Goncharov’s view of Turgenev as an effete and fashionable figure and his resentment of Turgenev’s life abroad was shared by some circles in Petersburg; but it is characteristic of Goncharov’s deep personal malady that, after the quarrel, he craved to do small services for Turgenev. One sees a similar split in Dostoevsky’s attitude to Turgenev. The tragic irony is that, in Oblomov, he had created a comic character on a scale far greater than anything within Turgenev’s powers, a figure at once Russian and universal. Oblomov is one of the finest, most generous, broken monuments in Russian fiction. The strange thing is that where Goncharov failed in Oblomov was in its long and tedious love story in which (one is inclined to say), he was trying, and failing, to copy Turgenev. There is further irony in the fact that Oblomov satisfied the committed critics who saw the novel as an attack on Russian landlordism, when its greatness arises from the active Goncharov’s buried craving for inertia as a quality almost saintly.
If Turgenev quarrelled in Petersburg, at Spasskoye he worked. After the failure of On the Eve, he turned to his past and produced a masterpiece in the art most natural to him, the story that runs to a hundred pages. The story is First Love, the tale, which he said was autobiographical, of a father and his sixteen-year-old son who are in love with the same young girl. It was the story that shocked Countess Lambert. It also shocked Louis Viardot when he read it in translation in the Revue des Deux Mondes. Viardot, the older man and husband, wrote sternly as friend to friend, that it was nothing but a glorification of adultery à la Dame Aux Camélias and that Turgenev was drifting into the sewer of the modern novel. The characters of the dirty, snuff-taking Princess and her daughter were odious. How could the father in the story be charming and adorable when he had cynically married a rich woman in order to spend her fortune on his mistresses? Why not, at the very least, make him a widower—the censor had made a similar complaint years before when he rejected A Month in the Country. Worst of all, Viardot said, the narrator is a man of forty who ought to have known better than to expose the vices of his father. This letter gives us one of those rare sights of the remote Louis Viardot who struck people as being an outsider in his own family and who indeed is known to have complained to his wife that the manner in which she left him out of the conversation with her famous friends at Courtavenel was causing gossip. He begged her to restrain herself. The respectable atheist and Republican enjoyed an extremely indecent piece of gauloiserie so long as it had the blessing of history and concerned the vices of Kings and Courts, but he held sternly to the morality of the middle class.
The story and its intention are, of course, quite unlike Louis Viardot’s caricature of it which can only have sprung from the anger of a good man who had had to endure the insinuations conventionally made about an elderly husband married to a famous young wife. The story is a study of the devastating loss of innocence and the revelation of the nature of adult passion and, as usual in Turgenev’s stories, it turns on the growth of knowledge of the heart. Love is not the simple yet tormenting rapture of a touching adolescent; it is a violent, awe-inspiring passion which leaves its trail of jealousies and guilt. There was some truth in the criticism that Turgenev’s love stories have something of the emblem or fairy tale in them, but First Love, like the later Torrents of Spring and the love story in Smoke, contains one of his rare statements about the nature of physical passion—rare because of his own romantic idealism or the conventions of the time. There is no pressing on the pedal in the powerful scenes: they are quiet. Truth-telling—quite different from the highly coloured naturalism which Louis Viardot had read into the story—rules every turn of feeling. The boy sees his father at night talking to a woman at the open window of a house. She is Zinaida with whom the boy is in love. She is refusing the father something:
My father gave a shrug of his shoulders, and set his hat straight on his head, which with him was always a sign of impatience … then I could hear the words “Vous devez vous séparer de cette …” Zinaida straightened herself and held out her hand. Then something unbelievable took place before my eyes. My father suddenly lifted his riding-crop, with which he had been flicking the dust off the folds of his coat, and I heard the sound of a sharp blow struck across her arm which was bared to the elbow. It was all I could do to prevent myself from crying out. Zinaida quivered—looked silently at my father—and raising her arm slowly to her lips, kissed the scar which glowed crimson upon it.
And the boy goes home thinking “That is love, that’s passion … But how could one bear to be struck by any hand, however dear - and yet it seems one can if one is in love.”
My father flung away the crop and bounding quickly up the steps to the porch, broke into the house. Zinaida turned round, stretched out her arms, tossed her head back—and also moved away from the window.
That is the climax of a story which has passed through the comic antics of Zinaida’s admirers. We have seen various kinds of love. We have seen feelings change into their opposite. The boy’s startled jealousy of his father is violent, then absurd, then turns to admiration amounting to worship, and then is quietly dissolved in the events of ordinary life. What is sometimes called leisurely in Turgenev is not so much a sense of timelessness as one of space in which everything will eventually be accounted for or vanish. Life is affirmed not only in its intense moments but in its continuing: the fact that the boy cannot know all, that indeed no one knows all, gives Turgenev’s realism its essential truth-telling quality. In this his realism is finer than Tolstoy’s assertion of all knowledge. The story goes on:
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 the love of women; beware of that ecstasy, that slow poison.” My mother, after his death, sent a considerable sum of money to Moscow.
But, for Turgenev, explanation is not an end. Life is not enclosed reminiscence:
During the past month I had suddenly grown much older, and my love, with all its violent excitements and its torments now seemed even to me so very puny and childish and pitiful beside that other unknown something which I could hardly begin to guess at, but which struck terror into me like an unfamiliar, beautiful, but awe-inspiring face whose features one strains in vain to discern in the gathering darkness.
And now the story becomes still more spacious than its observed drama. Years ripple on, “everything melts away like wax in the sun … like snow” and the writer hears of Zinaida’s death in childbirth. “So that was the final goal to which this young life, all glitter and ardour and excitement went hurrying along.” What had he left now, in old age, fresher and dearer than his memory of “that brief storm that came and went so swiftly one morning in the spring?” Far more than this personal memory of love and death. He recalls that some days after he heard of Zinaida’s death, obeying an irresistible impulse he was present at the death of a poor old woman who had known nothing but bitter struggle with daily want and had had no joy or happiness—wouldn’t she be glad to die? No, she feared death and fought it and kept whispering “Lord forgive my sins.” We are brought back to Zinaida’s, his father’s and his own desire for life:
by the death-bed of that poor old woman, I grew afraid, afraid for Zinaida, and I wanted to say a prayer for her, my father—and for myself.
This is Louis Viardot’s vulgar story of adultery! A story that begins as a comedy of intrigue and becomes a tragedy that disperses us into the common lot! We recall Turgenev’s quotation from Pascal:
Le dernier acte est sanglant, quelque soit la comédie en tout le reste. On jette enfin de la terre sur la tête.
The quarrel with Gonchar
ov opened a period of quarrels in Turgenev’s life which became a storm when his next and finest novel, Fathers and Sons, was published. Before that, in 1860 and 1861, Turgenev was travelling in Europe. He was in Soden near Coblenz with Tolstoy’s brother Nikolai, a delightful companion. Turgenev remarked:
The humility Leo Tolstoy developed theoretically, his brother actually practised in real life. He always lived in the most impossible lodgings, almost hovels … and shared all he had with the poorest outcasts.
In Soden Nikolai was slowly dying of tuberculosis and wrote to Leo that Turgenev was with him
so well that he confesses that he is “quite well.” He has found some German girl and goes into ecstasies about her. We (this relates to our dearest Turgenev) play chess together but somehow it does not go as it should: he is thinking of his German girl and I of my cure.
The poor man died at Hyères in the autumn of 1860. The relations between Tolstoy and Turgenev continued to be in flux. Tolstoy admired Faust, thought Acia rubbish and, contrary to most critics, thought On the Eve was much better than The House of Gentlefolk. Tolstoy’s judgment is erratic—he thought the awful painter Shabin “an excellent negative character.”
The rest are not types, even their conception, their position is not typical … The girl is hopelessly bad. “Ah how I love thee … her eyelashes were long” … It always surprises me that Turgenev with his mental powers and poetic sensibility should even in his methods not be able to refrain from banality. There is no humanity or sympathy for the characters, but the author exhibits monsters whom he scolds but does not pity. This jars painfully with the tone and intention of liberalism in everything else.
Turgenev wrote in a droll verse letter to their common friend Fet:
Indeed I know he bears me little love
And I love him as little. Too differently
Are mixed those elements of which we’re formed.
After his brother’s death, Tolstoy was in more sympathetic mood. He and Turgenev were fairly near neighbours in Russia, as Russian distances go, and Tolstoy came to Spasskoye on a visit with their friend Fet in 1862. The meeting was amiable. Turgenev had just finished Fathers and Sons and gave it to Tolstoy to look at. He lay on Spasskoye’s famous divan in the drawing-room, began to read and fell asleep over it. Ominous. Tolstoy woke up to see Turgenev’s back impatiently disappearing through the doorway.
The two set off, nevertheless, to stay with Fet. Turgenev loved good food. Champagne flowed. After the meal, Tolstoy, Fet and Turgenev went for a walk and lay down in the grass talking with abandon. The next morning they came down to breakfast, with Mme. Fet seated before the samovar. Disaster. Kind Mme. Fet asked Turgenev whether he was satisfied with the English governess he had found for Paulinette. It seemed a comfortable question, even though it may have raised in Turgenev’s mind the trouble the girl had been in the Viardot family, and the bother he had had in finding a flat for her and a governess in Paris. Turgenev took the question easily and said the governess was excellent, though she had of course the English mania for liking things to be clear and exact. She had asked Turgenev what precise sum the now eighteen-year-old girl ought to give to charity. Turgenev went on:
And now she requires my daughter to take in hand and mend the tattered clothes of the poor.
Tolstoy bristled at once: he saw an opportunity of attacking Turgenev’s belief in a foreign education.
“And you consider that good?”
“Certainly it places the doer of charity in touch with every day needs.”
“And I consider,” Tolstoy exclaimed, “that a well-dressed girl with dirty rags on her lap is acting an insincere and theatrical farce.”
“I beg you not to say that,” said Turgenev. “Why should I not say what I am convinced is true,” replied Tolstoy.
Once more the idea of “conviction” haunts every Russian quarrel of the period; no one has opinions. They have absolute convictions.
“Then you consider I educate my daughter badly?” Tolstoy said he did. Turgenev jumped up from the table, white with rage, and exclaimed, “If you speak in that way I will punch your head,” and rushed into the next room. A second later he rushed back and said to Mme. Fet: “Please excuse my improper conduct which I deeply regret,” and once more left the room.
Turgenev had the habit of pacing in and out of rooms when he was agitated. The gentle man’s passions flared up though he would repent very quickly. The uncharacteristic thing was the threat of any physical violence: the champagne of the previous evening must have been too lavish, but of course Tolstoy—who had himself fathered an illegitimate child—had aimed precisely at Turgenev’s guilt and his difficulties with the girl and also at his dignity and his virtue. Turgenev had been determined to turn Paulinette into a nice French girl, for he knew that in Russia she would be open to slights and unhappiness, even though his long absences from her showed him to be a negligent father.
The two men left the house in a temper and the quarrel became a farce. It was simple for Turgenev to stalk out because he had a carriage. Tolstoy had no carriage and Fet could not lend him the only carriage he had because he only had horses that had not yet been broken in. Tolstoy had to hire a conveyance at the nearest post station. At the first country house he reached, Tolstoy wrote to demand an apology from Turgenev and told him to send it to the post house at Boguslav where it would be picked up. The dust of the country roads blew up around the quarrel. Turgenev replied in the formal tones of an elder statesman raising a minor point in a Treaty. He said that manners had required him to apologise first to Mme. Fet but not to her guest. The point being made, he now proceeded to a majestic apology: he confessed to the insult—though in fact Tolstoy had insulted him—and even asked pardon.
What happened this morning proved clearly that attempts at intimacy between opposite natures as yours and mine can lead to no good results,
and had the honour to remain, Gracious Sir, your most humble servant. Alas, with typical incompetence, he forgot to send the document to Boguslav, but had it delivered by messenger to Fet’s house so that the message arrived very late. Tolstoy was not satisfied. He went to Boguslav for pistols and issued a challenge, adding the sneer that he meant “a real fight and not the sort of formality with champagne to follow, usual in military circles.”
Turgenev answered that he did not see what more he could add and that he would willingly stand his fire in order to efface “My truly insane words.” Tolstoy, he said, had a perfect right to call him out. The comings and goings of carriages, messengers and horses enlivened the country roads. Fortunately the weather was good. The unhappy Fet tried to bring the two men together but Tolstoy now turned on Fet and said he would return any further letters from him unopened.
Then, of course, after four months Tolstoy made one of his familiar somersaults into repentance. He wrote to Turgenev saying:
I have insulted you: forgive. I find it unendurably hard to think I have an enemy.
But once more the natural inertia of Russian life spoiled the effect. More letters seemed to have miscarried than to have arrived. Turgenev went off to France and, not knowing his address, Tolstoy sent his own letter to a bookseller in Petersburg asking him to forward it and it took more than three months to get into Turgenev’s hands.
This led to a new twist to a quarrel which was turning into a short novel, with Dostoevskian overtones. Passing through Petersburg, Turgenev wrote to Fet:
I learned from certain “reliable people”—oh those reliable people!—that copies of Tolstoy’s last letter (the letter in which he says he despises me), are circulating in Moscow and are said to have been distributed by Tolstoy himself. That enraged me and I sent him a challenge to fight when I return to Russia. Tolstoy has answered that the circulation of the copies is pure invention and he enclosed another letter in which, recapitulating that and how I insulted him, he asks my forgiveness and declines my challenge.
When he at last received Tolstoy’s letter through the bookseller
, Turgenev wrote again to Fet that obviously the stars of Turgenev and Tolstoy were not in conjunction:
But you may write and tell him that I (without phrase or joke), love him very much from afar, respect him and watch his fate with sympathetic interest … we must live as though we inhabited different planets or different countries.
When he heard about it, Turgenev’s genial friend Botkin’s opinion was that Tolstoy, the younger man, wanted to love Turgenev ardently and unfortunately his impulsive feeling encountered merely mild good-natured indifference. His mind was in a chaos. Turgenev’s was not.
Chapter 9
The attacks on Turgenev by Goncharov and Tolstoy were personal attacks on his honour and dignity as a man; he was by nature excitable but his irony and judgment soon restored his balance. In the next few years he found himself in the middle of a quarrel with Russia itself, both with the educated élite of Right and Left and with young men of humbler class who had become vocal after the Crimean War. Confusion and extremism appeared on the scene and he was at once in the difficult position of the man of strong, committed liberal principles who has to meet the usual charges of being a waverer.
The Gentle Barbarian Page 16