The Gentle Barbarian

by V. S. Pritchett

  Reçois donc, compagne lointaine

  L ‘adieu de mon coeur

  Comme une épouse devenue veuve

  Comme une amie qui étreint en silence son ami

  Avant son éxil.

  His letters suggest that Paulinette was troublesome and had been put into a boarding-school: there is even a suggestion that she be sent back to Russia but Turgenev refused to have her, saying that her position would be impossible for her there. Although he was rich in land he was often short of ready money and often late in sending it for the child’s support—a cholera epidemic, the effects of the war, crop failures and bad management of the estate had meant a large if temporary loss. The Tyutchevs had cost him 300,000 francs and a hundred thousand of that had, he said, been thrown out of the window; wages had gone up, no improvements had been made and his income had been cut by a third. Turgenev was turning out to be as improvident as many of the bad landowners. So he got rid of the Tyutchevs—they parted friends—and he got in his kindly old uncle who had married again and who brought in a crowd of his wife’s relatives. It was one of Turgenev’s lazy decisions and in the long run turned out to be just as bad as the arrangement with Tyutchev. The novelist was a natural victim in these matters and notorious for being at the mercy of his servants. One thing his mother had done to him was to remove the voice and capacity of command. And that must have been an additional reason for his failure with Pauline.

  He came back to Petersburg grey-haired but still a dandy, a wit and a gourmet and made effective play with a pose of saying “Farewell to life.” He began to end all his phrases with a favourite word “Enough.” It grew on him and was a kind of signature tune. His arrival in Petersburg was celebrated by dinners given by his friends on The Contemporary, on which he was the leading contributor. Rudin was a success, although those who heard that the central character was based on Bakunin said that it was far more a portrait of Turgenev himself.

  He allowed himself further dissipations. He said to a friend that he was “going the rounds of the suburban dances with a charming Polish woman, giving her silver plate and spending nights with her until eight in the morning,” but that after two months of it he had to give it up out of physical exhaustion. This Polish adventure, his youthful seduction, the touching affair with the miller’s wife—who asked him for no more than some scented soap so that her hands would smell as sweetly as the hands of the society ladies he kissed—and some casual incidents he reported to the Goncourts, are the only known episodes of his sexual life besides the two that produced children. There may have been more in Paris and Italy but he was shocked when Tolstoy told him of his debauches. If Rakitin in A Month in the Country is in some respects a self-portrait, Turgenev always said he was not a Don Juan. To the Goncourts, the “doux géant” said he was timid in love; he approached women with respect, emotion and was surprised, he said, at his happiness. Yet among the pious, aristocratic ladies of Petersburg he had the reputation of “living immorally,” They meant that he had rejected the Orthodox Church. When he was staying with the Aksakovs in the country his hostess said that his ideals were sullied and that he was “only capable of physical sensations: all his impressions pour through his nerves, he is not capable of either understanding or of feeling the spiritual side of things.” He might be a huge man but—this was wounding—“he lacked even pagan force.” On this Yarmolinsky in his Life makes a far more sensitive commentary:

  Certainly his response did not stop short of spiritual matters. With him, as with so many artists, the intense perception of the physical world alone was so transcendent an experience as to unlock the gates of the spirit.

  One glance at his stories shows the truth of this and it is illustrated by a passage in one of his finest pieces of prose, A Tour of the Forest, part of which was being written at this time—he added to it in old age. It has a Shakespearean echo:

  I raised my head and saw at the very end of a delicate twig one of those large flies with emerald head and long body and four transparent wings, which the fanciful French call ‘maidens’ while our guileless people call them ‘bucket yokes’. For a long time, 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…. that was all. Looking at her, it suddenly seemed to me that I understood the life of nature, understood its clear and unmistakable though mysterious significance. There is a subdued, quiet animation, an unhasting restrained use of sensation and powers, an equilibrium of health in each separate creature. Everything that goes beyond this level, above or below, she flings away as worthless. Many insects die as soon as they know the joys of love, which destroys the equilibrium. The sick beast plunges into the thicket and expires alone … and the man who from his own fault or from the fault of others is faring ill in the world—ought, at least, to know how to keep silence.

  If the pious Vera Aksakov spoke bitterly of Turgenev, there was another no less religious woman living in the highest circles of the Court who thought to rescue him from impiety and the paralysing effects of his love for Pauline Viardot which all his friends deplored and his enemies mocked him for. She was the Countess Lambert. He was cultivating her because she had influence with the Tsar and he was begging her to use it to get him a passport, precisely for the reasons she did not favour. A friendship that lasted began and on his side was one of the amitiés amoureuses or confessional philanderings in which his charm made him expert. He ended by troubling her feelings and she was for a time closer to him than Pauline and there is a trace of her in his next novel, A Nest of Gentlefolk. The bond between them was that they were both unhappy.

  The Countess was of French and German stock and was unhappily married to one of the aides de camp of the Tsar—a plain woman of thirty-five, who had given up the vanities of her high social position and, but for her children, would have become a Sister of Charity. Brought up as a Lutheran, she was a strict convert to the Orthodox Church and her piety and Turgenev’s atheism gave a piquancy to their talks when he spent his evenings with her. If she was trying to save his soul, he, of course, was the novelist who was studying her. She listened to the sad story of his frustrated love for Pauline not without jealousy and said she admired Pauline as a singer but added that Pauline had made him waspish and bitter; that he was a pagan who was “corrupted by the cult of Venus” and she appealed to him to replace it by the sterner call of Christian duty. She received him but propriety and a taste for the long-winded in personal relationships led her to prefer knowing him by correspondence which—for her at least—made their occasional meetings more disturbing. She was inclined to tears. If she could have converted him she would have been lost. On his side, Turgenev was careful to play the man of the world and, in time, she had to remind him sharply that she was “a creature of reason,” and wished to be treated “as a true friend.” When, in one of his letters, he wrote that he “respectfully kissed her charming hands,” she replied sharply that “a woman would prefer to have a little more ardour from men without compromising them.”

  The bond between them was that they were both fanciful enough to declare that “life was over,” that they were already on the brink of old age though under forty. Both were hypochondriacs. She did not entirely approve of his work, for politically she was very conservative; and when he came to write First Love she told him it was “one of his bad deeds” but that he committed evil or sin in an irresistible manner. The Empress had hated the story, she said, but the Emperor had thought it delightful. Many times they got on to the subject of the “ideal” in literature and there he had to correct her. She was at heart a sentimentalist; she supposed, he told her, that the ideal should be an addition or an embellishment in the portrayal of character and he replied with the faith he had learned from Goethe:

  Tout être étudié avec une sympathie sincère et ardent, peut dégager pour nous la vérité qui est la base de la vie. C’est en cela précisément que consiste
ce qu’on appelle l’idéalisation artistique.

  The part of confidante was consoling to both parties but it affected him less than it affected her. She was more than half in love with him and was unhappy when she saw she could neither make him give up his “paganism” or his destructive love of Pauline. The question of the passport was always there as an humiliation. Against all her arguments, he said he had as much of Don Quixote in himself as Hamlet. She had to get as much consolation as she could from a letter she wrote to him telling him not to see Pauline again—as all his friends did—not “to knock his head against a brick wall,” and drift back into his “gypsy life.” He agreed wryly that he was about to commit a folly, and made it worse by saying:

  Don Quixote at least believed in the beauty of his Dulcinea but the Don Quixotes of our time realise that Dulcinea is an ugly hag and yet keep running after her … we have no ideal, that is the trouble.

  The poor woman tried to make him jealous by taking up with Grigorovich, another writer, but although Turgenev had his vanity, jealousy affected him very little. He got his passport and he left for France. For a long time their correspondence went on and then fizzled out. Turgenev’s objection to her was not so much that she was a spiritual Siren but that she had the reactionary opinions of Court society; and indeed she was deeply shocked later by the political tendency of his writing and was, as he knew she would be, in the enemy camp. The high-minded lady wished devoutly that he would write “popular” work. The final blow must have come some years later when she found him at Ems, where she had gone for the cure in the company of a Ukrainian woman writer of short stories, Marko Vovtchok, another object of his platonic tenderness.

  For an artist to whom the company of women was indispensable, the friendship with the Countess was more than an exchange of woes: it quickened the imagination of the storyteller, who was, as he said, “saturated with femininity.” One thing he saw in the Countess was a deep fear and misunderstanding of what was sacred to him: art and its perception of “la vérité qui est la base de la vie.” With Dostoevsky he believed that “art lives man’s life with him.” Turgenev’s talk with the Countess about Goethe had fertilised him. He sat down to write Faust, one of his most accomplished stories. It is the first of his ghost stories, a genre he did not approach again until his last years, and even were we to object—as Herzen did in his brusque rational way—to the suggestion of a ghostly presence, a psychologist would find no objection to it. The story has a double theme: the awakening of the imagination and the maturing and enlarging of our nature through immersion in works of art; and the deadening of the soul that occurs when an interior will imposed by others crushes the free imagination. Vera, the young girl in the story, has been trained by her mother to abjure novels and poetry and to read about useful subjects only. The mother’s motive is not ignorant; it is even high-minded; but behind it are primitive influences of family history. Her mother, a delightful person, says:

  “You tell me that reading poetry is both useful and pleasant. I consider one must make one’s choice early in life; either the useful or the pleasant and abide by it once and for all. I tried at one time to unite the two. That’s impossible and leads to ruin and vulgarity.”

  The subject runs all the risks of being a trite moral story for the schoolroom, written to educate the Countess. With the incomparable delicacy and dramatic tact with which Turgenev can show the growth of love, he can also show the shadow of guilt, the terror of an alien overpowering will running alongside of ourselves like a shadow and a fate; it will blast Vera with the images that break the nerve. He floats the tale out of the schoolroom into the clear air of real life. And, as always, a minor droll character—Vera’s husband—brings the playwright’s intervals of perspective and rest to a narrative that might otherwise be sententious and too high-flown. The special technical difficulty in this story is that he has to make a formal reading of Faust endurable to the reader; yet he manages this cleverly by bringing in the husband who cannot bear poetry-reading, and a comic German who keeps crying out “How wonderful! How sublime!” and even “How profound!” Turgenev was also a master of the tentative and of aside.

  I touched on the old legend of Doctor Faust, the significance of Mephistopheles and Goethe himself and asked them to stop me if anything struck them as obscure. Then I cleared my throat—Priem-kov asked me if I wouldn’t have some sugar water and one could perceive that he was very well satisfied with himself for having put this question to me. I refused.

  From the biographer’s point of view the statement at the end of the story indicates that there was a decisive and lasting change in Turgenev’s mind at this critical period of his life:

  One conviction I have gained from the experience of the last years—that life is not just an amusement: life is not even enjoyable … life is hard labour. Renunciation, continual renunciation—that is its secret meaning, its solution. Not the fulfilment of cherished dreams and aspirations, however lofty they may be—the fulfilment of duty, that is what must be the care of man … But in youth we think—the freer the better, the further one will get. Youth may be excused for thinking so … Now I would say try to live, it is not so easy as it seems.

  The Countess might think she had convinced him but in fact his was not the Christian’s renunciation: it was far bleaker—the stoicism of the atheist and pagan and not without its incurable fear of death that gave intensity to the living moment.

  Pauline Viardot disliked the story when she eventually read it, perhaps because she had her jealousy of the new Muse. Incidentally, since she knew little Russian, Turgenev’s claim that everything he wrote he submitted to her first must be modified: he would read it aloud, translating into French as he went along—not a satisfying method for either party. Another suggestion, not mentioned by Turgenev’s biographers, occurs to me. In its circumstances the situation of Vera in Faust and Pauline in life are alike: the happy young wife with three children and a doting, dull and anxious husband falls in love with a gifted young man. Vera declares her love and her passion is thwarted—by whom? Not the husband, not another lover; not by a family counsellor—but by the ghost or image of the mother who calls her daughter back to duty. Was it Mme. Garcia, with a family history as exotic as the history of Vera’s mother, who imposed her will and made Pauline break? And was Priemkov, too, like Louis Viardot? Or was Turgenev describing the fatal influence of Varvara Petrovna on his own will and heart: ghosts are always the unconscious.

  Early in 1856 before he left to knock his head against the brick wall of Courtavenel, Turgenev invited the new young writer Tolstoy to stay with him in his flat in Petersburg: “in Stepanov’s house at the Arnicktov Bridge on the Fontanka.” Tolstoy was twenty-six, ten years younger than Turgenev and they knew each other only by correspondence in which Turgenev had enthused over Tolstoy’s Childhood and the Sebastopol sketches which had made him an instant celebrity in Petersburg. The Tsar himself was so enthusiastic that he had ordered them to be translated into French at once. Balls and dinners were given for the fierce artillery officer who had come up to the capital straight from his battery in the Crimea. Self-conscious about the imagined defects in his appearance, Tolstoy had brushed up his stiff hair to give himself a high forehead, given a devilish twist to his frowning brows and had grown curving side-whiskers and a thick moustache to cover his heavy upper lip. He intensified the aggressive stare of his small eyes which appeared to some to be searching for the weakness of an opponent he could crush; he was suspicious of praise, quick to accuse of hypocrisy, ready to pick a quarrel; yet he could also be caressing. The Puritan had been the guest of the beautiful Mme. Panaev at a dinner given by Nekrassov, the editor of The Contemporary; Nekrassov and Panaev were known as the co-husbands, for Nekrassov had become her lover. Turgenev and others began to praise George Sand and Tolstoy shouted angrily across the table that a woman of such loose sexual morality ought to be tied to a hangman’s cart and dragged through the streets as a public example. An embarrassing dinner
party. Yet while he was in Petersburg Tolstoy passed his nights in carousals with gypsies and gambling. Inside a week he had challenged someone to a duel. It is true he confessed his self-disgust in his diaries about his resort to brothels: “Horrible. But absolutely the last time. This is no longer temperament but habitual lechery.” And again, after going to some place of amusement: “Disgusting. Girls, stupid music, girls, an artificial nightingale, girls, heat, cigarette smoke, girls, vodka, cheese, wild shrieks, girls, girls, girls.”

  Turgenev put up Tolstoy in his flat and was nearly driven out of his mind by a guest who was clearly jealous of Turgenev’s own fame and his gifts—Tolstoy was at this time an awkward and slovenly writer—and one who declared all Turgenev’s opinions were insincere. He found Turgenev’s friendly and gentle manner patronising; he was even annoyed by the knowledge that Turgenev’s estate was larger than his and accused him of hypocrisy in freeing his serfs and of coldness of heart. Turgenev himself was not Varvara Petrovna’s son for nothing: he could scream with rage when provoked, but he was at once ashamed of his rage. A man with little consciousness of his own rank, he could not help thinking Tolstoy’s pride in his title of Count, and his contempt for writers who, at that time, were more accomplished than he, were ridiculous. As with so many Puritan diarists, Tolstoy’s fits of remorse were the expression of his own inordinate belief in his own virtue alone. He was the only good man because he exclusively knew what goodness was. At the time of his meeting with Turgenev he was no doubt under strain, for he had come straight from the battlefield, but the arrogance and the pride were endemic as we know from the famous Rules he made for himself. His pride was to last all his life until it destroyed him.