The Gentle Barbarian

by V. S. Pritchett

  He was in Paris in 1861, because he was concerned about his daughter who wanted to get married but could not make up her mind about her suitors, when the Emancipation of the serfs was proclaimed and he went to the Thanksgiving Service at the Russian Church and, like many others, wept with joy. Herzen, the exile who could not return, told him that the author of The Sportsman’s Sketches ought to be in Russia. Turgenev had, however, settled matters with his own peasants before the proclamation. He had given them a fifth of his land for nothing and at Spasskoye itself—the most intimate part of his estate and his home—he had given them the land on which their houses stood, and was soon building a small hospital, a home for the aged and had started a school.

  All over Russia the peasants were bewildered by their freedom and often suspicious of the new dispensation. Many preferred the old ways to which they were accustomed. At Spasskoye they continued their traditional sport of stealing wood and, knowing Turgenev was an easy man, they grazed their horses on his flower beds. Elsewhere there were rows about the size of individual holdings and the redemption money. There were family rows between husbands and wives, and between brothers. The peasants were illiterate and often refused to put their mark on legal papers. They found they had to pay taxes and many regarded Emancipation as a landlord’s trick—and among the bad landlords so it became. Many peasants sold their strips and left the land and there were not enough hands left to get in the harvest. Presently in Petersburg there were outbreaks of fire which were thought to be the work of terrorists belonging to the Land and Liberty League who, without any clear idea of policy, were calling for Revolution. The new Tsar had begun as a liberal but was now in panic; Radicals were arrested and sent into exile.

  These events are in the background of the new novel Turgenev had written, Fathers and Sons, the tragedy of the conflict between two generations. The book set off a storm that was to last the rest of his life. It is his masterpiece. To foreign readers the savagery of the quarrel has seemed incomprehensible until recent times. In his brilliant Romanes Lectures given in Oxford in 1970—by far the most illuminating exposition we have of Turgenev’s growth and achievement as a novelist—Sir Isaiah Berlin adds an important corrective to our judgement. A book like Fathers and Sons, he points out, no longer seems happily remote to us in the violent conditions of our own times. His characters are not delightful Russian incurables but are now present and recognisable, now revolutionary change occurs everywhere in our own world. Turgenev was not withdrawn from disturbing realities; he was apolitical in the party sense, but he had his own commitment and could not resist his fascination with what frightened him or the duty he felt the artist had to observe and understand the types he saw dramatically opposed in his country.

  The storm caused by his novel arose out of his portrait of “its tragic hero”: Bazarov. The Radicals thought it a libel on the younger generation who called for revolution or reform; the Conservatives accused him of siding with the enemies of order. In his Reminiscences, Turgenev is enlightening on the origins of the character and especially on his methods. Once more he says:

  I have heard it said … not once but many times that in my works I always “started with an idea or developed an idea” … I never attempted “to create a character” unless I had as my starting point not an idea but a living person to whom the appropriate elements were later on gradually attached and added. Not possessing a great amount of free inventive power, I always felt the need of some firm ground on which I could plant my feet.

  He goes on to say that the basis of Bazarov was a young provincial doctor he had met in a train. The man had since died. The impression was still vague but in that man

  I could watch the embodiment of the principle which had scarcely come to life but was just beginning to stir at the time which later received the name of “nihilism.”

  It is an oddity of social history that well-off Russians were in the habit of going to Ventnor in the Isle of Wight for the sea-bathing. Turgenev went there and there was talk of a “new Russian type”—someone said he would be Rudin reborn. Walking alone on the beach, the novelist told them that he had had a sudden vision of a dead man: Bazarov must be tragic. But the sources of a novelist’s characters are not only parts of new persons suddenly met, but go back also to literature and literary experience. Some said that in Bazarov, Turgenev had put something of the young Radical critic Dobrolyubov who had been outrageously rude to him. Turgenev denied this, but Bazarov is famous for his rudeness—and Sir Isaiah Berlin points to the possibility of Belinsky as a source of Bazarov’s brusqueness, directness, his explosions of sarcasm at hypocrisy and that there may be a link with Dobrolyubov’s “ferocious militant, anti-aestheticism.” Belinsky died tragically and the gifted Dobrolyubov died tragically young also in 1861 while the novel was being written. The random finality of death was always Turgenev’s haunting preoccupation; but the hostile critics took Bazarov’s untimely death at the end of the novel as a final attempt by Turgenev to make his “hero” trivial and to punish him for his nihilism.

  The moment we open the novel we understand that Turgenev is not writing the didactic work which both the Left and the Right imagined and called for in the hysteria of the time. His art rests on his ability to unself himself and to become the people he writes about. He observes and listens so that they appear to us clearly, untrammelled and living, as human beings do, in their own effortless justification. This, we say, is what they felt themselves naturally to be in the times they were living in, moving into the days that follow.

  As usual the novel was carefully planned in play-like fashion in four long acts, though the scenes run with more intimacy than in his earlier work. They are less story-like and more flowing than in the manner of a European novel. In the first act we see Arkady Kirsanov, a student who has just graduated, arriving at his father’s small property in the country. He brings with him his idol and friend, young Bazarov, who is coming to the end of his medical training and who is on the way to visit his own much poorer parents, fifty miles or more further on. The elder Kirsanov’s property has 100 serfs—or as Nikolai Kirsanov prefers to say, for he is an enlightened man—5,000 acres. The year is 1859. He has anticipated the Emancipation by putting his peasants on the quit-rent system and is having endless trouble with them. They are suspicious. They steal, they break his machines through incompetence. Nikolai is a warm, tender, unpractical man, a reader of the classics and a liberal of good family, but short of money and easily swindled. He is also a widower and is embarrassed to admit to his son that while the boy was away at the University he has taken an innkeeper’s daughter called Fe-nichka to live with him and that she has lately given birth to their child. Arkady tells his father that he and his friend Bazarov are above out-of-date prejudices about marriage, so father and son are on shy good terms at once. Nikolai shares the house with his brother Pavel, once a Guards officer, very much the Petersburg aristocrat and dandy who wears high, marble-white collars, a man of culture who affects stiff English manners. He had been famous for a long love affair with a Princess who had “enigmatic” eyes. She had died and Pavel had given up his life in society, travelled to all the fashionable resorts and had come at last to live in correct and austere melancholy with his brother. At sight, Pavel takes against Bazarov, Arkady’s lower-class “long-haired” friend. And this first act is mostly about their growing enmity. “This Bazarov. What is he?” Pavel asks Arkady about his friend.

  He is a nihilist, Arkady says. A nihilist is a man who doesn’t take any principle for granted.

  “Indeed,” [says Pavel]. “Well I can see this is not our cup of tea. We of the older generation think that without principles” (Pavel Petrovich pronounced the word as if it were French, whereas Arkady put the stress on the first syllable)—“without principles taken as you say on trust one cannot move an inch or draw a single breath. Vous avez changé tout cela, may God grant you health and a general’s rank, but we shall be content to look on and admire Messieurs les … what wa
s it?”

  “Nihilists,” said Arkady, speaking very distinctly.

  “Yes. It used to be Hegelians, and now there are nihilists. We shall see how you manage to exist in a void, in an airless vacuum; and now please ring the bell, brother Nikolai, it is time for me to drink my cocoa.”

  When Pavel forces Bazarov into the argument, Bazarov is off-hand and says he has no interest in anything outside of physics and the natural sciences. A decent chemist is twenty times more useful than a poet like Schiller or Goethe, the gods of Pavel’s generation. Pavel says:

  “I take it you do not acknowledge art then?”

  “The art of making money or of advertising pills for piles!” exclaimed Bazarov with a contemptuous laugh.

  “… So you reject all that? Very well. So you only believe in science?” “I have already explained to you I don’t believe in anything: and what is science—science in the abstract? There are sciences, as there are trades and professions, but Abstract science just doesn’t exist.”

  For Pavel, Bazarov is an impudent barbarian; for Bazarov, Pavel is a ridiculous aristocrat. His fame as the unhappy pursuer of the Princess, who has anyway been long dead, is pathetic.

  “… a fellow who has staked his whole life on the one card of a woman’s love, and when that card fails, turns sour and lets himself go till he’s fit for nothing, is not a man, is not a male creature … And what are these mysterious relations between a man and a woman? We physiologists know what they are.”

  Pavel had been taken by the “enigmatic” eyes of the Princess.

  “You study the anatomy of the eye; and where does that enigmatic look you talk about come in? That’s all romantic rot, mouldy aesthetics.”

  As for kindly old Nikolai Kirsanov’s love of nature. Bazarov says:

  “Nature is not a temple, it is a workshop and man is the workman in it.”

  These sarcasms lead at last to a grand quarrel in which Arkady and Bazarov are on one side and Pavel on the other. Bazarov says that it is useless to go on talking about Russia and social disease. Reformers never do anything. All they talk about is art and parliaments when the important question is getting enough to eat. Russia is stifled by superstition, industry is a mess because the people at the top aren’t honest. Nothing is likely to come out of this talk about emancipating the serf; the peasants will simply rob one another and drink themselves silly. And so, says Pavel:

  “[You] decided not to do anything serious yourselves.”

  “And decided not to do anything serious,” Bazarov repeated grimly.

  He suddenly felt vexed with himself for having spoken so freely in front of this member of the upper class.

  “But to confine yourself to abuse.”

  “To confine ourselves to abuse.”

  “And that is called nihilism?”

  “And that is called nihilism,” Bazarov repeated again, this time with marked insolence.

  “We destroy because we are a force,” remarked Arkady …. “Yes, a force, and therefore not accountable to anyone.”

  To which Pavel Kirsanov replies frostily that he might as well say that the wild Kalmuk or the Mongols are a force. He and the aristocracy believe in principles and civilisation and all its fruits. The proper home for Arkady and Bazarov is a Kalmuk tent.

  In the second act Bazarov and Arkady leave the idyllic estate on which they have annoyed everybody and Turgenev now turns first to farce. The young men go to the provincial capital and call on a ridiculous “advanced” young woman, Yevdoxia Kukshin, and an absurd, brash young climber, Sitnikov, who is the son of a spirit merchant and ashamed of it. Yevdoxia seems to live on champagne and cigarettes. Her room is littered with books and papers and her talk is an inconsequent litter of headlong ideas.

  “Are you interested in chemistry? That is my passion. I have even invented a new sort of mastic myself.” … To make dolls’ heads so they can’t break … I have still got to read Liebig. Have you seen Kislyakov’s article on female labour in the Moscow News? Do read it. You are interested in women’s emancipation, I suppose. And in the schools’ problem too?”

  How out of date George Sand is; not to be compared to Emerson, knows nothing of physiology and hasn’t even heard of embryology and in these days how can one get on without that?

  Farce turns to the comedy of provincial manners when the two young men escape to the Ball the visiting panjandrum is giving. We see the grand man’s struttings and snubbings. But the note changes when a beautiful and rich widow invites the young men to stay at her mansion. Bazarov, who has mocked Pavel Kirsanov for his fatal love of his “enigmatic” Princess, finds himself snared into what he despises: romantic love for a cold, intelligent, rich woman who talks well and who is drawn to Bazarov’s rebellious ideas.

  Bazarov was a pursuer of women but had no time for ideal or romantic love which he regarded as an aberration: If a woman takes your fancy, he would say, “try to gain your end and if you don’t succeed—well don’t bother; there are plenty more good fish in the sea.” Mme. Odintsov appealed to him; the rumours about her, the freedom and independence of her ideas, her unmistakable liking for him—all seemed to be in his favour; but he soon discovered that he would not “gain his end,” and as for turning his back on her, he found, to his own bewilderment, that it was more than he could do. His blood took fire the moment he thought of her; he could easily have mastered his blood but something else was taking possession of him … when he was alone he recognized with indignation a romantic strain in himself.

  To rid himself of it he decides to leave and when she hears this she tries to stop him. In one last dangerous tack Bazarov cannot control himself. She is apparently tempting him too far and he angrily blurts out that he loves her and tries to embrace her. Madame Odintsov is astonished and physically frightened. She is not a conscious flirt: she is used to power and ease—her house runs like clockwork—and for her the relationship has been one of intellectual curiosity with a pleasant element of mild emotional flutter in it. She “believes” in his gifts and that he may become a “great man” but she would certainly not love him, a poor young man outside her own class. Bazarov sees he has made a fool of himself only too clearly and leaves. He returns to Arkady’s house to pick up his luggage and his medical books and goes on to stay, as he originally intended, with his own parents. Arkady goes with him.

  In the next act the two young men are seen there. The parents’ place is a small farm of a hundred acres and one serf. His father, an old army doctor, and his adoring mother greet the young men with touching, overwhelming love; indeed it suffocates Bazarov and although they try to leave him alone to work they cannot bear it. They tiptoe from room to room longing to be with him. These are the most touching portraits in a book in which the conflict between the generations is most felt. The young men decide to leave but promise to come back. The parents cannot understand what they have done to offend their son as he prepares to go.

  From early morning the house was filled with depression: the plate fell out of Anfisushka’s hands; even Fedka [the servant] did not know what he was doing and ended by taking off his boots.

  He had worn boots especially in honour of the two young men.

  … when Bazarov, after repeated promises to come back within a month at the latest, at last tore himself from [his parents’] clinging embraces and took his seat in the tarantass; when the horses moved off, the bells tinkled, and the wheels spun round—when there was nothing left to gaze after, the dust had settled and Timofeich, all bent and tottering, had crept back to his tiny room; when the two old people found themselves alone in the house, which suddenly seemed as shrunken and decrepit as they—then Vassily Ivanych, who a few moments before had been vigorously waving his handkerchief on the steps, slumped into a chair and let his head drop on his chest. “He has gone, left us!” he faltered. “Gone, because he found it dull here with us. I’m a lonely man now, lonely as this finger,” he repeated again and again, and each time he thrust out his hand with his for
efinger pointing away from the rest.

  Bazarov and Arkady return to the Kirsanovs. There is a watchful truce between Bazarov and Pavel Petrovich. Pavel even shows polite curiosity about Bazarov’s microscope. But Bazarov is morose and he eventually tries to rid himself of Madame Odintsov’s image by recovering his audacity with women. He sets out to see if the simple Fenichka is vulnerable. Once more the test of love appears in the story. Fenichka is an ingenuous young mother; Bazarov puts her at her ease. The only person she fears is Pavel Petrovich who keeps an eye on her. In fact, the old aristocrat sees something of his own lost Madame Odintsov, the Princess, in the blooming face of the young mother and his gazes are almost but not quite innocent; he longs for the impossible return of youth, the wild youth which Bazarov has and he guesses what Bazarov is up to. One day he sees and hears Bazarov making up to Fenichka, who is confused and does not know what to do when Bazarov suddenly kisses her. The opportunity for revenge has arrived for Pavel.

  In a splendid, icy, formal scene he challenges Bazarov to a duel. Bazarov of course regards this as farcical, but the very pointlessness, the destructive aspect, makes him accept at once. He’ll certainly stand up to a gentleman. (Turgenev the sportsman is excellent in duel scenes: he has one very good short story on the subject and knows that duels conceal an underlying attraction between the parties.) This one satirises the formalities and is comical. Bazarov wounds Pavel, who falls and behaves with polite sang-froid and is obliged to let Bazarov attend to his wound. Pavel eventually recovers and realises he has acted a good deal out of snobbery. The fact is that Turgenev is preparing, once more, a test of love for his characters: Pavel tells his brother and Fenichka that if they love each other they must marry. They overcome their nervous shyness—they were afraid of Pavel’s authority.