Turgenev’s gratitude was eloquent. He renamed the child Paulinette and, once again, with theatrical feeling, declared that Pauline would henceforth be her “mother”; that the child should be “their” daughter. The play was like the fancy of a child and there was indeed something, as Pauline said of him afterwards, naive and child-like in the dilettante of Petersburg. The matter was quickly settled, for the Viardots understood the terrible stories he had told them of his mother’s rule. Turgenev found a French woman who was returning to Paris, put Paulinette in her care and set them on the road to Stettin in Poland. He travelled with them for three days by diligence and studied the child’s character. She showed herself to be intelligent if tough and forward, for she had had her way with the old serf women who had brought her up and treated her as an amusing toy. She loved music, she said; but she had seen “many evil things.” She told him for example that she didn’t feel sorry for anyone—no one had felt pity for her. But suppose, he had asked, if she saw someone suffering? To that the child said “What about it? The only person I’m sorry for is myself.” And added that although she was only little she knew what the world was like: “I’ve seen everything,” she said. He told Pauline that, like himself, the child had sulky moods. Still, he was confident that her life as a free person in a civilised house where she was loved would transform the little savage.
Four years passed before she saw her father again and she had been transformed, but not as all had foreseen. Music bored her. She did not like her new mother and she quarrelled jealously with Pauline’s Louise. And she grew up to be watchful and knowing about what went on in the Viardot family.
Soon after the quarrel with their mother about the estate, Turgenev left Moscow for Petersburg and Varvara Petrovna left for Spasskoye. When she got there she heard that her sons had secretly been there to collect their things. She screamed at her butler, “How dared you let them in.”
“We could not refuse them,” the trembling butler said, “They are our masters.”
“Masters! Masters! I am the only mistress of this place,” she said, and snatching a riding whip she slashed him across the face.
She did not stay long at Spasskoye. Her illness got worse and the procession started back over the rough roads to Moscow, where her doctor said she was suffering not only from dropsy but from consumption. She was slowly dying and sat in silence. No one dared mention her sons to her. She was preparing herself for death, but her vitality kept her alive longer than anyone thought possible. She wrote a note to be given to her sons after her death which ordered them to give her butler and Porfiry, the serf doctor, their freedom and sums of money.
When at last the death agony began, Nikolai came to her side. She stroked his head and murmured Ivan’s name—but the news had not reached him. She had ordered her orchestra to play dance music in the next room as she died.
Afterwards, a note was found in her diary. It said: “My mother! My children! Forgive me. And you Lord forgive me for pride, that deadly sin, was always my sin.”
“God save us,” Turgenev wrote to Pauline, “from a death like that.” It horrified him. Even in the years when he had made excuses about coming home to see his mother, even when he persisted in his love for “that gypsy,” she had ruled him from a distance. Now he had no ruler or only an imagined ruler in Pauline.
He was suddenly rich. The huge estate was equally divided between his brother Nikolai, a man who was to show himself as practical and as careful to improve his capital as Turgenev was careless. Ivan’s share was 30,000 acres of which Spasskoye alone had 3,000 and he had the large income of 25,000 roubles a year. He righted some wrongs at once: he freed all his household serfs. With the others he had his difficulties, but in putting them on an annual rent, instead of sticking to the old system of making them work half the week for him without wages, he showed that he was not a serf-owner, but a landowner who had, like Lavretsky in A Nest of Gentlefolk, a serious interest in the land. But Turgenev, though he might see the importance of this, was temperamentally unfitted for the role of master. Viardot wrote to advise him to install a manager and he did so: a friend and writer called Tyutchev and his family were put in charge. It was soon noticed that they spread all over the house at Spasskoye. The neighbors said that Turgenev gave the impression of being a lodger: so he was because, restless like his mother, he was often up in Moscow and above all Petersburg on his literary business. He was bored by provincial life. He still longed for Courtavenel and spoke of going there in two years and he was avid for the letters that took fifteen days to reach him. He blessed the Viardots again and again for their goodness to his daughter. Scrupulously he sent money for her pension to Louis Viardot. He had recovered from the misery of the parting. There was something, he said, that goes straight to the heart in being on one’s native soil, among people who talk your own language and who, good or bad, are made of the same clay as oneself. Things might go badly, but at least one was in one’s natural element. His only trouble was that he was thirty-two. His youth had gone. Seven years had passed since he had been taken to see her—he wrote to Pauline—for the first time.
In Petersburg he took an expensive and handsome flat where he kept a valet and a cook and, once more, was the gourmet and dandy with a monocle on its ribbon, entertaining his friends and going from drawing-room to drawing-room. The chestnut-haired young man was becoming prematurely grey and the grave blue-eyed gaze of the man of the world brought the women buzzing round him to hear his witticisms and his laughter. He had always charmed society, but now The Sportsman’s Sketches—though not yet published in book form—had made him a celebrity. The unsuccessful poet had vanished. He had become the dangerous writer, the hope of the young enemies of serfdom. He had moved to minor successes in the theatre. He had written three plays: The Bachelor, which had short runs in Petersburg and Moscow, despite a poor second Act; the long A Month in the Country; and a witty one-act piece, A Provincial Lady. The last was a great success in Petersburg. He had caught influenza but went to the packed theatre and murmured Pauline’s name for luck as the curtain went up. He found the acting of the young première detestable, but at the end the applause was so loud and sustained that he lost his head and ran out of the theatre.
But the censor refused to pass A Month in the Country because of its “immorality”; it would have been permitted if Rakitin had been shown to be in love with a widow, but not with a married woman. The play is usually taken to be based on Turgenev’s relationship with Pauline and does seem to be a partial transfiguration of it, but the differences are obvious. The story has been transferred to Russian provincial life in which the characters are trapped by the boredom Turgenev hated. Pauline was not a bored provincial woman on the verge of middle age; Turgenev was not an idler; there was no young girl in rivalry with Pauline. The only possible portraits are the young man with whom Natalya has fallen in love: he is a sort of Gounod but without the temperament. The farming husband might be Viardot. It was always Turgenev’s habit to start with models from real life and, as many writers do, to transfer them to other scenes or to add bits of other people and aspects of himself to them. No doubt, for Turgenev’s ear and memory were quick, some of the lines of the play may have been spoken at Courtavenel but one notices how the burden of the play is borne by Rakitin-Turgenev rather than by Pauline-Natalya. It does contain Natalya’s mockery of Rakitin’s poetic talk of Nature, which Pauline may have spoken, but it is the bitter, analytical Turgenev who warns the new young lover in words that his own father might have used.
Love, whether happy or unhappy is a real calamity if you give yourself up wholly to it. You wait! I don’t suppose you know yet how those delicate hands can torture you, with what tender solicitude they can tear your heart to pieces. You will find out how much blazing hatred is hidden beneath the most ardent of love … You will find out what it means to belong to a petticoat, what it means to be enslaved, to be infected and how shameful and weary such slavery is.
The play was not
performed in Russia until the seventies—thirty years on—perhaps because of the novelising longueurs of the original version—and it charmed an audience who looked back upon the graces of the forties with nostalgia. The success was also due to the brilliant young actress Savina, who when she read it felt the part of the young girl Vera was far more important than the part of Natalya and, by this insight, brought the play to life. She was at that time unaware of any autobiographical sources there might be. We can agree that in Rakitin, Turgenev was mocking himself. From the point of view of Turgenev’s novels it is interesting that he has found his future setting: the Russian country house, the future classic scene of the Russian novel; and that the comedy is as ordered as a dance and sparkles like a poem. It foreshadows the mastery of poetic realism in the love stories to which he was about to turn.
The Russian Sphinx looked stonily at his success. The revolution of ‘48 had made the police and censors watchful. They were watching for Turgenev to make the small careless error. Their chance came the following year in 1852: the great Gogol died suddenly at the age of forty-three. The censor had not forgotten that the Tsar, in a moment of levity, had allowed The Government Inspector and Dead Souls to ridicule the official classes; Gogol himself had recanted and had come to regard his great works as scandalous. Just as Tolstoy was to denounce his own work after his conversion, so Gogol repudiated everything he had written except a huge and wearisome volume of moralising letters he had written to a pious aristocratic lady. Gogol had even attacked the readers and critics who praised him and left Russia for years of travel in Europe and the Holy Land. His feeble health had been ruined by gluttony which he abandoned for diets that starved him. His morbid secretiveness had become religious mania and eccentricity was verging on madness, and just before his death he burned the second part of Dead Souls: he had gone out of his mind in trying to kill his own fantastic comic spirit.
The censors were now determined to have their revenge and to suppress eulogies of the early Gogol. Turgenev had been to see the sick man a few months before his death and wrote a portrait of him in his Literary Reminiscences. He noted the famous comic nose which gave Gogol his cunning fox-like look, the puffy lips, the bad teeth; but he said the tired eyes of the great artist and poet sparkled. It was tragic to hear the old fox now praising the censorship and saying it developed the acumen or patience of authors! In his account of Gogol’s reading of The Government Inspector there is a passage which reveals as much of Gogol as of Turgenev the raconteur:
With what puzzled and astonished expression did Gogol utter the phrase of the Mayor about the two rats (at the very beginning of the play)—“They came, they sniffed and they went away.” He even looked up at us slowly, as though asking for an explanation of such an astonishing performance.
Different as the two men were, they were masters of timing and were united in their habit of marvelling at the sight of small things.
Indignant at the silence of the Press at Gogol’s death, Turgenev sent an ardent, personal eulogy to a Petersburg paper: this was brave in the climate of the time. His letter contained one very dangerous thought, “Only thoughtless and short-sighted people do not feel the presence of a living flame in everything uttered by him.” Officials do not like being called short-sighted. The Petersburg censor banned the letter. The last thing the censor wanted to see fanned was “a living flame.” At this, and counting on the traditional jealousy between the Petersburg and Moscow censors, Turgenev easily got the Moscow censor to pass the letter. When the Tsar heard, he sacked the Moscow man and ordered the author of The Sportsman’s Sketches to be arrested for “manifest disobedience,” the fundamental, everlasting Russian sin. When a time-serving University Chancellor called Gogol “a servile writer,” Turgenev wrote a letter to a friend: “Sitting up to their necks in shit these people have undertaken to eat it to the full.” The police intercepted the letter. Turgenev was sent to jail for a month and then to exile on his estate and remained under police supervision until 1856—although The Sportsman ‘s Sketches slipped by in the meantime without hindrance in volume form! One more censor was sacked.
From prison he got a letter out secretly to the Viardots and said he was treated decently. He walked up and down for exercise 416 times a day and reckoned that he covered two kilometers. It wasn’t exactly cheerful, but his room was large, he had books. He could write and indeed he wrote one of his most famous reminiscent tales, Mumu, “a true story,” the account of his mother’s cruel treatment of a dumb servant whose only love was for his dog. She ordered him to get rid of it because she could not stand its barking; the servants conspire to help him, but when this fails, he is forced to go off and drown it. For Turgenev, Mumu is dumb Russia. The servant leaves the house for good and walks twenty miles to his own village, but with “an invincible purpose, a desperate and yet joyous determination … his eyes fixed greedily straight before him.” Passion has been born: the passion for his own freedom.
Crowds came to visit Turgenev in jail on the first day. That was soon stopped but the ladies hung about outside to catch sight of him. Excellent food was sent in. He made the governor drunk and got him to join in a toast to Robespierre and amused himself by looking over the dossiers of suspects or arrested men which were left lying about in the governor’s office. But his smuggled letter to Pauline became less light-hearted:
The saddest thing of it all is that it is a final Goodbye to all hope of travelling abroad: it is true that I had never deluded myself on that score. I knew well that when I left you it would be for a long time, perhaps forever. I am left with only one desire: that I shall be allowed to travel where I like in Russia.
There was another reason for his despair. He had heard that Pauline was again pregnant. If he had had any mad dream that he and she would be united, this marked the fortifying of her marriage. The child was a daughter, Didie, and in time Pauline had a third daughter called Marianne and a son Paul. If the friendship continued, he would always be, as he put it, on the edge of another man’s nest. The letters that passed between them had always been formally addressed, but now the private ecstasies in German are dropped.
His arrest, the short imprisonment and the two years of exile on his estate to which he was sentenced, and subsequent police supervision, were a lasting shock to a man who put his freedom first. It was a shock of disgust and it certainly put an end to a plan he had to travel across Russia. He was not allowed to go more than forty miles from Spasskoye. It is true that the arrest added to his fame as the author of A Sportsman’s Sketches: he became the most promising writer in Russia, for Tolstoy had not yet appeared and Dostoevsky had written only Poor Folk and The Double and in two years would be silenced by his long exile in Siberia.
The separation from the Viardots was excellent for the writer if it was wretched for the man. Turgenev realised in Spasskoye that in the nine years since he had first met Pauline he had become a different man and that the house had changed. He still had his room with its screens by the bedside—they were decorated with a mosaic in wood crudely copied by Varvara Petrovna’s orders by a serf-workman from an album she had brought back from Sorrento—there was a large ikon in one corner and a leather armchair, relics of his mother’s life and his writing tables by the window looking out on his avenue of limes. Everything had aged. The housekeeper, who used to lavish raspberry jam on him, had shrivelled. The high-heeled and ribboned goat-skin slippers of the butler still creaked, but his legs were like sticks inside his yellow breeches and his face had shrunk into a sort of little fist. All the man’s teeth had gone. The boys on the estate had suddenly become men. In the garden he gazed with wonder at the birches, the maples and an oak sapling he had planted. How tall they were; how fine his avenues of limes. The birds—birds appear in nearly all his stories—the orioles, the nightingales, the doves, the woodpecker and the cuckoo filled him with tenderness, but the house smelled musty although he was fond of the ancestral furniture, the old chests and their brass plates, the fly-blown glass l
ustres, the white armchairs with oval backs. He had simple homemade stuff in the room where he worked. The green blinds had turned yellow and threw off a soft light on the ceiling.
Memories of childhood flooding back upon me—wherever I went, whatever I looked at, they surged on all sides, distinct, to the smallest detail, and, as it were, immovable in their clearly defined outlines … then I gradually turned away from the past and all that was left was a sort of drowsy heaviness in my heart.
He looked at his books. There was his Candide of 1770, newspapers and periodicals of that year: his Mirabeau—The Triumphant Chameleon—and his great-grandmother’s French grammar and books he had bought abroad. Faust, for example, which he knew once by heart, a poor edition of 1828.
At Spasskoye he passed as a clever, lazy man who played chess and draughts and games of Preference. He entertained his neighbours and was bored. The only diversions were days of shooting. People tried to marry him off as we can guess from his story The Two Friends, for he was a catch. Letters from Pauline became rarer. He writes to her: no music, no friends—not even neighbours. The Tyutchevs are excellent people but we do not live in the same world. What have I left? Work and memories but if the former is to become possible and the latter less bitter I must have letters from you with news of your happiness and the breath of sunshine and poetry that they bring. My life is dripping away like a tap.
Music was what he missed most. Mme. Tyutchev could be pushed to the piano but her husband had no music in him. The daughter could only thump. He went to the houses of his neighbours but these parties turned into sing-songs and charades. In his story The Two Friends there is a comic account of a young lady who is urged by her father to sing “that Italian piece where you go patter-patter like peas.” The girl’s shrill voice breaks into howls and “from certain nasal sounds it could be surmised that she was singing in Italian.” The charades led to clowning and Turgenev, always an actor in his mad moods, could easily act a hare sniffing and munching, passing its paws over its face, pricking up its ears and bounding off. (He had clowned at the Herzens, one remembers, when he was under stress in Paris in 1848.)
The Gentle Barbarian Page 9