The Gentle Barbarian

by V. S. Pritchett

  In the final act, Bazarov packs up once more and while he does so he tells Arkady that their friendship is over. Not because of the trouble he has caused but because Arkady, he says, has changed. Arkady, who had also been sentimentally in love with Madame Odintsov, has been drawn to her younger sister whom she has dominated in her regal way. In this Turgenev shows his subtlety in showing the two sisters in another light. Madame Odintsov’s idle, exalté mind veils a managing, possessive nature. Bazarov sees that Arkady has been clear-headed in love when he himself is still suffering from the romantic disease and has failed. He is not rancorous but he tells Arkady that in accepting the conventions of marriage he has lost the Nihilist spirit.

  “There’s no audacity in you; no venom … Your sort, the gentry, can never go farther than well-bred resignation and that’s futile … you won’t stand up and fight… you enjoy finding fault with yourself; but we’ve had enough of all that—give us fresh victims! We must smash people!

  Bazarov returns to his parents. This is the moving finale of the novel. The old people realise that their son has changed and dare not ask him what is on his mind. They are relieved when they see him taking an interest in helping his father in doctoring the peasants from time to time. The father listens with admiration to his son’s talk of new knowledge in medicine. The doting mother restrains her effusive love and is in awe of him. But an accident occurs. Bazarov goes off to perform an autopsy on a peasant who has died of typhus and in doing so makes a small cut in his finger. He comes back asking for silver nitrate. There is none in this backward part of the country and Bazarov understands—and so does his father—that he is a dead man if he has caught the infection.

  The scene of Bazarov’s death is famous. It is one of the most moving and beautifully observed things that the great observer ever wrote—Chekhov admired it as a doctor and as an artist who himself was a master of recording human sorrow. The power of this narrative owes something to the hypochondria and sense of the presence of death which Turgenev felt so continuously in his own life; and in this the writing is one of those cleansings which a great artist achieves in his maturity. If the death, by such a small misadventure, may strike one as trivial and therefore not tragic—the point made by hostile critics—it has its own ironic logic: for Bazarov the Nihilist cannot object to accident or the random hostility of nature. When the death occurs, Turgenev writes, the experience of life on earth is not altogether in our hands. The last lines that describe the visit of the parents to Bazarov’s grave are devastating:

  Vassily Ivanych was seized by a sudden frenzy. “I said I would rebel,” he shouted hoarsely, his face inflamed and distorted, waving his clenched fist in the air as though threatening someone—“And I will rebel, I will!” But Arina Vlassyevna, suffused in tears, hung her arms round his neck and both fell prone together. “And so,” as Anfisushka related afterwards in the servants’ rooms, “side by side they bowed their poor heads like lambs in the heat of noonday …”

  In the years that follow, the two frail old people support each other as they walk, year after year, to the cemetery, kneel at their son’s grave, yearning over the silent stone.

  The storm caused by Fathers and Sons was violent and went on rumbling for years. The Right did not enjoy the ironical portrait of Pavel Kirsanov and Turgenev’s tolerance of Bazarov. The word “nihilist” had caught on—very much as the idea of “the superfluous man” had done years before—and the Radicals thought the portrait of Bazarov a libel on the young generation and their views. Bazarov is indeed silent on what he and his friends would do once the task of destruction was done; whereas those among the Nihilists who did think about this had a belief in some kind of Populist democracy which was too vague to become an effective Cause. Turgenev was in the impossible situation of being an apolitical man, a detached diagnostician in a period when the politically minded called for polemic and propaganda. Turgenev made matters worse by his comments. To the Conservative Countess Lambert he wrote:

  The convictions of my youth have not changed. But I never have been and never will be occupied with politics. It is alien and uninteresting to me. I pay attention to politics only in so far as a writer who is called upon to depict contemporary life must. You do wrong to demand from me in literature what I cannot give—fruits that do not grow on my tree. I have never written for the people … I have written for that class of the public to which I belong.

  To others he wrote that he found himself agreeing with most of the views of Bazarov, excepts his views on art and literature. That sounds harmless enough but it was damaging, for under Russian despotism, with political discussion subject to censorship, art and literature had a peculiar covert political prestige. All literature was judged—as it continues to be in Russia today—by its social “tendency.” But for Turgenev, as Sir Isaiah Berlin says, “acts, ideas, art, literature were expressions of individuals, not of objective forces of which the actors or thinkers were merely the embodiments. The reduction of men to the function of being primarily carriers or agents were as deeply repellent to Turgenev as it had been to Herzen or, in his later phase, to his revered friend Belinsky.”

  Politically Bazarov was not a revolutionary but a pre-Revolution-ary; a type thrown up by a period which seemed “on the eve” of perhaps violent change: the peasantry were 80 percent of the population of the country. Bazarov thought them stupid. Two objections to him have some point: first, he was not, in the Nihilist sense, a true type, for he was not really an urban figure—as the active politicals inevitably were. Secondly, his ruling interest was not in politics but in natural science. Had he been a writer he could have been prophetic of Chekhov who, as a doctor, also stood outside the philosophical and literary influences which had formed the main stream of Russian novelists—including Turgenev himself.

  The only weakness of the novel—it seems to me—is in the chapter on the visit to Madame Odintsov. It has some of that over-scented claustrophobic sentimentality into which Turgenev sometimes falls. She is the standard dissatisfied rich woman, but there is an embarrassing lushness in his writing when he tries to probe her mind:

  Sometimes, emerging all warm and languorous from a fragrant bath, she would fall to musing on the futility of life, its sorrow and toil and cruelty … Like all women who have not succeeded in falling in love she hankered after something without knowing what it was. In reality there was nothing she wanted, though it seemed to her that she wanted everything.

  It is not hard to believe that Bazarov would feel the angry sensations of lust in her presence, but that he could have endured all those long, educative walks in the woods and the solemn conversations in her drawing-room is hard to believe, although we take the ironic point. We suspect Turgenev of one of his bouts of self-castigation for the long drawn out “ideal” love for Pauline Viardot and his chats with Countess Lambert, and that here the book suffers from the blur of autobiography unassimilated.

  Of course there were critics who defended Turgenev, even among the political young; but the attacks wounded him deeply. He had been looked upon as a leader by the young of his generation, now the new generation of young people despised him. They were indeed supplanted in their turn but for one who drew so much from the springs of youth as he did and who regretted the loss of his youth so bitterly—as the early pose of precocious old age shows—the blow was terrible. The effects lasted into his real old age.

  As he had said in Rudin, the young require simple answers even if they are illusory. The irony is that Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, who were hostile to radical politics, were treated with respect. The reason—apart from the fact that their range and strength as novelists was far greater—was that they were obsessed men. They had their missions which, in their different ways, were aspects of the feeling that Russia had an untainted Messianic role to play in the world; both had their religion and indeed in Dostoevsky’s journalism the idea of mission was politically imperial: the Russian right to Constantinople. Turgenev had no mission: he thought Dostoevsky�
�s large talk of humanity mere rhetoric. Like Pavel Kirsanov, though not in his arthritic way, he stood for “civilisation,” spelled out letter by letter, for what had been a long, patient, intricate growth.

  The philandering friendship with Countess Lambert limped on, despite her disapproval of Fathers and Sons. He still annoyed her by playing the man of the world and she annoyed him with her sentimental philistinism.

  There was a good deal of talk on his part of how his heart had died and that there was no hope for him but to prepare himself to face the lugubrious facts of mortality. The only thing he or she could do, he said, was to allow themselves to float together hand in hand on the waves of life. She with a firm grip on his hand, one notices, not hers firmly gripped by his. No master steersman he, nor was he very complimentary. “You and I expect so little for ourselves,” he said. The Countess, who disapproved of his politics, his books and his lack of religion, was piqued to hear that she would get very little as they floated along.

  Floating was very much in his mind. About this time, sick of Russia, he turned to fantasy. For some reason or other the dream he had told Pauline about when he was a young man at Courtavenel came into his mind and he wrote a strange story, Phantoms. It can be read as an erotic dream or even as a tour of the futile history of political power in the world; or as a literary experiment by a poetic realist who has felt an impulse towards surrealism, or as a non-mystical venture into the occult. The reader looks for allegory or for images from the unconscious—does it tell one something of the life the rationalist has buried?—but Turgenev said that Phantoms was simply a stream of disconnected pictures without allegorical meaning. A woman in white who appears to be spun out of mist seizes the writer, in the familiar way of such erotic dreams, declares she loves him. By unlucky chance Turgenev gave her the English name of Ellis; he may have intended Alice. He feels the touch of her lips—“Leeches might prick so in mild or drowsy mood”—and she bears him away night after night into the sky and they fly over the world into the civilisations of the past. He sees Caesar’s Rome, Pompeii, the Russian steppe, Paris, Germany, St. Petersburg in a series of nightmare and splenetic pictures in a grotesque travelogue of terror. The woman cannot reveal who she is except that she is a spirit in limbo craving not to be utterly extinguished until she sees

  a thing bulky, dark, yellow-black, spotted like a lizard’s belly, not a storm cloud, not smoke was crawling with a snake-like motion over the earth. A wide rhythmic undulating movement from above downwards and from below upwards, an undulation revealing the malignant sweep of the vulture as it sweeps over its prey; at times an indescribably revolting, grovelling in the earth, as of a spider stooping over its captured fly … It was a power moving; that power which there is no resisting, to which all is subject, sightless, shapeless, senseless, sees all, knows all … Ellis,” I cried. “It is death itself.”

  If there is the bizarre attraction of meaningless horror, the suggestion of a sexual struggle against extinction in Phantoms, it was followed by Enough which might be called a rationalist’s Commination service, a Psalm of despair. Turgenev was noted for saying “Enough,” as if in angered longing for an End of some kind: it suggests the desire to be done with all that accompanies the brilliance of a mind, the force of a desire intellectually before it can be lived through, the malady of the sentimentalist. It is more obviously an utterance about the evanescence and futility of life. Nature is inexorable.

  She knows not art as she knows not freedom as she knows not good…. Man is her child; but man’s work—art—is hostile to her just because it strives to be unchanging and immortal… [Nature] creates in destroying and she cares not whether she creates or she destroys.

  Russian critics fell upon Enough and though it has a fine sustained and dominant rhythm in which each sentence and phrase strikes hard as an energetic statement of pessimism, it is altogether too personal to be effective. Tolstoy made a sensible remark about it. He said: “The personal and subjective is only good when it is full of life and passion, while here we have subjectivity full of lifeless suffering.” Turgenev, the spectator, had little gift for bringing his inner life to the surface. But one understands that he has reached total despair.

  Chapter 10

  In these the gloomiest days of his life surprising news came to him. Pauline Viardot had decided to give her last performances in the great opera houses of London and Paris: she had her last triumphs in Dublin and Paris, but she knew her voice had lost its highest quality. The voice that had ruled as if it were a separate being inside her began to lose its range. Drastic with others, the perfectionist had enslaved and over-strained her voice and coming of a long-headed family with an austere tradition of musical discipline, she was not going to expose herself to fiasco.

  Compared with hers, Turgenev’s life had not been driven. Her journeys from city to city in Europe in the first decades of the railway age were long and exhausting. She arrived at each place and had to begin daily rehearsals at once. In one year, she gave fifty performances in England. She had lately created the part of Lady Macbeth in Verdi’s opera. Her role in Macbeth was considered one of her greatest acting parts and not without a meaning irony Turgenev wrote to her saying that if they could play it together in her little theatre at Courtavenel, he would be glad to play the part of Banquo. In 1861 she had given Gluck’s Orpheus a hundred and twenty-one times. In a letter to the conductor Rietz—quoted by April Fitzlyon—she wrote about learning her parts:

  I have the impression I have a little theatre in my head where my little actors move. Even at night in my sleep my private theatre pursues me—it becomes unbearable at times.

  The Viardots decided to give up Courtavenel, and let the house in the rue de Douai. Louis Viardot had often been alone there, playing “mother” to the children. He fumed with hatred of Napoleon III, his politics and his morals and wanted to get out of Paris. The couple settled on Baden-Baden as the ideal place for a semi-retirement in which she could give occasional performances when she wished and turn to composition and rich pupils.

  In choosing Baden-Baden the Viardots showed their acumen. Pauline had commanded a kingdom of huge applauding audiences; now she needed a small Court in a place where the élite and fashionable settled and money abounded—in short a Principality. The Germans had been adept at preserving princelings, grand dukes and margraves who combined the overfed bourgeois flush with the elegance of royal satiety and ease. The Rhineland was the country of the Schloss with its stagey medieval appeal to the middle-class century; a spa ministered to the most exclusive of diseases: gout, rheumatism, paralysis and the stone. A few miles across the Rhine from Strasbourg and twenty-three miles up the Rhine from Karlsruhe on the main line from Ostend and Brussels, Baden-Baden had become Europe’s and especially the Parisian’s summer resort, a Monte Carlo without need of a Mediterranean. It had its Schloss, indeed it had two. Famous statesmen, great artists in music, the theatre and painting found the season at Baden-Baden indispensable to their health and amusement. It was a pretty town, adroitly placed where nature was a seductive mixture of mountain, forest, decorous waterfalls and streams. Beyond the little valley that climbed gently from the orchards of the Rhineland and the hills where the vineyards stood in peaceable regiments were the tall pines of the Black Forest; in the sheltered avenues of the town itself were a profusion of beeches, acacias, chestnuts, willows and firs, all neatly labelled as in a botanist’s paradise. The scene was graceful, instructive and soothing to the indulgent sentiments of middle age. The cakes were rich and creamy, the wines light and tender. The little river Oos running through the gardens from the hills was packed with trout; the mountain lakes (to German fancy), with water sprites. The fountains played, the statues offered their antique suggestions. In the summer and early autumn evenings a lilac haze gave the scene the sweet wilfulness and contentment of a Victorian painting. At appropriate hours one lay in the baths of ionised minerals, drank the water at a Kurhaus, or sat in long rows listening to the orchestra,
paraded to see who had arrived and filed into the gambling tables. Whiskered officers pranced on their horses. Ladies and grooms galloped down the Allées. The age of uniforms, clinking spurs and the crinoline had come. The rich built themselves villas in the grey, steep-roofed château style of Louis XIII. When Viardot sold Courtavenel he brought his distinguished collection of pictures as a compliment to the town, and Pauline soon established her Court.

  If Turgenev had almost lost touch with Pauline, he was often in correspondence with Louis Viardot, who received moneys for the education and pension of Paulinette, and also about translations. He was helping Viardot to translate Onegin into French when he heard of the move to Baden and made this the excuse for a visit. It was very short and difficult. But in 1863 the embarrassment had receded sufficiently for him to be allowed—there can be no other word—to take a flat in the Schillerstrasse not far from the Viardots’ house.

  Some biographers, including David Magarshack, think that Pauline’s softening towards Turgenev was unscrupulous and one does detect here and there in his work that he knew he was being used. She was proposing to publish several albums of Russian songs and she needed the support of his famous name. His figure would be indispensable to her salon. April Fitzlyon more sympathetically suggests that now Pauline had given up the great opera houses she had time for family life and the emotions she had been obliged to subdue as an artist. In the confessional letters, strange in their erotic overtones, Pauline had written to Rietz, the testy father figure to whom she had turned at the time when Turgenev had attached himself to the Countess Lambert, and said outright that she had crushed her heart ruthlessly. She certainly knew at once when she saw Turgenev in Baden and needed him that she could dominate him absolutely whenever she wished. She wanted a small theatre. Turgenev was soon building one of those steep-roofed Louis XIII—style houses for himself, planting its large gardens and building a theatre for her in the grounds.