The Gentle Barbarian

by V. S. Pritchett

  “I have no need of people with scowling faces like that,” she said, for she required deferential smiles from her workers and ordered him to be sent off at once to a “Settlement.” She often threatened servants with Siberia or prison. The sentenced man or woman had then to be led past her drawing-room window and to bow as he or she was taken off. Turgenev writes in the story:

  Yermil stood without his cap, with downcast head, barefoot, with his boots tied up with a string behind his back; his face, turned towards the seignorial mansion, expressed not despair nor grief, nor even bewilderment, a stupid smile was frozen on his colourless lips, his eyes dry and half closed, looked stubbornly on the ground. My grandmother was apprised of his presence. She got up from her sofa, went with a faint rustle of her silken skirts to the window of the study and holding her golden rimmed double eye glass on the bridge of her nose, looked at the new exile.

  Her clerk, the Baburin of the story, protested and she replied:

  “That is of absolutely no consequence to me—among my subjects I am sovereign and answerable to no one, only I am not accustomed to have people criticising me in my presence and meddling in what is not their business… You too do not suit me. You are discharged.” And turning to her steward she told him to pay off the clerk and get rid of him by dinner time. “Don’t put me into a passion,” she said. “What is Yermil waiting for? I have seen him. What more does he want?”

  And, says Turgenev, she shook a handkerchief angrily out of the window.

  After such a scene she would go back to her chair, her rage satisfied, and go on playing patience or reading the latest French novel. She despised Russian writing—except for a few lines of Pushkin.

  Varvara Petrovna’s husband seems to have behaved with formal indifference and amused himself with his love affairs or his shooting. Perhaps he too was afraid of the virago he had married, although it is said his concern was to preserve an illusion of decorum in the tormented house. He drifted into ill-health and a long illness. The two sons sat by his bedside when he died. Varvara Petrovna was away in Italy. Ivan was sixteen.

  An early drawing of Turgenev in his boyhood before the tragic loss of his father—it appears in Yarmolinsky’s Life—is of a decorous but slyly staring gnome-like little creature, with a large head too big for his body. The forehead is high and fine, the eyes are intently watchful and dead-still with mischief. He sits in a trance-like state as if memorising every inch of what he sees. He was noted for his precocious and unabashed remarks to distinguished guests which got him into trouble. He perhaps picked up banter from his mother. Children brought up under a tyranny and who are spoiled one moment and beaten the next are likely to be evasive and to lead a double life and lie their way out when in difficulty. He wandered about a large house that always had guests and hangers-on in it, and had some of the too-forward characteristics of the hotel-child of the restless European and American rich of later times. He knew very well that he and his older brother were the young masters; but in old age he said all he remembered was the birchings he got from his mother; and the cowed serfs and the severe German and French tutors. His ear for French or German was remarkable: he was a born mimic and with a gift for play-acting and fantasy. His real education, as was apt to happen to the children of the gentry, was given him by the servants. He listened to their stories, knew the barbarous wrongs his mother inflicted on them; starved of the despised Russian language in family life, he heard it continually from them.

  Varvara Petrovna—who was an efficient ruler of her household—saw to it that her favourite serfs were taught to read and write, and one youth who had a taste for reading used to go off to the library secretly with Ivan to find a book. The library was not much more than a storeroom where the books were tied up in bundles that smelled of mice. They found an astonishing popular work called Emblems and Symbols, a sort of Russian Iliad, Turgenev called it, of fantastic verses about unicorns, kings, negroes, pyramids and snakes. There is a recollection of this discovery in Punin and Baburin when Punin

  shouted the verses out solemnly in a flowing outpour through his nose like a man intoxicated and beside himself with ecstasy … In this way we went through not only Lomonosov, Sumarokov and Kantemir … even Kheraskov’s Rossiada … There is in it, among others, a mighty Tatar woman, a gigantic heroine: I have forgotten her name now but in those days my hands and feet turned cold, as soon as it was uttered. “Yes,” Punin would say … Kheraskov he doesn’t let one off easily.”

  The story of Bunin and Baburin was one of the things Turgenev wrote in the last years of his life and one is immediately struck by the minuteness of his observation and his feeling for solitude as a boy. To the child brought up in such a place Spasskoye was a timeless, boundless country: the immense gardens and distances of the estate would seem to be Russia itself; he would know few if any children of his own class and, if any did arrive, they would seem totally outlandish. His natural affections and play were with the children of serfs among whom he would be pleased yet irked by the sense of his own privilege. His childhood, as with so many rich children, was a training for the innocence of the rich who take private life to be the whole world. At a very early age and as the favourite, he found that he had two roles to play. The household was a sort of secret society containing the quarrels between a passionate mother and a cool husband and the infinite quarrels and intrigues of the hierarchy of tale-telling servants: he listened and he would try to keep the peace by charm and being funny. Watching was a necessity and an amusement. Very early he stared at faces and learned to read the moods and history that were built into them; and when, for self-preservation, he could get away he went out into hiding places in the gardens and the woods to watch the things of nature build their history, from minute to differing minute: to gaze at a leaf or a bird waiting for it to move, to listen to the differing sounds of his boots as he walked over leaves, over grass, through hemp fields, to notice every change of light and shadow and the movements of cloud in the sky as the moments of the morning or the afternoon passed.

  I raised my head and saw at the end of a delicate twig one of those large flies with emerald heads and long body and four transparent wings… For a long while, more than an hour, I did not take my eyes off her. Soaked through and through with sunshine she did not stir, only from time to time turning her head from side to side and shaking her lifted wings—and that was all.

  He had the eye of a naturalist; that is to say, there is no day-dreaming in it, no Wordsworthian moral content. He is already a collector of the events of the hour as it changes.

  Chapter 2

  When they were nine or ten, the Turgenev brothers were put into a prep school in Moscow for a short time, then into a high school where they met mostly boys of their own class. At fifteen Ivan entered Moscow University, which was not much more than a secondary school to whom all, except serfs, were admitted. After a year or so there he advanced to Petersburg University with the fashionable intention of proceeding to the University of Berlin. This prosaic education was to fit young men of his class for high rank in the Tsarist civil service or life in the Army or at Court.

  In Moscow Ivan drank his first draught of German idealism. The philosophy of Hegel turned young men of his generation to metaphysics and literature. At the prep school run by a cheerful old German, the students lived en famille and spelled out Schiller during the week, played forfeits or charades on Sundays and went in for passionate friendships. Later on in his stories Turgenev recalled these lofty attachments: in Yakov Pasinkov, for example, he tells of his feeling for Yakov, the ugly duckling of the school, who had sharply pulled him up for his very Russian habit of telling lies: he told them partly out of an impetuous bent for fantasy and also from a pleasure in swaggering, but he was always quick to repent of his exaggerations. He responded to Yakov’s “goodness”:

  On his [Yakov’s] lips the words “goodness,” “truth,” “life,” “science,” “love,” however enthusiastically uttered, never rang with a false n
ote. Without strain, without effort he stepped into the world of the ideal: his pure soul was ready to stand before the holy shrine of beauty.

  The two were soon “soul in soul as the saying was.” The language of romantic love had become the fashion under the German influence: it was a reaction from the correct, ironical, formal language of his mother’s and father’s generation. When Turgenev entered Moscow University the ideals of self-perfection and the sublime absorbed the students and became grandiloquent. His own mind had turned to poetry and there is one of his early attempts in a letter to his Uncle Nikolai, an affable gentleman who had settled on the family in Spasskoye in the easy-going Russian way, and who eased the difficult moments of life there. The poem is about the annual drama of the breaking up of the ice on the Moscow river in the thaw which always drew the crowd. These ice-floes “suddenly fly-bang!”—against the stone banks and are smashed to pieces.

  They swallow each other in the wrestling of the waters/

  The ice-floes are born of other ice-floes/

  A sea is born of another sea.

  Once more, one notices, his eye moving from moment to moment.

  His growing literary turn is seen in his reading. He has been “enraptured by reading Mirabeau” and the young linguist was soon moving into English literature: Shakespeare, Shelley and above all Byron whom he knows through Pushkin. Shakespeare and Pushkin became his lasting guides. There are no evocations of Moscow’s gilded Asiatic steeples and gilded domes in Turgenev’s wriing, but, as Gogol did, he was more likely to note oddities like the hundreds of crows perched on the crucifixes and cupolas. Life in Moscow was almost rustic. Alexandr Herzen, ten years older than Turgenev, and to whom one turns again and again for close social observation, says in My Past and Thoughts that the houses of the gentry were all huddled together and yet the inhabitants were not of a single type: they were specimens of everything in Russian history, living unhurried and easy-going lives. There was a spaciousness of their own within them which we do not find in the petit-bourgeois life of the West … the rank and file of this society was composed of landowners not in the service or serving not on their own account, but to pacify their relations, and of young literary men and professors. There was a fluidity of relationships not yet settled and of habits not reduced to a sluggish orderliness, a freedom which is not found in the more ancient life of Europe … the Slav laisser faire.

  This Moscow lived by its dreams of Berlin and Paris. The talk went on until two in the morning and since it was dangerous to talk about politics, the subject had to be embalmed in literary and philosophical argument. The Muscovites were far from the formal Court life of Petersburg and the brisk coldness of official manners.

  All the same, “democratic” speculations were heard among the older students and the professors who had been to Berlin, and Turgenev, in his eager way, picked up one or two opinions that caused him to be mocked as “the American”; the first sign of his private horror of serfdom.

  The boys came back to Spasskoye for the holidays and at fifteen—Ivan told the Goncourts—he had his first mistress.

  I was very young. I was a virgin and with the desires one has at the age of 15. My mother had a pretty chambermaid who looked a little silly but, you know, a silly look lends a certain grandeur to some faces. It was rather a damp day, no a rainy day: one of those erotic days that Daudet likes to describe. It began to drizzle. She took—mind you, I was her master and she was my slave—she took hold of me by the hair at the back of my head and said to me “Come.” What followed was the sensations we have all experienced. But the sweet clasp of my hair accompanied by that single word—that still gives me a sensation of happiness every time I think of it.

  The incident would strike his mother as normal, indeed proper; perhaps she arranged it. His inevitable love affairs would be under her control in the manner of her generation. She distinguished between sexual adventure and the far greater perils of love.

  The boy had suddenly grown as tall as his father, indeed into a plumpish young giant with a long body and shortish legs which gave a sway to his walk. He had chestnut hair and large grave blue eyes, a bold nose. When his face was still the expression was of a young man self-absorbed, posing a little, and waiting. He had the fashionable lisp and he had some difficulty in getting his words out at first; the voice was gentle and caressing, but he was easily excited and then in talk and laughter the voice became high and shrill, even boisterous and he started pacing up and down the room like an actor carried away by his part.

  In 1834 when he was sixteen, his mother pushed him on to Petersburg University, the proper place for a young nobleman and where she had good connections. He shared rooms with his older brother who was a cadet in the military college. His mother went off to Italy but presently there was the family tragedy. The father was dying at Spasskoye.

  So much has been made of the powerful influence of his mother upon Turgenev’s character that the father has come to seem a distant and negligent figure who let her run her family as she wished. This is not quite so. When he intervened his was the voice of authority and she had some awe of him. His distance had its spell. He was one of those fathers who have the disconcerting air of being a spectator in his own family. In this Ivan was very much his father’s son; he too had grown into a restless spectator, his mind on his inner personal freedom. They went out shooting together: the father, though poorly educated himself, took an awkward interest in his son’s education. Although he became a rationalist very early, Ivan was affected by the superstitions his father shared with the servants and one effect of seeing the agonies of his father’s death was to convince Ivan for life that he would die of the disease of the bladder that killed his father.

  It is tempting to trace Turgenev’s life-long hypochondria to this event but when one considers the peculiar emotional conditions of life at Spasskoye, other influences pervade. Cholera moved from district to district among the peasants and the news of it besieged the minds of the landowners who shut themselves up in their houses when it was about. Varvara Petrovna feared it so much that she is said to have been borne round her grounds in a glass-enclosed chair when the plague came near. Spasskoye was a hothouse of imaginary symptoms and there was only a serf doctor living there to offer his crude remedies. Her temper brought on fainting fits and other disorders, and so strong was her will and imagination that she could act out any illness that suited her, with dramatic effect: it is not surprising that Ivan should have caught something of her morbidity.

  Much more important was the effect of the father’s death on Varvara Petrovna’s attitude to her favourite son. She now turned greedily, almost amorously to him for the love she had not received from her husband. Her possessiveness increased and in the storms she created in the household he fell into the part of the soother, the peacemaker, the slave of her moods. When he was there—as Mme. Zhitova says—Varvara Petrovna forgot her violence, but at the same time, even he had to watch and calculate the moment when he could intercede. For she was capable of punishing the servants for whom he had tactfully spoken: it was a way of punishing him.

  He went back to Petersburg to the familiar Arctic Venice with its enormous palaces, its wide, windy, dusty streets down which the cold winds of the Baltic blew; and where, when they were not blowing, the fog of the marshes on which Peter the Great had built the city made the air leaden. It was a city made for hypochondriacs, dangerous to the weak chest and the throat. Its famous staring white nights were hard on the nerves of the sleepless. The capital seemed, as Herzen said, a façade, a screen, an inhuman artifice.

  One had to visualise behind the screen, soldiers under the rod, serfs under the lash, faces that betrayed a stifled moan, carts on their way to Siberia, convicts trudging in the same direction, shaven heads, branded faces, helmets, epaulettes and plumes.

  What Petersburg really meant to Turgenev was that it was the stepping-stone to Berlin and Europe. In his Reminiscences he wrote:

  I had long dreamed of th
at journey. I was convinced that in Russia one could acquire only a certain amount of elementary knowledge and that the source of true knowledge was to be found abroad. In those days there was not a single man among the professors and lecturers at the University of Petersburg who could shake that conviction of mine; indeed they themselves were imbued with it … The aim of our young men … reminded me of the search by the Slavs for chieftains from the overseas Varangians.

  There was no order in Russia. Everything he knew about his country disgusted him. He was for “plunging headlong into the German sea,” as soon as he could. He was ready for the Greek and German classics. And in his third year he showed Pletnyov, his professor, a laborious attempt to write a Russian Manfred: a play called Steno in iambic pentameter in the required Italian setting—“a perfectly preposterous work.” The professor invited him to his flat and made gentle fun of it and he met a little literary society and caught sight of Pushkin, the demi-god, at the theatre.

  I remember his small, dark face, his African lips, the gleam of his large teeth, his pendent side-whiskers, his dark, jaundiced eyes beneath a high forehead, almost without eyebrows and his curly hair.