Why, after all his sufferings, did he return to the Viardots and accept, finally as it turned out, the life of an expatriate? The “empty nest” at Spasskoye knew him now only as an occasional visitor. Was it only because, as he sometimes said, and others said quite seriously too, that Pauline’s extraordinary eyes had hypnotised him? Did he inevitably submit to the will of others? She had obviously imposed her will on her husband. Of course, Turgenev loved family life by proxy. Her children were growing up and he loved children although his own child bored him. One does not imagine that she was a woman to forget a wrong or that she would accept any criticism of her own behaviour. She had a tongue and in the Spanish way cherished a jealousy. There is one scene, of which almost nothing is known, which may have been important. He brought his daughter Paulinette for a visit to Baden and Paulinette made a violent attack on Pauline: Turgenev was the witness. If we knew the words that passed we would probably know everything about Pauline and Turgenev’s relationship in the past; it would tell us what Pauline must have understood when she heard him silence his daughter and saw her only victory: that such victories are dangerous, even though they are victories at the expense of another woman’s child and the child’s father. Still it does seem that a warmer reconciliation with Turgenev dates from soon after this time. And that what kept Turgenev out of Russia was a renewal, of what he called an autumnal love on his side and, just possibly, on hers.
That happiness can, of course, be regarded as a danger for him as a writer, for he wrote less when he was with her.
Although his life-long complaint was that he had been obliged to live “on the edge of another man’s nest,” he had in his early years held the opinion that it was not a good thing for an artist to marry. The artist must serve the Muse, serve her and no one else. “An unhappy marriage may do something for a talent, but a happy one is no good at all.” It was a mistake to be absorbed in a feeling for one person alone. And he said that he himself found he could work best in the glow of a casual affair “especially with a married woman who could manage both herself and her passions.” He may have taken this attitude because of his mother’s domination: it is common for men who have been dominated in that way to shy away especially from women of their own class. It is true that in the long separations from Pauline his talent reached his greatest powers; yet what may have been his spiritual love of her was certainly a marriage at its most exacting. He was very aware of the impoverishing effect of expatriation and his own friends did not stop reminding him of it. But Russia, we must remember, had turned on him, indeed on his greatest book and not only that, threatened him. He had had one unforgettable taste of arrest and exile which had put an end to his happiness when he was a young man.
There was a powerful reason, almost as powerful as love, for keeping out of Russia now. The extreme radical manifestos, the acts of terrorism that followed the emancipation of the serfs and the fact that the conservatives saw Turgenev as sympathetic to the Nihilists, aroused real fears that they might incriminate him. Turgenev knew, as every Russian did, that his freedom of movement was in the hands of the Tsar who could easily find the pretext for sending him into exile once more, even for confiscating his estate. In 1862 Turgenev’s Radical opponent, Chernyshevsky, a member of what Herzen called “the bilious set” whose attacks had led to Turgenev’s quarrel with The Contemporary, was arrested on charges connected with revolutionary socialism and was deported to Siberia, where he remained until 1883. Turgenev was not in the same danger—he had been careful to keep his well-placed aristocratic friends—but he knew how remote from the minds of his countrymen the liberal spirit was: they had been formed for despotism, its paternal thrashings and its Byzantine chicaneries.
A reminder of his own danger had come to Turgenev in 1863. He had gone to London and had visited Herzen, whose brilliant periodical Kolokol, or The Bell, was still powerful as the voice of dissident Russians abroad. With him was Bakunin, the now dilapidated friend of Turgenev’s youth. In 1861, Bakunin, the perpetual revolutionary, had achieved his most romantic coup—he had been in prison then in Siberia when the Austrians handed him over to the Russians in ‘48. Now, with impertinent ease, he had escaped through Japan and arrived in London via New York, eager for news of revolution. Herzen wrote in My Past and Thoughts:
He had piously preserved all the habits and customs of his fatherland, that is of student-life in Moscow: heaps of tobacco lay on his table like stores of forage, cigar-ash covered his papers, together with half-finished glasses of tea … He argued, lectured, made arrangements, shouted, decided, directed, organised and encouraged all day long, all night long … and set to work to write five, ten, fifteen letters to Semipalatinsk and Arad, to Belgrade and Tsargrad, to Bessarabia, Moldavia and Belokrinitsa … His activity, his laziness, his appetite, and everything else, like his gigantic statue and the everlasting sweat he was in, everything, in fact, was on a superhuman scale, as he was himself; and he was himself a giant with his leonine head and tousled mane.
At fifty he was still the wandering student, living from day to day, borrowing indiscriminately, throwing other people’s money away, giving away his last penny except what he needed for cigarettes and tea. In London he soon got money from Turgenev, who was sorry for the old agitator who had grown up coarse but incurable in his hopes of finding a revolution somewhere. He nevertheless derided Turgenev’s views and egged Herzen on to support the Polish insurrection in The Bell—a folly as Herzen later admitted. Bakunin was flamboyant as a conspirator and wildly reckless in his correspondence and described the meeting with Turgenev in a letter which was easily picked up by the Russian secret police in Paris and the upshot was that Turgenev was commanded to return to St. Petersburg to be questioned in secret by the Senate. This was alarming and Turgenev wrote a letter to the Tsar protesting that he was a writer with no involvement with politics; but he had to go. He knew one or two of his judges who received him politely: in fact before the first hearing he had gone to a grand soirée given by a Marquis Pepoli who had married a singer. He wrote to Pauline:
And Prince Dolgorouki (listen to this!)the head of all the police in the Empire, one of the most influential people in the government chatted with me for a while; Prince Souvorov (of the Council of State and military government of Petersburg) was charming to me which shows that they don’t regard me as a conspirator.
Indeed the fat judge, Venevitinov, once a friend of Pushkin and Gogol, told him the whole affair was a miserable waste of time.
So it turned out. The judges studied the Dossier, asked him one or two questions where his name was mentioned in it and told him he was free to leave Russia whenever he liked, and sympathised with him. He was having one of his first attacks of gout. He went off to arrange for the publication of the first album of Pauline’s Russian songs and spent an evening with “kind old Countess Lambert” whose health was improving.
The exasperating aspect of the case was that it took place after an exchange of published letters with Herzen in 1862 in which Turgenev had explained his profound differences with Herzen’s ostensibly Left-ward move in politics which seemed to Turgenev reactionary. One more sad and important quarrel with a friend of many years was the outcome.
The purpose of The Bell was described in the four volumes of Herzen’s collected writings:
You can work on men [he wrote] only by dreaming their dreams more clearly than they can dream them themselves, not by demonstrating their ideas to them as geometrical theories are demonstrated.
In the fifties he had settled in London, living at first in a grotesque room in Primrose Hill which contained, to his sardonic amusement, a bust of Queen Victoria and of Lola Montez. He was freer in London than he had ever been in his harassed wanderings in Europe but:
My heart was not lighter for this freedom but yet I looked out of the window with a greeting to the sombre trees in the park which were hardly visible through the smoky fog and thanked them for their peacefulness. There is no town in the world which is mor
e adapted for training one away from people and training one into solitude than London.
Until the sixties, Herzen, like Turgenev, had been a convinced Westerner but now he changed his mind. The rich Russian aristocrat and revolutionary, noted for his fine bearing and his excellent clothes, could not bear to see the rise of the lower middle class in industrialised Europe.
Their vulgarity is cramping to art, above all their decorum, moderation and punctuality.
Their life was
full of small defects and small virtues; it is self-restrained, often niggardly and shuns what is extreme and superfluous. The petit bourgeois ideal is the little house with little windows looking on to the street, a school for the son, a dress for the daughter, a servant for the hard work.
To Herzen the success of the new ideal was a degradation; he was aging and yearned to be back in peasant Russia and dreamed that a society less mean and calculating, something closer to the old Slavophil teaching, would somehow appear. It is an extraordinary reversal of belief and when Turgenev read the six long letters addressed to himself in The Bell, he replied hotly to the accusation that his own belief in Western Europe and its traditions was due to laziness and epicureanism. The hope of a new society lay with the educated class who transmit civilisation. Herzen, he said, was worshipping the peasant’s sheepskin coat; left to themselves the peasants would soon become as bourgeois as Europe and would be averse to all civic responsibility and independent action.
You diagnose contemporary mankind with unusual subtlety and sensitivity [Turgenev wrote], but why must this [i.e., the petit bourgeois] be Western Man and not bipedes in general.
Herzen, he said, was like a doctor who after examining the symptoms of a chronic illness says that the whole trouble comes from the patient’s being a Frenchman. If Herzen has lost his faith in civilisation and finally revolution, let him admit it “without evident or implied exceptions in favour of a Russian Messiah who is expected at any moment and in whom you really believe as little as you do in the Hebrew one.”
This dispute lost its amiable note after his “trial” in Petersburg, and, Turgenev read in The Bell a nasty paragraph, thought to have been written by Bakunin, which accused Turgenev of betraying the conspirators to the judges and in which he was called “a grey haired Magdalene of masculine gender” who had written to the Emperor because she feared he was unaware of her repentance with the result that she had lost strength, appetite and her hair and teeth are falling out. The language of Russian controversy has always been gaudy in personal insult. It was too much that Bakunin who had borrowed money from him should now spread slanders.
But [he wrote to Herzen] I did not expect you in just the same way to fling mud at a man you have known for almost twenty years—solely because his convictions are different from yours.
Herzen never apologised: he had been infected by Bakunin with the mistrust that Bakunin always sowed between his friends—the characteristic that Turgenev had noted years before in the portrait of Rudin. There was a long breach. It is characteristic of Turgenev that he tried to comfort Herzen when The Bell finally lost its readers and came to an end.
Fashionable society in Baden, frivolous though it was, paid its peculiar tribute to the fame of the artists who came there. Pauline’s fame in opera, Turgenev’s fame as a novelist, drew people to them. Louis Viardot’s mild distinction as a scholar himself benefited from the glow of his wife’s and Turgenev’s achievements. Other musical people had caused royal frostiness and a drawing in of skirts, but this respectable liaison offered no revelations to the outside world and was so clearly domestic, middle-aged and high-minded that it ruffled no one except the Russians and the French who, in their airy way, could not believe that two of Pauline’s children, Claudine and Paul, were not Turgenev’s, but had no secrets of the alcove to report. Pauline had the advantage of being the model for Consuelo who had never strayed, despite her alarming experiences. And then the Viardot group were well-off and intellectually formidable. The most the ironical could notice was that Turgenev, who had so often spoken of his old age and approaching death even in his thirties, now at forty-five had the tact to be as white-haired as the husband who was more than twenty years older than himself. In this town where the Russian visitors shouted and the courtesans from Paris were overdressed, there was social reassurance in the sight of the two staid and white-haired men going off shooting together or escorting the vigorous and commanding young singer who struck one, in her severe plainness, as being the male of the three. Her salon was soon the most exclusive in Baden and was visited by the ruling Prince himself.
The climate of Baden improved Turgenev’s health: he was free of the laryngitis, colds and bronchitis of Petersburg. He no longer wore a respirator or spat blood. He stuck, however, to mufflers, comforters and rugs in the winter and longed for Russian stoves.
Turgenev’s letters to Pauline when she is occasionally away singing in Germany recover the liveliness of his youthful adoration; the flowery worshipping phrases in German which had almost vanished now reappear in the mid-sixties, and although we have none of her letters we can tell from his that she now wrote often and more warmly. The next few years were the happiest in their lives. Turgenev was in high spirits. He loved dancing and play-acting. He became a child among her children. He appointed himself an additional father or a godfather who, as he said, adored them all, played with them, taught them. The young pupils of Pauline Viardot were in awe of her, but it was Turgenev who put them at their ease with his chatter. Louis Viardot was silent, uttered the word that brought them to order, was strict, but could make a pun. He was the just man with strict moral views: he was very French in being the man whose ideas were arranged in an orderly manner. But he did find himself effaced at times by a famous wife and the famous novelist. In Alexander Zviguilsky’s introduction to new letters of Turgenev (Librairie des Cinq Continents, 1871), there is a reference to Gustave Dulay’s Pauline Viardot, Tragédienne Lyrique, which comments on a letter Louis Viardot wrote to his wife in 1865. He says he has never for a moment thought his wife indulged in sentiments or conduct unworthy of her. But one has to be careful not to give rise to gossip. He complains, without mentioning Turgenev, that there have often been occasions in conversations, in musical matters or relations with their children “that his place has been taken by another.” What would Pauline think if she found some other woman, George Sand, for example, taking her place the whole time in the affections and duties of those nearest to her, so that she was made to feel irrelevant? Pauline appears to have replied that he was having an attack of the blue devils, but he replied that he wished it were just that, but:
my heart is sound, it is filled with you, loves and reveres you. Let us work together and give me back my peace, cheerfulness and let me enjoy to the full my happiness and pride in having you for my wife and friend.
The passion of Louis Viardot for the wife who respected but did not love him, is resigned but deep. She was a woman indeed with two lovers: the husband almost silent who, when she was away once, wrote to Turgenev that he was now sadly left “to be the mother of the family,” fussing for her return; and the other, vivacious, brilliant, talkative and longing for her too, when he had to go to Paris or Russia. There is an important difference between the two men: Louis is proud of his marriage to her and feels that she belongs to him: for Turgenev the feeling is different. He tells her constantly he belongs to her and the little girls whom he adores: She is a tree, he says, she is his root and his crown. “I fall down at your feet and kiss them a thousand times, am yours forever and ever.” Once more this is written in German, the love language of his youth, the language of music; and one can be certain it is the influence of her voice singing which has passed into these words. It strikes one again that language was his instrument.
The wounding quarrel about Fathers and Sons went on. Journalists, Turgenev noted, had called him a Vidocq, a Judas, bought for gold, poison toad and spittoon. But he was not only helping Pauline with
her Albums and even composing an operétte with her—he was writing a new novel, Smoke, in which he had one more fling at the Russian question. The Russian visitors in Baden talked incessantly through the nights about it.
In Smoke, all Turgenev’s sense of outrage at the reception of Fathers and Sons, breaks out in his fierce caricature of Russian society. Since the novel is set in Baden, among an international set, it naturally strikes one as being adventitiously a European novel in which the Russian characters have a stupefied, often an absurd anachronistic role. We are no longer dragging our way across the steppe or sitting in happy out-of-date lethargy in out-of-date country houses and among people who, for all their surface sophistication, belong to an order which has not been known in Europe for at least two hundred years. The very lightness of manner, the treatment of the theme, seems “modern” in its restlessness, its quickness, its wit and a new kind of psychological penetration. The upper-class Russians may cling together, but they are seen bemused by an active clash of cultures and are, as far as Europe is concerned, “on the spot.” Baden is a town in an advanced, industrialised country: people come and go not by diligence but by train. The smoke of the title is railway smoke, as well as having other symbolical duties. (The title was not Turgenev’s: the publisher took it, very fittingly, from one of the last pages of the book.)
There is no raggedness in the carefully constructed story. Baden suits it perfectly in being the closed scene which is a substitute for the country house and in which the skills of the secret playwright can be displayed and where the characters, being transients, can bring their past to a head and to the test before, once more, they depart. The flowery August season is at its height. We see the yawning and glum Russian colony bickering and boasting under the “arbre russe” in the gardens, “the fine fleur of our society,” among them people like Baron Z, writer, orator, administrator and cardsharper; Prince Y, friend of the people and the church, who made a fortune out of selling doped vodka; the Countess S, a “Medusa in a bonnet”; a Princess Babette who boasted, as a thousand others did, that Chopin had died in her arms. The French are there in swarms, especially the demi-monde to whose buffooneries the Russians listen with awe, having no wit themselves. The opening chapter of Smoke is ferocious caricature of the Russian gentry abroad. Here, on his way back to Russia after four years studying economics and agricultural methods abroad, a young man called Litvinov pauses for a few days. He is waiting for his fiancée and her Aunt to arrive from Karlsruhe before he goes back to Russia to put modern ideas into practice on his land. Litvinov is a new kind of hero. He is the son of a modest, industrious clerk of serious mind who late in life had married a woman of noble extraction with large estates: this lady had run her houses in the orderly European fashion and seen to her son’s education. Litvinov takes his future as a landowner seriously and studiously and is an earnest, simple young plebeian. He knows that now the Emancipation has occurred, his task will require practical and intelligent handling. He is well-equipped to do this and has no time for the fashionable young Russian officers on leave, the reactionary Generals or what he regards as the blather of the Russian Radicals. As a hero he is nice but dull: Turgenev advances him in the cause of common sense. While he is waiting, he is dragged into the two main Russian parties: the dispiriting Radicals who gather round the famous Gubaryov—maliciously drawn from Herzen’s friend, the poet Ogarev, and the new kind of Slavophil Radical who believes that all hopes lie in the hidden genius of the Russian peasant. Litvinov is bored and next finds himself with the old Generals and young aristocrats who are still determined to resist the changes brought about by the Emancipation. He goes off for a long walk up the mountain to the old Schloss and there runs into a party of aristocratic young officers. They spot the plebeian in Litvinov at once and snub him with majestic affability and contempt:
The Gentle Barbarian Page 19