The Gentle Barbarian

by V. S. Pritchett

  The question of Turgenev’s relationship with Pauline and the changes in it are important. It was the opinion of a large number of his Russian contemporaries that his love for her was fatal to his talent, for it was an obsession that took him away from Russia and damaged his understanding of his own country. It was also their opinion that she enslaved him and reduced him to the state of her cavalier servant and that he became the humiliated figure in a ménage à trois, and that his love was not a strength but a sign of his chronic weakness of will, at the root of his pessimism and his melancholy.

  Turgenev called Courtavenel “the cradle of his fame.” There at the age of twenty-eight he felt that épanouissement de l’être which gave him his first important subjects. His letters of this time are the happy letters of a mind finding itself and growing. It is a cultivated mind. It is endlessly curious. It is spirited and critical: the letters are brilliant, changeable, discursive talk, all personality. One can see that Pauline Viardot was drawn to him by not only his gaiety and his serious interest in her art, but his ease as a natural teacher. He was flattering, but the flattery was instructed. For example, he told her she had not quite mastered tragic parts where her talent would eventually lie—Iphigenia would suit her, but Goethe was “a shade calm” because “Thank God you come from the Midi—still there is something composed in your character.”

  Turgenev read everything rapidly and with excitement. He tells her that he has picked up a book by a fool called Daumer who holds the theory that Primitive Judaic Christianity was simply the cult of Moloch revived. A silly theory, but there is a terrible side to Christianity: the bloody, disheartening, anti-human side of a religion which set out to be a religion of love and charity. It is painful to read of the flagellation, the processions, worship of relics, the autos-da-fé, the hatred of life, the horror of women, all those wounds and all that talk of blood.

  Under her husband’s influence Turgenev’s conversation was peppered with bits of Spanish. Pauline, of course, knew the language well. Turgenev took Spanish lessons at Courtavenel and was soon reading Calderón. Of Calderón’s Devoción de la Cruz he says he is the greatest Catholic dramatic poet since Shakespeare—like him, the most humane and the most anti-Christian: He has

  cette foi immuable, triomphante, sans l’ombre dun doute ou même d‘une réflexion. Il vous écrase à force de grandeur et de majesté, malgré tout ce que cette doctrine a de répulsif et d’atroce. Ce néant de tout ce qui constitue la dignité de I‘homme devant la volonté divine, l’indifférence profonde pour tout ce que nous appelons vertu ou vice avec laquelle la Grâce se répand sur son élu—est encore un triomphe pour l’esprit humain, car l’être qui proclame ainsi avec tant d’audace son propre néant, s’élève par cela même à I’égal de cette Divinité fantasque, dont il se reconnaît être le jouet.

  He has moved on to Calderóne’s La Vida Es Sueño with its wild energy, its profound and sombre disdain for life, its astonishing boldness of thought, set side by side with Catholic fanaticism at its most inflexible. Calderón’s Segismund is the Spanish Hamlet. That life is a dream will be both context and impulse when Turgenev found his genius in poetic realism and already we see him forming his theory of the contrasting characters of Hamlet and Don Quixote. But a Hamlet who marks the difference between the South and the North. Hamlet is the more reflective, subtle and philosophic; the character of Segismund is simple, naked and as penetrating as a dagger: one fails to act through irresolution, doubt and brooding: the other acts—for his southern blood drives him to do so—but even as he acts he knows that life is only a dream. (The lover is subtly trying to stir her southern blood and draw out her Spanishness.)

  Contemporary literature, he reflects, is in a state of transition. It is eclectic and reflects no more than the scattered sentiments of their author. There is no great dominant movement—perhaps industrialism will take the place of literature; perhaps that will liberate and regenerate mankind. So perhaps the real poets are the Americans who will cut a path through Panama and invent a transatlantic electric telegraph. (Once the social revolution has been achieved a new literature will be born!) He doesn’t suppose that a spirit as discriminating, simple, straight-forward and serious as hers is has much patience with the stories of Diderot: he is too full of paradox and fireworks, though sometimes he has new and bold ideas. It is by his Encyclopaedia he will live and by his devotion to freedom. (There will be more than a touch of Diderot in the construction of Turgenev’s stories.)

  Louis Viardot has asked him to arrange his library. There is a list of books read: M. Ott’s History is the work of a Catholic Democrat—something against nature: that idea merely produces monsters. There are other nauseating books on history in the library: Rolteck, for example, with his flat, emphatic style but there are the spirited letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu; an absurd Spanish novel; Bausset’s Napoleon, the book of a born lackey; a dull translation of Virgil’s Eclogues, not exactly a marvel in the original. He has started on the Koran but despite its good sense he knows it will all lead sooner or later to the usual Oriental flatulence.

  But he knows that what she will most want is news of the theatre, what he is doing and the small events of life in Paris where he goes to buy the papers for critiques of her performances and to stroll in the Tuileries and to watch the pretty children and their staid nurses and enjoy the crisp autumn air. Autumn on a fine day is rather like Louis XIV in old age. He expects she’ll laugh at that idea. “Well, go on laughing to show your teeth.”

  Another day he goes to the woods at Ville d’Avray:

  L’impression que la nature fait sur l’homme est étrange. Il y a dans cette impression un fonds d’amertume fraîche comme tous les odeurs des champs, un peu de mélancholie sereine comme dans les chants d‘oiseaux

  and adds that he adores the reality, the changes, the dangers, the habits, the passing beauty of life. While he is rearranging Louis Viardot’s library the servant is polishing, washing, tidying, sweeping, waxing from morning to night. One night as he goes up to bed he hears two deep sighs that passed in a puff of air close to him. It froze him. Suppose the next moment a hand had touched him: he would have screamed like an eagle. (Question: Are the blind afraid of ghosts?) He lists the sounds he heard one night as he stood by the drawbridge: the throb of the blood in his ears, the rustle of leaves, the four crickets in the courtyard, fish rising in the moat, a dull sound from the road, the ping of a mosquito. He goes out to look at the stars and writes what will become one of the certainties of his life:

  Cette chose indifférente, impérieuse, vorace, égoiste, envahissante, c’est la vie, la nature …

  Still, tell Louis there are a lot of quail about and shooting begins on the 25th. There is a plague of orange tawneys (rougets). In an hour her aunt has caught “cinquante, cincuenta, fünfzig, fifty,” on her face and neck. He’s scratching himself with both hands. They’re all waiting for Mlle. Berthe’s arrival, para dar a comer a los bichos (“to give the bugs a meal”), as Don Pablo says, as a useful diversion. M. Fougeux arrives, the king of bores. Turgenev goes rowing and puffing around the moat with him. The moat needs dredging. Fougeux is a man who speaks only in clichés and quotations. Over and over again he says “Nature is only a vast garden.” God!

  One night he has a long fantastic flying dream. He is walking along a road lined with poplars and is obliged to sing the line “A la voix de la mére” a hundred times before he will be allowed to get home. He meets a white figure who calls himself his brother and who turns him into a bird. He finds he has a long beak like a pelican and off they fly:

  I can remember it still, not simply in the head, but if I can so express myself, with my whole body.

  They fly over the sea and below he sees enormous fish with black heads and he knows he has to dive for them because they are his food. A secret horror stops him. The sun suddenly rises and burns like a furnace. And so on. (Perhaps he was dreaming about his mother, his brother and the carp lying deep in the fish pond at Sp
asskoye. Many times in his later writings he evokes gross sinister fishes rising out of the deep water to threaten him. A great many years later, in a gloomy period of his life, he put this dream into a rhapsodic fantasy called Phantoms: it has little merit but suggests an erotic excitement or the frustration and fear of it.)

  From her exhausting tours and the applause of audiences in London, Germany and Austria, the singer and her husband returned at intervals to Courtavenel to rest. They had taken in the young Gounod and Turgenev was for a time a little jealous of Pauline’s interest in his work: there was some local gossip—George Sand indeed wrote to Pauline asking if he were “a good man”—but the friendship seems to have been strictly musical in its interests, though when Gounod suddenly married, his wife made trouble when Louis and Pauline sent her a bracelet.

  On Sundays Turgenev would go off shooting with Louis or would go for charming walks with Pauline. They lay under the trees talking or reading books aloud or in the house he would go through the works she was studying. If there were parties Turgenev danced with her; he was an excellent dancer. On ordinary evenings, the family of aunts sat about reading, knitting and sewing, and an uncle taught Pauline’s rather spoiled little daughter Spanish, Gounod worked on a musical score, and Turgenev told stories.

  Then Louis and Pauline were off again and every few days he was writing to her. The letters begin, Bonjour or Dear Madame Viardot, and there were friendly messages to Viardot. To hers, Viardot often added a postscript. Nothing could have been more correct; but by 1848, his letters often end in ardent phrases in German. She is his “dearest Angel.” Again “Thank you a thousand, thousand times for … you know why … you the best and dearest of women … what happiness you gave me then …” And “Give me your kind and delicate hands so that I can press and kiss them a long time … Whatever a man can think, feel and say, I say it and feel it now.”

  Her hands were beautiful and he worshipped them all his life. In a letter sent to her in 1849 he said in German:

  All day I have been lost in a magical dream. Everything, everything, all the past, all that has been poured irresistibly and spontaneously into my soul … I am whole … I belong body and soul to my dear Queen. God bless you a thousand times.

  In July ‘49 at Courtavenel he went off to a village féte, studied the faces and watched the sweating dancers. He passed the next day alone and wrote to her in German:

  I cannot tell you how much I have thought of you every day, when I got back to the house I cried out your name in ecstasy and opened my arms with longing for you. You must have heard and seen me!

  There is a line in one letter in which, once only, he addresses her as “du.” From this and from the paragraphs in German some biographers have thought that Pauline and he had become physically lovers and that German was used to hide the fact from her husband who is said not to have known the language. This is most unlikely: Louis had been many times to Germany; as a capable translator in a bilingual family, he must at least have picked up some German in the course of his business and indeed from Pauline’s singing. German is more likely to be “a tender little language” between intimate friends and Turgenev, the polyglot, liked to spice his letters with foreign words for he could not use more than a word or two of Russian to her. Perhaps in using German he was simply using the romantic language of the sublime he had learned in Berlin when he was nineteen. Expressions of love are at once more extravagant and frequent in a foreign tongue and, for that reason, have the harmless sense of theatrical fantasy or flattery: platonic love affairs live by words and not deeds. George Sand wrote with the same exaltation in her novels; and young women of the period would expect no less from a correspondent, especially from the Russian “openness.” There is no sign that Pauline ever replied to Turgenev in such terms.

  It is impossible to say more about the nature of this love for the moment; but there is strong reason to suspect that Pauline, duty or no duty, “hot southern blood” (as she once or twice said) or not, was one of those gifted young women who do not feel physical passion until later in life and have something mannish in their nature. And what about the guilt Turgenev may have felt in being in love with the wife of a generous friend? This is also a mystery: there is only a slight sign of this embarrassment in his stories.

  In their biographies, Yarmolinsky, Magarshack and April Fitzlyon differ considerably in their interpretation. Yarmolinsky is vivid, engaging and ironical in the disabused manner of the nineteen-twenties and regards the love affair as purely platonic on both sides, a deep amitié amoureuse, which would go a long way to explaining why Turgenev never gave it up and why Louis Viardot tolerated it. (Louis was to become the father of four children.) Magarshack asserts that Pauline did become Turgenev’s mistress and that the affair came quickly to an end because she gave him up for Ary Scheffer, the painter, who often came to Courtavenel and that when she and Turgenev were reconciled she was unfaithful to him and her husband again. He also accepts the common gossip that her second daughter, Didie, and her son Paul were probably Turgenev’s children. Neither of these writers has closely considered the character of Pauline and all the evidence as searchingly as April Fitzlyon has done. She believes that Pauline did fall seriously in love with Turgenev and indeed felt passion for the first time; that it is just possible they were briefly lovers, though to neither of them was physical love important—indeed Pauline may have been put off by a dislike of “conjugal duty”—and that, in any case, she put her art before personal relationships always and is well-known to have disapproved of the Bohemian morals of her profession. Far from having been her lover, Ary Scheffer—a man as old as her husband and a stern moralist—would be the counsellor who prevented her from leaving her husband for Turgenev and made her control her heart by her will which was certainly very strong. She says it is indeed just possible in the case of the son that Turgenev was the father, but it is unlikely and there is no evidence. And that although Turgenev made bitter remarks in the vicissitudes of his attachment to her and in his masochistic way said that he lived under her heel as many of his incredulous friends thought, he endured what he did endure because he was in love with his own chivalrous love.

  In this situation Louis Viardot behaved with dignity and concealed the pain he must have felt. He was passionately in love with his wife and was no cynic: he remained friends with Turgenev all his life, although some thought their attitude to each other formal.

  The situation indeed changed, as we shall see.

  Whatever went on at Courtavenel in those early years there is no doubt that Louis and his wife must have regarded Turgenev affectionately as an extraordinary and exotic case. Viardot himself, as a traveller and one who had felt the Spanish spell of his wife, must have felt the Russian spell of Turgenev. They must have been astounded by the story of his barbarous experience at Spasskoye, and have been amazed that the giant had grown to be grave and gentle, as well as gifted. And Louis must have recognised a wit and a mind far richer than his own. The Viardots felt concern for his talent and both pointed to the dangers of idleness to a man who was rich enough to do nothing. Pauline was no amateur: she was an artist and a professional and it can never have entered her head that Turgenev, who was incapable of managing money or any practical matter, could replace her husband. One can see by their kindness, and especially Louis Viardot’s, that although they saw his distinction and originality, their feeling must have been protective. Viardot had no small vanity in his own taste and exercised an almost fatherly right to give sound advice to the feckless aristocrat and was aware of having two artists on his hands whom he could keep in order. He was a rational man but quietly firm in requiring moral behaviour and decorum.

  There is a line in A Month in the Country, the play that Turgenev began to write before he left Courtavenel and which in many respects is drawn on his situation as a lover. Rakitin, the lover, is made to say at the crisis of the play:

  “It is time to put an end to these morbid, consumptive relations.”
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br />   Consumptive? Or self-consuming? It strikes one that those words must have been actually spoken at Courtavenel not by Turgenev but by Viardot. They have his manner.

  There comes a moment, in one of the last letters Turgenev was to write from Courtavenel, when he adds a sentence in German:

  What is the matter with Viardot? Is he upset because I am living here?

  Chapter 4

  Turgenev was all personality but he did not pour everything away in talk at Courtavenel. He began to write and indeed earned a little money. He had before him the example of a young woman who sacrificed her personal feeling for her art. And there was the industry, even the literary influence, of Louis Viardot himself, who saw that Turgenev’s talents would have to struggle against his expectations of great wealth and ease. The methodical slaughterer had written a book about his holidays with the gun. When he and Turgenev went out shooting near Rozay-en-Brie the dull country brought his memories of the ravines, the marshes, the oak woods of Spasskoye to life. He discovered that, Westerner though he was, he carried an ineffaceable Russia inside him; the Russia of his boyhood and young manhood became all the clearer in detail and stronger in meaning for being distant. Distance also freed him of the direct rancours of politics. He sat down to write prose, the first of The Sportsman’s Sketches. He was proud to write to Pauline that he had sent off packets of manuscript to The Contemporary in Russia and the editor and the readers asked for more.

  When he became a writer of stories Turgenev was obliged to find some way of disguising himself and of distributing his character among the people he created. In The Sportsman’s Sketches he had to be, with his natural modesty, what he had been—an anonymous amateur of his sport, coming casually upon the country people of the private nation he had been brought up in. The people and woods of Orel and Kaluga were his educators as a writer.