The Gentle Barbarian

by V. S. Pritchett

  The stream of letters that had crawled across Europe from the Viardots in the early days of his absence had begun to dry up. He complained that Pauline told him less and less about herself: he and she, he felt, were only in touch by their fingertips. “The affections wilt when the chances of meeting again are almost nil.” He himself had little to tell her. He told her about his shooting and tempted Viardot with the numbers of birds shot. There were messages from her, not altogether assuring, about Paulinette.

  Despite the dangers of seeing autobiography even in novelists in whom the autobiographical strain is strong, one can see a likely fragment of it in his short story in letters, A Correspondence, which he had begun to write far earlier. The end looks as if it had been tacked on. It is in many ways, biographically speaking, an addition to his self-accusation about the jilting of Tatyana Bakunin and may go back further to one of those love-affairs in Berlin which Herzen taunted him about. There appears to be an oblique reference to Pauline who appears here as a ballet dancer:

  One could not even call the girl a beauty: I have only to close my eyes and at once the theatre is before me, the almost empty stage, representing the heart of a forest … and she running in from one wing on the right… and from that fatal moment I belonged to her like a dog…

  And:

  I never anticipated that I should come to hanging about rehearsals, bored and frozen, behind the scenes, breathing in the smut and grime of the theatre, making friends with all sorts of unexpected persons. Making friends did I say?—cringing slavishly upon them. I never anticipated that I should carry a ballet-dancer’s shawl, buy her new gloves, clean her old ones with breadcrumbs…

  But when he says that love is not a free union of souls as the German professors had somehow taught him, but a state in which one person is slave and the other master—“Ah, we’re great hands, we Russians, at making such a finish”—the bitterness he felt at Spasskoye is plain.

  In the April of 1853 Turgenev read in the newspapers and heard from friends that the Viardots were again in Petersburg. He was pained that she had not written to tell him of this journey. A bad omen. Then he heard that Louis Viardot had taken seriously ill and had been sent back to France. She was on her own and was coming to give performances in Moscow. His hopes blazed up. He was in exile and was forbidden to travel but he took a gamble and travelled there secretly on a false passport. It is known that either she had a cold or feigned one, cancelled her performances for a few days, and that they met. What happened between them or what was said is unknown. April Fitzlyon suggests that there was a struggle between duty and love in Pauline’s mind and that duty probably won. In The Price of Genius, she quotes a confession to the German conductor, Julius Rietz, written at a later date:

  What interior happiness one has each time that willpower has gained a victory over passion, over instinct! It breaks you, but the knowledge of having raised yourself a step towards good sustains us and gives us sometimes the strength to resist cruel sufferings. When one wishes to, one can always find antidotes—yes, alas, one finds them.

  But what were the antidotes? Casual love affairs? Surely not—she disapproved of the escapades of her friends. Her family? The taste for fine houses? The social excitements of fame and applause? Concern for money? Hers was a fiercely competitive life.

  Although she is likely to have admired his recklessness in coming to Moscow, she would be angrily aware of the political embarrassment she would be put into. Her life was public and gossip would be damaging to her and certainly would get back to Viardot. There may have been no struggle with her heart at all, for what was much on her mind at this time was that there were signs that she had begun to strain her voice. A letter written by Turgenev when he got back to Spasskoye suggests that the singer was agitated and displeased. Perhaps she was worried about Viardot’s health? Turgenev said that her two letters from Moscow and Petersburg were “laconic,” but—being given to thinking in confusing images—he added that the second

  a l’air d’un torrent qui tombe, chaque mot est tout impatient de ne pas être le dernier.

  Her letter sounded as though it had been a series of unfinished exclamations. And, with irony, he said he hoped that when the whirlwind in which she was living had died down she would give a more detailed account of what she was doing. He then turns to his health, as usual, and says it is going “clopin-clopant” like a hare that has been “peppered in what hunters call its ‘sac’” he has the idea that he is suffering from a trifle known as cancer of the intestine.

  After this meeting their relationship came virtually to an end on her side. In two years she gave birth to her third daughter.

  Turgenev distracted himself with a love affair with a serf-girl called Feotiska. According to Isaac Pavlovsky’s Souvenirs sur Tour-guéneff, which is interesting on the customs of the country, Turgenev had a relation, a young beauty of sixteen who managed a small estate of her own. She was taken aback when Turgenev offered to buy her personal maid from her. She haggled and stuck out for the high price of 700 roubles—25 or 30 roubles was the usual price. The girl—Feotiska—was thin, dark and plain: her sad eyes seem to have attracted him. He paid the price demanded and she was in tears when he took her to Spasskoye. He felt so strongly at the time that he made serious attempts to educate her, but she hated that and broke into violent rages. She bore him a son—his second illegitimate child—but he believed that he was not the father of it and got rid of her by marrying her off to a petty official. The child was put into an orphanage and he was never afterwards able to trace it. Fatherhood, one can see, was not one of Turgenev’s gifts.

  Whether he told Pauline about Feotiska is not known. He probably would not have thought such sexual affairs important enough, though, in a naive way, he did tell her about his passing flirtations. Perhaps he hoped they would cause what Balzac used to call a “profitable jealousy.” They did, for Pauline was possessive of the man she did not want and her temper was roused. The coolness after Moscow had obviously some connection with a letter from him telling her that he had thought of marrying another girl, a cousin called Olga Turgenev, a pretty and witty little blonde girl of nineteen. For a month she had turned his head, but it all came to nothing. When Pauline was angered by this he pointed out that she had had the first news from himself.

  Chapter 6

  Although Courtavenel had been “the cradle of his fame,” getting away from the presence of Pauline and the “consumptive relationship” was a release for the hidden novelist. As early as 1847 he had written a story about his days as a student, Andrey Kolosov, a kind of prose Parasha, which Dostoevsky had called a landmark. It attacks the romantic sickness from which he was recovering, “the faint-hearted creatures who from dullness or weakness go on playing the cracked strings of their flabby and sentimental hearts.” The narrator is one of these: he is the weak young hero-worshipper of the ruthless student Kolosov, known as “the extraordinary man”—a theme which will recur again and again in Turgenev’s writing: the preoccupation with the need of an exemplar or leader which was felt by educated young Russians in the next two decades. The story has also another aspect, not often considered by admirers of his sensitive and poetic writings; Turgenev’s gift for the raw sardonic comedy of vulgar or shabby genteel life in which Gogol and Dickens are his masters. The “unpresentable persons” belong to the low families who scheme to make a “catch” for their oppressed daughters and they are a welcome relief. They also set the story in perspective and his management of perspective is Turgenev’s distinctive gift. The passing effect of a minor character, the awful Shtchitov, who is compared to “the unswept floor of a Russian restaurant,” is to send up the unheroic narrator who, on the wave of imitative sentimentality, tries to take on the poor girl whom the “extraordinary” Kolosov has grown bored with. Turgenev’s point is: Better the ruthless man who throws the girl over than the sentimentalist who broods on “the sacredness of love” and who will be a muddler and, inevitably, turn into a cad and leave a
trail of mess and snuffles behind him. The comedy is not harsh and sour. Turgenev is the dispassionate observer of youth in the years when one feeling so naturally changes into its opposite. The scene in which the narrator declares his love for the jilted girl—and in which it is clear that he has really been unconsciously in love with Kolosov and not with her—is done in the manner from which Chekhov learned in the next generation:

  I almost shouted: “I love you. I want to marry you. I want to be your champion, your friend. I don’t ask for love. Till tomorrow.” With these words I rushed out of the room. In the passage [her father] met me, and not only showed no surprise at my visit but positively, with an agreeable smile, offered me an apple… “Take the apple, it is a nice apple. Really!” Mechanically I took the apple at last and drove all the way home with it in my hand.

  The ludicrous incident, like some discordant musical note, does not belittle the girl’s misery in love, as mere wit or humourousness would do, but makes us respect its pathos.

  There was no established tradition of story telling or novel writing in Russian literature. Turgenev is a founder and innovator: the great novels of the nineteenth century were in the future—he was at the beginning of that awakening which was to run parallel with the awakening of the Russian peoples themselves. Behind him there were fables and the superb narrative of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin: that did offer to the coming Russian novelists the model love story, but it was done in verse. It was important in forming the classical cast of Turgenev’s genius and was a source of his kind of poetic realism. But neither he nor any of the Russian novelists had the equivalent of Defoe, Richardson, Smollett, Sterne, Fielding, Scott or the early Dickens before them. Russian culture in the eighteenth century had been bred in France and was an interest of the educated classes only. Turgenev regarded Pushkin as a master because Pushkin sought to replace French influence by the influence of the German and the English—by Goethe and Shakespeare. From Pushkin he learned how to give an ironical picture of society, the art of miniature and its opposite, spontaneous improvisation.

  Turgenev was only slightly drawn to French models. Diderot and Mérimée amused him because they were writers of novellas. Balzac he detested: “a mere ethnographer,” he said. After Pushkin, Gogol was a tempting genius, but Gogol’s realism broke into poetic and chaotic fantasy: he dived into comic disorder and the grotesque; his language was almost malignly rich, his imagination was so secretive, devious and conniving that it spread, so to say, into the underground of character and situation. But Turgenev’s temperament was for the classical and concise: where Gogol was involved and satirical at once, Turgenev was the spectator—his work before anything else was shaped and lyrical. He sought to tell the observable truth; Gogol went on into sly wild journeys of fancy beyond it and, of course, in the end, went over the precipice into piety and metaphysical remorse.

  Turgenev’s other contemporary was Lermontov, who was killed in a duel. He was a violent and Romantic Byron; there was no violence, no man of ruthless action in Turgenev and no taste for danger and romantic actes gratuites and dramatic pungency. But he did see in Lermontov a drastic talent made for the novella of 30,000 words. The Lermontov influence is strong in two early Turgenev stories: The Jew, the laconic and horrifying tale of a wretched spy who uses his daughter as bait to soldiers waiting for battle and is hanged; and in The Duellist, the tale of a young officer’s half love-affair with the dour regimental killer who is watching for one more chance of an affair of honour, the direct influence of Lermontov is strong; indeed these two stories are so well done that one suspects the Lutovinov strain in Turgenev was not quite extinguished and, in life, survived in the gentlemanly killing of birds.

  But the central preoccupation, well-rooted in Turgenev’s mind, was with establishing the idea of civilisation—which he eventually spelled out letter by letter—and the autonomy of art in a country that, for him, had been barbarous or inert for centuries; the belief in these values, he observed, often took too hopefully the wrong road and led the unwary or the innocent into delusions and self-deception, but as values they stood firm. Under the despotic system in Russia the hopeful were easily frustrated and, if they lacked will, easily became resigned or drifted back, when youth had passed, into futility and went to pieces. For fifty years the question of the emancipation of the serfs had been argued but it drifted: the drift had come to be regarded as a state of grace. As an intellectual, Turgenev knew the pleasant futility of endless speculative talk and, in this connection, it is interesting to compare the Russian situation with the Spanish of the nineteenth century, the situation of a country hostile to the West and stagnant and, which, after 1898, produced a group of writers one of whose themes was abulia, the lack of will. As a novelist he knew his part was to see the Russian situation in terms of living men and women and what they represented, truthfully. It was easy to write essays about ideas; it would be easy, had he been a German, to write a tutorial Bildingsroman; but as a Russian and in his country, he had to innovate and invent a new art.

  At Spasskoye in the fifties he tried first of all a very long reminiscent novel about the Lutovinovs, but it became shapeless and he gave it up. He also tried his hand at plain realism in The Inn, a story of peasant greed: it fails because it is photographic. He did better in A Backwater, a tragedy of provincial isolation. He had little power of invention but, as many writers of talent do, he got round this by turning his defects to advantage and discovered the hidden logic and drama of mood. A trivial word spoken when the company are for a moment silent will have the grace effect of a bell-like echo later on in the story. At once the structure of the story is sonata-like, one is left with the reverberations of a note hanging in the air after it has been struck on the key.

  Looking at the life around him he at last sees that the gentry have become prolific in a type that he calls the superfluous or unnecessary man, a race of failing Hamlets. Superfluous men haunted Russian fiction for more than a generation and Turgenev will eventually arrive at the conclusion that there is a continual struggle between Don Quixote and Hamlet in the Russian temper, and saw this conflict in himself. The first of his Hamlets appears in The Hamlet of the Shchigrovsky District. (It was eventually published as one of his pieces of marksmanship among the landowners of The Sportsman’s Sketches and it is brilliant farce.) Yet we are made to feel sympathy for the nameless, ridiculous self-styled Hamlet who appears in it, a man who feels himself to be inferior to governors, princes, officials, even to the local police. The melancholy of Turgenev does not thwart his comic gifts: the opening account of the male house party in a provincial mansion is pure Gogol:

  these well-disposed people were engaged in importantly sorting their cards and casting sideward glances at newcomers without moving their heads: also five or six district officials with round tummies, puffy sticky little hands and modestly immobile feet. These gentlemen spoke in soft voices, regaled everyone with timid smiles, held their cards close to their shirt-fronts and, when playing trumps, did not thump them down on the table but, on the contrary, let them drop with a floating motion on to the green cloth and, as they gathered in their winnings, produced a slight but very decorous and polite creaking sound.

  The excellence in this story lies in the way Turgenev conveys that everyone in the party is aware of everyone else: the party moves, the eyes glance, the vapid thoughts are telegraphed with meaningless content round the room. We are only at the beginning of Turgenev’s curious liquid gift which became eventually supreme in Proust. When the story breaks into the vegetable Hamlet’s confession of his burning incompetence in growing up, in marrying, his troubles as a landowner and a widower, and as a widower who can’t even be sad, our laughter is still there, but we are half-ashamed of it.

  In A Correspondence the broadness has gone and is replaced by a serious attempt to analyse moral failure. A Correspondence can be read as a savaging of his own failure in love—and at times it cuts to the bone—but enlarged by a Russian context. There are traces o
f Diderot and although a story told in letters has an old-fashioned air to us, it is never flat and, with his experience as a failed playwright behind him, he knows at what point to make a break and dramatically build up tension. A man and a woman who have been unhappily in love with other lovers, discuss their situation and expose their characters and one can read into the man’s words an exposition of Turgenev’s own compulsive leaning to the amitié amoureuse. But the Russia of his generation comes in:

  We Russians have set ourselves no other task in life but the cultivation of our own personalities—and so we get again one monster the more in the world, one more of those worthless creatures in whom habits of self-consciousness distort the very striving for truth.

  They are morbid, perpetual, self-paralysed psychologists.

  The woman in the correspondence replies with an indignant protest that the intelligent young Russian girl is destroyed by the fickleness of young men who are futile because they are without a firm role in society. There are no male heroes: it is the women who, at least, grow up and become strong.

  Self-mockery or self-castigation, as he called it, runs through Turgenev’s stories of this period and reaches its climax in The Diary of a Superfluous Man. This type, with the absurd name of Tchulkatu-rin, is born useless, a supernumerary, the “fifth wheel” of the cart or the “fifth horse” in the team, who shambles along and does not pull. The diarist is dying and looks back on his life with a self-pity that does not pervade because Turgenev is writing bitter comedy: the comedy of a man who misreads not only his own feelings, but indulges in pretentious false emotions and is wrong about everyone else. There is a farcical Gogol-like party: he provokes a duel with his rival in love, a visiting Prince. He hopes the duel will make an heroic impression. Instead it outrages the whole town who now regard the feeble fellow as a jealous, bloodthirsty monster, even a madman: “It is needless to say that the Ozhogin’s doors were closed against me. Kirilla Matveitch even sent me back a bit of pencil I had left in the house.”