The Gentle Barbarian

by V. S. Pritchett

  “How much happiness a man can extract from the contemplation of his own unhappiness,” the diarist writes. Turgenev is attacking himself and his own self-pity and even in the pathetic scene of the diarist’s death, savaging his own fear of death. The story is an alarming piece of hilarious clowning by the sad actor, as well as a comic picture of what life is like among the top officials in one of the thousands of provincial towns in stagnant Russia. The brief portraits—small things like the girl whose eyes are either raised high or are lowered as a device to hide an awful squint—these are brilliant. And from a short-story writer’s point of view, the timing and spacing of episodes is perfect. It is certain now that Turgenev is a master of his craft and there lies our pleasure in what might otherwise have weighed us down as a moral diagnosis. Still we are a little irked by the overtones of languid, poetic madness. When Gogol or, later on, Dostoevsky presented such scenes they gave themselves to them with more energy: even the weak or meek characters of Dostoevsky have some inner stubbornness in their passive natures.

  Looking back on these stories written in his early thirties one understands why his friend Annenkov begged Turgenev to “stop taking a voluptuous pleasure in himself,” that is “in your authorship and to do without the sudden appearance of odd fellows of whom you are too fond” and that he should not be so coquettish about the miseries and contradictions of life. His people should “appear unostentatiously without suspecting that anyone is looking at him.” Turgenev himself was tiring of his skills and his wit. He had always feared the amateur in himself. He wrote in a letter:

  I have done enough of extracting the triple essence from human character, of pouring it into small bottles. “Sniff it, gentle reader, uncork it and sniff it. It has the Russian bouquet, hasn’t it?” Enough, enough. But the question is, am I capable of doing something great and calm, am I going to succeed with clear simple outlines? That I don’t know and I shan’t know until I try. But believe me you will hear something new from me or you will hear nothing. For that reason I am almost glad of my winter seclusion. I shall have time to collect myself; and above all in solitude one is away from things, literary and journalistic especially. I shall become somebody only when the littérateur is destroyed in me.

  At the time of the Olga Turgenev affair he had been visiting the Aksakovs on their estate. The father was a shy and kindly man—the memoirs he eventually wrote are exquisite accounts of Russian life in the earlier generation and are classics. The son was a fanatic Slavophil and Turgenev enjoyed violent arguments with him—bits of him crop up in many of Turgenev’s portraits of the Slavophils. He returned to Spasskoye and got down to writing Rudin, a novel which would be a final attempt to dispose of the illusions of his youth and to complete his portrait of the superfluous or supernumerary man who had been deprived of purpose by the Russian situation. By an irony of history the moment was well-chosen, for the Crimean War started in 1854. Turgenev was torn by the fact that the West had declared against Russia and he rediscovered his patriotism at first: the eventual defeats brought home to him that the war would in a few years mark the end of the landowning class as an intellectual élite and the sole source of revolutionary or reformist ideas. Rudin is an enlargement of Turgenev’s powers: it establishes him as a dispassionate, apolitical novelist who watches political ideas as they filter into individual character. Only at the very end of the book is there an overt political act; and that was added years later.

  The first draft of Rudin was written in seven weeks. The manuscript was later rewritten after severe criticism by his friends. Before writing it, Turgenev had taken pains to formulate a method which was to sustain him for his finest and mature novels. In his apprenticeship the novelist learns that he must put his limitations to positive use. Turgenev knew he could draw still portraits: he must somehow create the illusion of life rippling through them. He was by nature summary and intense. He now wrote down a list of the types that interested him, putting the real names of the persons, often several similar people compressed into one. Since he had no faculty for dramatic plot, he wrote a minute factual biography of each one, adding to it and noting every trait and gesture. His experience as a playwright led him to choose the closed scene in which people come in and go off, as on the stage; and his practice as a writer of short stories made him build his novels of short episodes complete in themselves, with a pause or interval between them, after which the next movement can begin in a new key. As André Mazon has said, the leisurely narrative of a conteur is his strength. A disturbing visitor arrives at a country house, there’s a walk in the garden, a debate at lunch, a lady of the house talks with a peasant, there is a lovers’ tête-à-tête, a declaration of love in which a man is caught between two loves—then farewells between two people, thoughts of the young man alone. It is the pattern of A Month in the Country and in outline it seems slight. But what we are conscious of is the outer watchful timeless silence of Russia. The words of comedy are grave in their undertone and around the people we feel the sparkle or the stare of Nature which is as indifferent to them as it is to the passing of time itself.

  In Rudin the disturbing visitor who arrives on the stage of the country house was, in real life, Bakunin, the Bakunin of his Berlin years, before ‘48 in Paris when he had become an exuberant political conspirator. When Turgenev was writing the novel, the real Bakunin was serving the beginning of his four years in prison and his eight years in Siberia. This aspect of Bakunin’s life is ignored until the last page: and in consequence there is little resemblance between Rudin and his original. Rudin is not a flamboyant revolutionary. He is no giant. He is not the extremist whom Herzen eventually described as a Columbus without an America or even a ship. The genuine Baku-nin-like traits are his eloquence, his spell over the young, his meddling with minds and hearts, his incorrigible sponging, his inborn dishonesty, his foredoomed life as a penniless nomad—a brilliant mind going to seed. He is a chronic romantic philanderer. There is in fact a good deal of the evasive Turgenev in Rudin, and in the portrait Turgenev is punishing himself.

  Before Rudin arrives at the country house the main characters are settled. Darya Mihailovna is a rich Muscovite and lion-huntress in her fifties, a fashionable provincial and would-be-précieuse, who looks down on her neighbours and likes to fill her house in the summer with clever men if she can find them. “Provincial ladies she could not endure.” She is sitting about with the latest French pamphlet in her hand and has to content herself with the local self-educated blusterer and misogynist Pigasov. If any disaster occurs, if a flood has wrecked a mill or a peasant has sliced his hand with an axe, Pigasov always asks “What’s her name?”: for him women are at the back of every calamity. Darya Mihailovna has a hanger-on called Pandalevsky living at her expense and a young daughter called Natalya with whom a neighbour called Volintzev is stubbornly and shyly in love. There is an eager tutor called Basistov and a tart French governess, Mlle. Boncourt. The summer hangs over the house and the estate, the birds sing. Then Rudin arrives, a tall, broad-chested, stooping man, eyes brilliant, a fine nose and with a thin voice. His reserve goes when he gets into a battle of words with Pigasov about general propositions and convictions. Pigasov believes in facts.

  “It follows that there is no such thing as conviction according to you.”

  “No it doesn’t exist.”

  “Is that your conviction?”

  “Yes.”

  “But here you have one at the very first turn.”

  Before the day is over the comic Pigasov is routed, Rudin has captivated the young tutor by his eloquence. Natalya sees him as a genius. Pandalevsky sees his position as a privileged hanger-on is in danger and can only bide his time. Rudin stays for a week and is triumphant until a neighboring landowner, Lezhnyov, arrives. It is he who will eventually reveal he has known Rudin only too well in Berlin when they were students. He has been the victim, as Turgenev was in his friendship with Bakunin, of Bakunin’s meddling in a love-affair and causing it to wither. Turgenev no
w puts Rudin to the test of love: it is the test all his characters in stories and novels are put to. And lightly, yet gravely, he proceeds to expose Rudin who has captivated Natalya. Rudin is the classic egoist in his sentiments. He knows the whole keyboard from the evocation of “pure souls” to effective hints of private sorrow: he tells Natalya that she has restored his belief in himself after a wasted life and then, when he finds he has won her, he at once looks for escape by the back door of “submission to Fate.” It all sounds uncomfortably like Turgenev’s own behaviour in love with young girls. Rudin has no money, no career, nothing. There are none so easily carried away, Turgenev notes, as men without passion: talk of “submission to Fate” is the self-protective device of the drifting and cold-hearted man.

  The permanence of Turgenev’s love stories owes everything to his sense of love as spiritual test, and test of moral character; but they are also diagnoses of the condition of a generation. In the earlier, A Correspondence, the young woman speaks of how intelligent women “who are not satisfied with the worries of domestic life” yearn for the love of a man who will guide their minds.

  If he were a hero, he would fire her, would teach her to sacrifice herself and all sacrifices would be easy for her! But there are no heroes in our times … And so the parting comes. Happy the girl who realises at once that it is the end of everything … But you valorous, just men, for the most part have not the pluck nor even the desire to tell us the truth.

  She will be strong only when hard experience makes her find her “true self.” The discovery of “the true self” is at the heart of the lovers’ dilemma and, by implication, it is Russia’s.

  Pandalevsky, the hanger-on who fears his security as a cavalier servant, turns spy; reports the meetings of the lovers to Darya Mihailovna who gives her daughter a dressing-down in unaristo-cratic language. Natalya’s heart is broken but she grows from a simple girl into a decisive, clear-headed young woman: the old theme of Onegin has a long life in the history of Russian love, the theme of hardening off.

  It falls to Lezhnyov to explain why they have all fallen under Rudin’s spell. Why especially did he put such a spell on the young and inspire them with idealism? The answer lies in his prodigious memory, his eloquence which jumps from image to image, without intervals of exact thought, his power of generalising and coming to conclusions which made “all that seemed disconnected fall into a whole.”

  Try to tell young people that you cannot give them the whole truth and they will not listen to you.

  The young must have conclusions.

  Lezhnyov shows Rudin as a cheat, a sponger—soon very evident—also sexless, calculating, flamboyant out of vanity.

  So, in the drawing-room of Darya Mihailovna’s boudoir, in the trysts in the garden, Rudin appears and it is all set against the background of the comic jealousies of the hangers-on and the tart phrases of the French governess. Rudin is caught out and he leaves. And now—with the skill of a playwright—the truthful Turgenev reverses and widens his judgment. Rudin’s visit had been one more fling by a penniless man in search of a patroness. In the final chapters we see him on the road in a remote province, the mountebank down on his luck. Here by chance Lezhnyov meets him, pities him and alters his own opinion. He comes back to the country house and tells them all about the meeting:

  I blamed him for coldness. I was right and wrong too when I did so. The coldness is in his blood—that is not his fault and not in his head. He is not an actor, as I called him nor a cheat, nor a scoundrel; he lives at other people’s expense not like a swindler but like a child … Rudin’s misfortune is that he does not understand Russia and that is certainly a misfortune. Russia can do without everyone of us but not one of us can do without her. Cosmopolitanism is all twaddle, the cosmopolitan is a nonentity—worse than a nonentity, without nationality there is no art, no truth, nor life, nor anything

  What captivates us is the simplicity, the easy grace of this novel, the tact with which he makes short chapters crystallise and contain the talk and the silences in which each character grows more clearly under our eyes. Turgenev is a natural master of conversation and of the silent thoughts it starts in people’s minds so that the whole thing is leisurely yet, in detail, is always quickened. There will be a change of tone as the people themselves know one another better; each sentence is an event and we are alert for it and its mood as we are in a play. Comedy rises casually as in small things. For example, Darya Mihailovna is delighted with Rudin. “C’est un homme comme il faut,” she thinks but mentally she pronounces those words in Russian.

  But Rudin is not sure in its construction. Lezhnyov’s sudden reversal of his judgment is dramatic and this is too obviously a device, and once it has its effect the story droops into hearsay in the last chapters, although Rudin’s shame-faced and seedy confession of his subsequent disasters is diverting. His accounts of how patrons always tire of him, and of how one absurd fellow without a penny joined him in a scheme—practical, one reflects, a hundred years later—of making a river navigable, are funny and even touching. The fact is that Turgenev had difficulties. He changed his mind. He listened to the advice of friends. They, like himself, were puzzled by how to end a story that was ebbing away. Four years after the publication, he tacked on a last page where Rudin is seen, without any warrant from the story, dying on the barricades in the Revolution of ‘48 in Paris. This does an ironical justice to a character who is too infused with the novelist himself and who has become a figment of debate; but the page is excellent reporting.

  The broken revolutionaries were running for their lives from their barricades as the troops came at them, when a tall man in an old overcoat with a red sash and a straw hat on his grey dishevelled hair jumped on top of an overturned omnibus and shouted in a strained shrill voice. In one hand he held a red flag, in the other a blunt curved sabre. He was at once shot dead. “Tiens!” said one of the escaping revolutionaries. “On vient de tuer le Polonais.”

  Bakunin did not die in such a way when he escaped from Siberia; he came back to stir up trouble, a conspirator who did not know he was out of date. He was a type of déclassé who lives by making reckless gestures in other people’s revolutions, very much a prophetic figure who, by a turn of the historical wheel, reappeared as the “Westerner” of our own thirties in the Spanish Civil War. However, perhaps that remark of Herzen himself in Paris when he saw the revolt fail had stuck in Turgenev’s mind. As we have seen, he had heard Herzen say he wished he had died sword in hand in the streets, for then at least he would have retained one of his illusions.

  In attempting a novel Turgenev was not by nature equipped for the epic length and the large scheme—he shrank fastidiously from Balzac’s exuberance which he found coarse—he had been up to now simply a master of the short story. He had yet to find a coherent way of placing several stories, not into a series but into an organic whole, in which narrative and commentary flow together harmoniously. In Pushkin one is always aware of the voice in attendance on the emotion or dashing tale and giving it the drive of meaning and the authority of a judgment. Turgenev looked back to Pushkin’s classical lesson: the commentary is to be part of the composition as a continuing aspect of the story, as Freeborn says in some cogent pages on Turgenev’s achievement in Turgenev: The Novelist’s Novelist. Turgenev himself may address us as “gentle reader” once or twice, but he can allow the role of commentator to be taken by Lezhnyov who is involved in the tale. We have the sensation of people living in and out of their changing judgments on one another and all in a single, clear stream. In Freeborn’s words:

  The distinction of Turgenev’s novels which begin with Rudin lies in their historical authenticity. They are portraits not only of particular heroes or heroines but of particular epochs … Moreover it is in the unity given to the fiction by the central figure that a balance is maintained between the ideological matter on the one hand and the human problem on the other.

  We are given two views of human destiny; there is a double narra
tor:

  Man as the rational being who aspires to put his ideas to a service of realizable ideals; and of man as the insignificant creature of a single day, at the mercy of nature and eternity. It is in this duality that the real “realism” of Turgenev’s four great novels resides.

  Is a non-hero like Rudin strong enough to hold the novel together? That is very doubtful. But we have confidence in Turgenev’s truthful feeling for experience. The moments of life are swallowed by the whole. Rudin has left disaster for Natalya behind him; if for others everything had fallen comfortably back into its old order, to Natalya

  Life seemed so cruel, so hateful and so sordid, she was so ashamed of herself, her love and her sorrow that she would have been glad at that moment to die … but she was young—life had scarcely begun for her and sooner or later life asserts its claims. Whatever blow has fallen on a man, he must—forgive the coarseness of the expression—eat that day or at least the next, and that is the first step to consolation.

  Chapter 7

  While Turgenev was writing his epitaph on a lost leader of his youth, the Tsar Nicholas, the dull, military “bald eagle,” had led Russia to slaughter and defeat in the Crimea. He died and his heir Alexander II was persuaded by Turgenev’s friends at Court to allow him to return to Petersburg though he refused to lift the surveillance by the police. The effect of this was to prevent him from leaving Russia. There was no point in leaving since, despite his letters, Pauline rarely wrote and on her side interest in him had gone dead. He sent her a translation of Pushkin’s poem, Adieu, in reproach. The last verse goes: