserved
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ISBN: 9781101492901
To Ros and Liz
Introduction
Home of the Gentry (Dvoryanskoye gnezdo) is Turgenev’s second novel, conceived in 1856 shortly after the completion of his first novel Rudin, and written for the greater part at Spasskoye during the summer of 1858. It was completed on the eve of Turgenev’s fortieth birthday (27 October 1858), revised in December of the same year and published in the Contemporary at the beginning of 1859.
This work has received many tides in English translation (Liza, or a Nest of Nobles, A House of Gentlefolk, A Nest of Gentlefolk, A Nest of the Gentry, A Nest of Nobles, A Nest of Hereditary Legislators, A Noble Nest, A Nobleman’s Nest), all of which testify to the inherent difficulty of combining in English the twin concepts of which the Russian title is composed. The word ‘nest’ in association with ‘nobility’ has its Victorian charm, or it may seem faintly Wodehouse-ish (the Hereditary Legislators are bound to have kept some sort of Jeeves in their Nest), or it may sound like Maudie Little-hampton trying to be chummy. Turgenev himself alleged (probably untruthfully) in a letter to W. R. S. Ralston, his English translator, that the tide was chosen by his publisher, not by him. He approved of Ralston’s proposal to use the heroine’s name in the title of the first authorized English translation (of 1869) and this much licence has clearly done nothing to inhibit the extraordinary variety of subsequent tides. The grounds for clarifying the tide still further by substituting ‘home’ for ‘nest’ are to be found in the novel itself: it is a novel about the home of Turgenev’s class, the gentry (or nobility), and about the problems of Turgenev’s generation in readjusting to their homeland after experiencing the profound but fickle influence of European ideas.
Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev (1818–83) had his own Russian home on the large estate of Spasskoye-Lutovinovo in the province of Oryol. Here, as a boy, he experienced something of the harshness from his mother that he describes in the strange education which his hero, Fyodor Lavretsky, received from his father (chapter XI). Like Lavretsky, though at a much earlier age than his hero, he escaped from his mother’s tutelage, attended the universities of Moscow and St Petersburg and in 1838 travelled to Berlin, where his university education was to be completed. He emerged from what he called his plunge into ‘the German sea’ with a clear conviction of the need for Russia to follow Europe. After returning to his own country in 1842, he soon made a reputation for himself as a leading writer of the period known as ‘the forties’. He began publishing his famous Sketches* of peasant life in the Contemporary in 1847 and the first separate edition of this work appeared in 1852. He wrote about rural Russia, about his own ‘home’, meaning the province of Oryol, with the mastery of one who was both a landowner, a member of the gentry class, and an intellectual, a member of the newly-emerged Russian intelligentsia. He combined the urbanity of the intellectual with the mildly laconic manner of the sporting country gentleman, the compassion of the educated reformer with the sensitive eye of the poetic observer, the artist’s fine sense of balance with the poignancy of the tragic philosopher. But his Sketches, even if they acquired fame as pictures drawn from the life of the peasantry, were concerned quite as much with the life of the landowning class, the gentry; and their effectiveness as propaganda against serfdom was due less perhaps to their sympathetic and humane portrayal of peasant types than to their exceedingly clearly observed, laconic, wryly satirical and unsentimental portraits of the gentry. Of all the Sketches concerned with the gentry the most satirical and the most compassionate is Hamlet of the Shchigrovsky District, for in it Turgenev deals not only with the gentry class at its most fatuous and repellent, but also with the type of introspective, Hamlet-like intellectual who was, despite his manifest inadequacies, the conscience and saving grace of his class and his generation.
Turgenev became the chronicler of this type of ‘superfluous man’ intellectual. His studies, moving gradually from censure of the type towards a more balanced and sympathetic treatment of his problems, culminated in his first novel, Rudin, which portrayed probably the most typical example of such a ‘superfluous man’ – an intellectual, educated abroad, who can find no place for himself in semi-feudal Russian society and whose primary function becomes that of an eloquent, but ineffectual, disseminator of ideas. When the heroine of the novel, Natalya, inspired by his high-minded talk of service and sacrifice, challenges him to act upon his words, he fails her. All he can offer her is the advice to submit – to submit to their inevitable parting, to circumstances, to Fate – and his own life, after his parting from Natalya, becomes an inglorious s
aga of lost opportunities and failed hopes until he sacrifices himself on the Paris barricades of 1848.
Rudin was written during the final stages of the Crimean War (1854–5) but was concerned with the Western-orientated intelligentsia of a decade earlier. Home of the Gentry, though ostensibly concerned with the 1840s (it opens in 1842), reflects in many ways the new upsurge of nationalist and Slavophil feeling experienced by the intelligentsia in the years immediately following the Crimean War. Turgenev was himself unsympathetic to Slavophilism, which united a Romantic belief in Russia’s superiority to Europe with an ultra-conservative admiration for the Orthodox Church, but he was dispassionate enough as a writer to recognize its appeal. This was a period, moreover, when the authority of Turgenev’s generation of the intelligentsia (the so-called ‘men of the forties’) was first seriously challenged by the new, radical, nihilist generation of the 1860s, whom Turgenev was to depict obliquely in On the Eve(1860) and directly in the figure of Bazarov in Fathers and Children(1862). Home of the Gentry is thus the last of Turgenev’s major works to be concerned exclusively with his own generation. It is both valedictory in its elegiac treatment of Lavretsky’s failure to achieve happiness and optimistic, if cautiously so, in its twin assumptions that Lavretsky’s unspectacular determination ‘to plough the land’ is a worthy task and that another, younger, generation is likely to revitalize the ‘home’ of the gentry when Lavretsky has gone. Lavretsky’s biography (chapters VIII to XVI) can be criticized for obtruding into and delaying the action of the novel, but it has an essential function despite this: it relates the novel to its time, recapitulating in miniature the experience of Turgenev’s own generation of the intelligentsia by showing how its Western education served to uproot it from Russia, to divorce it from its ‘home’ and to make it ultimately superfluous. Two characters in the fiction serve to highlight the ideological aspect of Lavretsky as a representative of his generation: Mikhalevich, his impoverished university friend, and Woldemar (or Vladimir) Panshin, his rival for Liza’s hand.
Mikhalevich’s arrival at Vasilyevskoye (chapter XXV) may seem gratuitous, just an interpolation, but Mikhalevich himself is not an interpolation in Lavretsky’s life. He is a ghost of Hamlet’s father come to remind him of the idealism (‘Religion, progress, humanity!’ he shouts as he leaves, almost falling out of the tarantass) to which he, Lavretsky, had aspired before his wife’s betrayal and four years of solitary reflection had nurtured such scepticism in his soul. Mikhalevich has the enthusiasm and idealism of a previous epoch and he indicts Lavretsky, notwithstanding the latter’s emotional state, for taking refuge in the self-pitying apathy of the well-read gentry, who excuse their inaction by assuming that ‘everything’s nonsense’. Man of words though he may be, Mikhalevich insists that ‘each individual has a duty, a great responsibility before God, before the people and before himself!’ – the duty, in other words, of the intelligentsia to work for Russia. It may be noticed that Lavretsky does not defend himself, for he does not conceive his duty in quite such grandiose terms. The curious and unbalanced education which he received from his father has taught him the danger of trying to implant ideas by force, of implementing changes from above without due regard for those who are to be changed. If it is the intelligentsia’s duty to act, what form should the action take? Lavretsky’s answer becomes clear in chapter XXXΙII during the controversy with Panshin. Here he forthrightly opposes Panshin’s view that changes must be introduced from above by speaking out in favour of Russia’s youth and independence and by demanding above all a recognition of Russia’s own ‘truth’ and reconciliation with it. But, though Turgenev ascribes these vague Slavophil sentiments to his hero, Lavretsky’s only statement of purposeful action is expressed in the words ‘To plough the land’ – to cultivate his garden, one supposes, in Voltairean fashion or to do his duty as a landowner in his own ‘home of the gentry’. In the Epilogue, which carries us eight years forward, we learn that ‘Lavretsky had a right to be satisfied: he had really made himself into a good proprietor, he had really learned how to plough the land, and he laboured not for himself alone; so far as was in his power, he tried to ensure and stabilize the livelihood of his peasants’. This, then, is the single positive achievement in Lavretsky’s life; in this way, and in this way only, Lavretsky readjusted to his home, became reconciled to its ‘truth’ and found his own ‘nest’.
All Turgenev’s novels have a topical reference. They are works which chronicle the ‘body and pressure of time’, meaning chiefly the evolution of Russian society and the Russian intelligentsia in its several epochs of the 1830s, 1840s and 1860s. Yet, though topical, they entirely lack that rumbustiousness, that sense of being written out of the noise and activity of their time, which is the pervasive sea-shell whisper in the novels of Charles Dickens; or in George Eliot’s Middlemarch, where her hortatory sermonizing, conjuring with manifold themes, presumptuousness towards her characters leave the impression that, through the window of the room where she writes and intermingling with her fiction, come the bustle and roar of a Victorian England which is for her more important than her representation of it; or in the work of Henry James, ever conscious of the noise outside, whose eloquence is of the slightly defensive kind which recognizes that an author’s voice must be tempered to the four walls of his novel’s setting. But the greatest of the nineteenth-century Russian novelists wrote out of the profundities of a silent country. In a real and literal sense Dostoyevsky wrote out of the nocturnal silence of St Petersburg, Tolstoy from the rural silence of Yasnaya Polyana and Turgenev from the summer quiet of Spasskoye. Their novels have the special, spell-binding absorption of voices speaking out of a natural stillness. None of Turgenev’s novels is more eloquent of such stillness than Home of the Gentry.
It is precisely such stillness that Lavretsky discovers when he returns finally to his ‘home’, the Vasilyevskoye that he preferred to the Lavriki of his boyhood (chapter XX):
And once again he began to listen to the silence, awaiting nothing – and yet at the same time endlessly expectant: the silence engulfed him on every side; the sun ran its course across the tranquil blue of the sky, and the clouds floated silently upon it; it seemed as if they knew why and where they were going. At that very time, in other places on the earth, life was seething, hurrying, roaring on its way; here the same life flowed by inaudibly, like water through marshy grass; and until evening Lavretsky could not tear himself away from contemplation of this receding, outflowing life; anguish for the past was melting in his soul like spring snow and – strangest of all! – never before had he felt so deep and strong a feeling for his country.
The boredom of such stillness will, he hopes, bring him to his senses and prepare him to ‘take up his task without hurry’. What awaits him, though, in his homeland is not such leisurely recovery but the exultation and heartbreak of his love for Liza. This experience is suggested to us as much in terms of sound as explicitly in terms of Lavretsky’s emotions. The novel is a Prospero’s isle in which the silence of Lavretsky’s homecoming is broken by the music of Liza’s presence. Lemm’s music, in which he invokes the stars (chapter XXII), is the accompaniment to the first stage in this process, interwoven as it is with Mikhalevich’s visit; but Lemm’s romance, like his cantata, ‘had striven to express something passionate and profound, but nothing had come of it’ and it is only through a vicarious sense of the passion and profundity of Lavretsky’s feeling that he is able to achieve his masterpiece and thereby orchestrate Lavretsky’s exultant love at the end of chapter XXXIV. This is the moment of climax in the novel when Lavretsky triumphs both ideologically and personally in his defeat of Panshin and his winning of Liza’s heart. The practically immediate reappearance of his wife (chapter XXXVI) is accompanied not only by the repugnant smell of patchouli, but also by her fondness for showy music. Her playing and singing, in dilettante partnership with Panshin, nicely offset and enhance, by their artificiality, the heartbreak of Lavretsky’s parting from Liza. When, after eigh
t years, he returns to the Kalitins’ house, it is the single reverberant note played on the piano that summarizes for him the extent of his loss.
The impossibility of happiness is the novel’s underlying theme. Turgenev tended to believe that man is never destined to experience happiness save as something ephemeral and inevitably foredoomed. In Home of the Gentry Lavretsky tries initially to assume that happiness is dependent upon the truth of the heart, as he tells Liza in chapter XXIX, but eventually he is obliged to accept Liza’s view that ‘happiness on earth does not depend on us’. But the pessimism implicit in this Turgenevan view of life is relieved throughout the novel by the affirmation of nature’s power to redeem, by the summer atmosphere in which the brief and poignant story is clothed and by the poetry with which Turgenev has invested the portrait of Liza, the heroine.
Naturally this portrait, so central to the novel, caused Turgenev more difficulty than any other. When the novel was given its first reading in draft form to an ‘areopagus’ (Turgenev’s term) of advisers in St Petersburg in late November or early December 1858, the chief criticism, it seems, was concerned with the religious background of Liza. Turgenev took particular care to amplify the portrait after this criticism by stressing aspects of her religious nature and by adding chapter XXXV which describes her religious upbringing. The uniqueness of Liza’s portrait is due chiefly to the fact that no other Turgenevan heroine has her specifically religious character, and commentators have consequently been tempted to seek for living prototypes, of whom the most frequently quoted is Countess E. E. Lambert who was Turgenev’s correspondent during the years when he was meditating his novel. His letters to her mirror the elegiac feeling which pervades his novel, but her claims as a prototype for Liza seem slender. Ivan Goncharov, the novelist, suspected that Turgenev had plagiarized the figure of Liza from his own heroine, Vera, of The Precipice (Obryv), cl aiming that he had told Turgenev the plan of his novel in 1855. The Precipice, however, was not published until 1869, which means that the plagiarization, even allowing for the possibility, could not have been based on anything more substantial than Goncharov’s initial sketches of his heroine’s character. Goncharov nursed his suspicions of Turgenev’s perfidy for the rest of his life. It is no more absurd to point to the faint similarity between Turgenev’s heroine and Tolstoy’s Liza of Two Hussars(1856), a work conceived and written at a time when both writers were living in close proximity and on fairly amicable terms.
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