Unknown to them all, the “autumnal happiness” of Baden was coming to an end. While he was away the Franco-German war had broken out and Moltke’s armies were on the move. Herzen had died too soon to see the justification of his belief that bourgeois Europe was a rotten organism.
Turgenev had said once or twice when the builders were slow in building his villa that the first tenant of the house would be a French General. It was soon clear that no French General would enter Baden with his troops. The Viardots were alarmed. They were French citizens. They fled from the town like the rest of the foreign residents. Turgenev returned from Russia in time to take Pauline Viardot and her daughters to Ostend and put them on the boat for England, then returned to Louis Viardot who stayed on for a short time. Turgenev remained. He still believed the French would arrive and knew they could do nothing to him. He, in fact, stayed on until the winter.
In 1848 he had been a spectator of revolution in Paris; now he was a spectator of war and wrote a number of commentaries for a Petersburg newspaper. The articles came to an end because the Russian editors were pro-French and he, from the double influence of the love of the romantic Germany of his youth and his hatred of Louis Napoleon, took the German side.
The German population were astonished by the early German victories. It had always been said that the Rhinelanders would not side with Prussia: now they were amazed to find themselves “befuddled by patriotic joy” in German unity. Turgenev heard the first sound of the German artillery from Yverg Castle, the highest point of the Black Forest from which one could see the whole valley of Alsace with its peaceful regiments of vines, its orchards and wide, hedgeless fields of maize stretching as far as Strasbourg. He saw the first black and red smoke of the explosions—forty to a minute. “It is impossible not to curse the war.” He took the German side, he said, because the salvation of civilisation and the free institutions in Europe depended on the donwfall of the monstrous Napoleonic system. He sincerely loved and respected the French people, he said, “but it was time to crush the immoral system that has ruled for 20 years.” It was their turn to learn the lesson that Prussians received at Jena, the Austrians at Sadowa and the Russians at Sebastopol. There is one characteristic literary aside in these letters: he had been reading Tolstoy’s War and Peace as it slowly came out, sometimes admiring it, often sharply critical of its “petty” realism, most of all of its philosophisings and its military comments.
I can well understand why Tolstoy supports the French side. He finds French phrasemongering repulsive, but he hates sober-mindedness, system and science (in a word the Germans), even more. His novel is based on enmity towards intellect, knowledge and cognition.
Tolstoy thought (he said) that battles are lost and won in the rumblings of adjutants and generals, whereas they are won by plans carried out, as Moltke does, with mathematical precision.
As he wrote, his house shook with the sounds of the bombardment of Strasbourg which had already been half burned down. And by day the French prisoners streamed in. But he was no reporter. He stands apart, absorbed in historical and social meditations… “We are still barbarians! And we shall probably remain so until the end of our days.”
The war, the surrender and the Commune were ruinous for the Viardots. Their property in Baden was safe enough, but in the collapse of the Funds, their income was vanishing and although she gave concerts in England that year and took on pupils in London, Pauline Viardot could not command the fees she had earned from the rich and even royal pupils she had had in Baden. She and Louis took a house in Seymour Street, and soon after, in Devonshire Place. When Turgenev joined them he took a separate flat in Beaumont Street to avoid gossip, but was at Devonshire Place most of the day. He stayed in England for seven months, except for a month when he was off to Petersburg in the spring of 1871 to raise money to help his daughter whose husband had been ruined by the war and to find a publisher for another of Pauline Viardot’s album of songs—they had had only a small success and, this time, secretly, he paid for the publication himself. His new agent at Spasskoye was turning out to be as incompetent and idle as his Uncle Nikolai had been. He had also the duty of seeing Pauline’s eldest daughter, Louise, who had left her husband and child in France. She was teaching singing in the Conservatoire in St. Petersburg. She hated her mother, her father, her husband and all society. She had cropped her hair short and seems to have inherited her mother’s male, domineering traits, without having her mother’s charm, and had always a submissive female “slave” in attendance. She repels, Turgenev wrote to the Viardots, but she aroused his pity. He went to Moscow which he loathed for its smell of “lamp oil and slavic blubber” and read the news of the Commune in the paper. Now he was pro-French:
It’s a case of the insurrection of ‘48 but now triumphant. What will happen to France? Will France, the nation to which we owe so much, fall into the anarchic state of Poland and Mexico?
What would become of the Viardots’ property, their investments, the farm at Courtavenel?
He had gone to Moscow because the cholera he dreaded had broken out in Petersburg, the plague he called “Him” or “the green devil.” The very word started bizarre imaginary pains in his body. In Moscow he received from Pauline one of the few letters we know of that display anxiety and even passion for him. She was frightened by the collapse of her career and her home.
Ah Dear friend, hurry back. Don’t stop an hour longer than is absolutely necessary. I beg you if you have the slightest love for us. Don’t go back to Petersburg. Promise me not to go back to that fatal city—please. Are you going on to Spasskoye? I hope you won’t. Send us a picture of yourself as a young man. Oh, write every day and come back, dear friend, come back to be near those who cannot be happy unless you are here.
The cold was intense, the snow crackled under his feet and, he said, he would give anything for the fogs of London because she was there, and he came back.
Although they disliked London, the Viardots had excellent friends there, people who remembered her performances. They stayed in country houses. She gave her Saturday parties. Eventually when the situation in France calmed down, Louis Viardot returned to Baden, to sell the house and pack up their furniture—especially the valuable organ—and his considerable collection of pictures, all unharmed by the war.
The happy frontier people of that part of Germany had thrived on French visitors and Baden’s small distinction, and no French man or woman, as Turgenev pointed out, had been molested. But the war had awoken French patriotism in Louis Viardot and although Pauline had been the victim of French insularity and intrigue in the operatic world in her youth, she loved the cosmopolitan life of Paris. The only member of the ménage who did not was Turgenev but, as he said, he would follow the Viordots even to Australia if she ordered it.
They got back their house in the rue de Douai and Turgenev discreetly asked if they would let him three rooms at the top of it. It was agreed.
Chapter 12
In 1870 when he was fifty-two, Turgenev wrote to a correspondent that a “Russian writer who has settled in Baden by that very fact condemns his writing to an early end. I have no illusions on that score, but since everything else is impossible, there is no point in talking about it… But are you really so submerged in what is ‘contemporary’ that you will not tolerate any non-contemporary characters?” Such people, he says, have lived and have a right to be portrayed. “I admit no other immortality: and this immortality of human life (in the eyes of art and history), is the basis of my whole world.”
What is one to think of his writing in the Baden period? The critics hated Smoke for political and patriotic reasons, but it is a very able novel. His visits to Russia were not lost: he had another long book in mind—Virgin Soil—but he was not ready for it and turned to the long short stories in which he rarely failed. He was simply, he said, “too full of subjects.” In his early fifties he wrote two reminiscent stories—the horrifying tale, The Brigadier, based on the incident we already know
of in the life of his Lutovinov grandmother who had committed murder. An old and senile brigadier “of the age of Catherine” is seen fishing, accompanied by a bullying servant who ridicules him. The brigadier has become a ruined and childish simpleton, reduced to poverty and ostracism because in middle years he had loved and lived with a terrifying young widow who, in a rage, had killed her page. Out of love and in a fit of honour the brigadier had assumed guilt for her crime and was tried for it but his sentence had been short. The widow and (after her death) her sister, bleed him of all his money until he is destitute. Yet once a week he visits the widow’s grave with adoration. At last he knows he is going to die. He knows because of a dream.
I, as maybe you know, often see Agrippina Ivanov (as he now calls her) in my dreams—heaven’s peace be with her—and never can I catch her: I am always running after her but cannot catch her. But last night I dreamed she was standing, as it were, before me, half turned away and laughing… I ran up to her at once and caught her… and she seemed to turn round quite and said to me “Well, Vassinka, now you have caught me… It has come to me that we shall be together again.”
The tale is told in the old-fashioned way of picking up the story by hearsay in the manner of a folk tale, but in the servant’s mockery there is something of the mockery of Shakespeare’s cynical comics, and Turgenev has made it powerful. The hearsay, the careful reader will notice, is not flat but is subtly varied as changes of scene and voice are made to carry it. The theme is, of course, familiar in his writings: a man dominated and enduring abasement and suffering in love. He will give everything to the monster but he lives by his honour which is a kind of exultation. The dream of death as a woman is also a common theme and so—we note once more—is the myth of bewitchment as a psychological fact.
The theme of honour as the real test in love and indeed in all crucial circumstances is of great importance in Turgenev’s writing and it must not be read as a romanticisation of an old-fashioned or picturesque idea common enough in the historical novels of the nineteenth century. If the brigadier’s honour is not to be questioned this is for reasons of Russian history. Turgenev believed that Russia was uncivilised in the Western sense because there was no experience of an age of chivalry in its culture. And if we look beyond this story to his own life, it would seem that his own Quixote-like concept of love in his feelings for Pauline is a chivalrous vow which once uttered must never be betrayed; in that sense his love of Pauline was not a weakness nor an obsession. It was an anachronism. It was a life-long vigil. It was not even romantic, but a spiritual law, an article of the aristocratic faith. The Brigadier is not only an important story, but a very revealing one in another connection. In his own life, Turgenev felt he owed it to himself as a duty of chivalrous principle to give money secretly to revolutionaries like Bakunin and others—the Populist leader, for example—even though he hated violence and terrorism and feared the loss of his property.
The idea of honour abused is at the heart of An Unhappy Girl, a story drawn from his student days. The girl is half-Jewish, one of the maltreated “orphans” handed on: the Jewish aspect of her beauty is ancient, ennobled by race, and aristocratic instinct. She is helplessly trapped in a coarse German family. Her tale is remarkable for its scenes of vulgar lower-middle-class life, its gambling episodes and a drunken funeral meal which follows the funeral of the tormented girl who has been driven to suicide. Unfortunately there is an element of plot: it is suggested that the girl may have been poisoned so that her small inheritance would then pass to the awful Germans if she died unmarried. Plot-making was outside Turgenev’s competence. The girl’s wretched state is well-done but Dostoevsky with his dynamic power of dramatising the inner life of the “insulted and the injured” would have made more of her, for Dostoevsky believed in free will whereas the art of Turgenev, the determinist, is in this sense static: people live under fate. Or rather one says again that time flows through them: they do not drive blindly forward through time.
In The Story of Lieutenant Erguynov a young naval officer is stripped of his money by a sly, amusing, fascinating girl who is a decoy used by thieves. Again the plot is awkward but there are some brilliant things in the tale, particularly in the account of Erguynov’s state of hallucination when, his drink being doped, he sails out of consciousness to the sound of the balalaika, is robbed, knocked on the head and dumped with his skull split on the roadside. And we get pleasure from the fact that, in old age, the simple Lieutenant loves telling the whole story again and again and loves to dwell on his hallucination so that the company knows it by heart. For what we are shown is an innocent young sailor growing into a knowing old fellow, enlarging himself as he talks. He makes us feel that he is telling us something that is now more completely “true” than it was when it was scattered in the fragmentary experience of real life. The point of honour crops up at the end, but comically. The thieves escape and so does the girl, but much later she writes to the sailor begging him to believe she herself was not responsible for the attempt to murder him. She had no idea they would go that far and she would like to see him and convince him that although she did deceive him she is not a criminal. The sailor—an honourable fellow—is rather taken by the idea, but he puts it off and does nothing. The fact that he does nothing makes the story rest delightfully in suspense—which is an aspect of life.
None of these stories approaches the power of A Lear of the Steppes. This is a major work. The Lear is Martin Petrovich Harlov, a hulking, rough, bear-like figure who farms 800 acres and owns serfs but who, though claiming to come of noble Russian stock “as old as Vassilievitch the Dark,” is a hard-driving peasant farmer, a stern, shouting but honest man. He lives in what he calls his “mansion,” a ramshackle homestead he has built with his own hands, a small manor with courtyard and a tumbledown thatched lodge. His own room in the house is unplastered. His riding whips, his horse collar, hang from nails on the wall. There is a wooden settle with a rug, flies swarm on the ceiling and the place smells as he himself does, of the forest. In the house live his two daughters: Anna, who is married to the whining and greedy son of a petty official, and Evlampia, who is being courted by a battered and broken major. Both girls are beauties.
The narrator of the story is fifteen when the events begin: the son of a wealthy landowning widow. It has, but only superficially, the tone of A Sportsman’s Sketches, but it will go much deeper. The widow has always been Harlov’s friend and adviser, so that we see Harlov through the eyes of an awed boy, as it might be Turgenev himself as a boy living with his mother at Spasskoye. If Harlov is a primitive giant he seems all the more gigantic to a boy’s wondering eyes. Turgenev is careful to convey the physical force of Harlov’s person by an insider’s, not an outsider’s metaphors that evoke the man and the working scenes of his life. The voice that came out of a small mouth was strong and resonant:
Its sound recalled the clank of iron bars carried in a cart over a badly paved road; and when Harlov spoke it was as though someone were shouting in a high wind across a wide ravine… his shoulders were like millstones… his ears were like twists of bread… he breathed like a bull but walked without a sound.
It is important to the story that the boy’s mother had found a wife for Harlov, a frail girl who lasted only long enough to give him two daughters, and saw to it that they had a superior education. Times are changing: we shall see the result of this kindness. The daughters will eventually turn their father out of his own house and drive him to frenzy and death.
The wonder is that this confident, dominant and roaring man who frightens everyone—“the wood demon” as people call him—will bring about his own downfall by an act of Lear-like weakness. He is liable to fits of melancholy, during which he shuts himself up in his room, starts to hum “like a swarm of bees.” The hours of humming end in singing meaningless words. He recovers. It is after one of these fits that he comes to his friend the widow and announces that Death has appeared to him in a dream in the form of a black colt t
hat rushes into the house, dances about and finally gives him a kick in the arm. He wakes up aching in every bone. It is this terror which has driven him to a bid for power which is exorbitant and, indeed, a sign of folly: he is going to divide his property between his daughters now; willing it to them is not enough, for he wants to see their gratitude. He wants to establish his absolute rule after death now and before his eyes. Nothing will persuade him that this is foolish.
The story now expands. We are in the Russia of A Sportsman’s Sketches, a crowd of characters come in, the lawyers, the police, officials, the grasping son-in-law and a spiteful, jeering figure called Souvenir, an orphan, the brother of Harlov’s dead wife who is hanger-on in the landowner’s house. Souvenir has a mawkish laugh that sounds like the rinsing of a bottle and whenever Harlov calls at the house he goes swaggering after him and saying “What made you kill my sister?” Souvenir has a goading, diabolical role to play. The deed of gift is signed and Souvenir tells the old man with delight that now his daughters will turn him out.
The Gentle Barbarian Page 22