Eight years later, when he has become a sound middle-aged farmer, Lavretsky makes one more visit to the house. The older generation have died off. As on his first visit, a young girl runs into him as he comes into the drawing-room; once more he says “I am Lavretsky.” All the laughing young people who are playing a game are almost strangers to him: he simply knows that time has gone on. He looks at the bench in the garden where he and Lisa sat, and at the piano:
He touched one of the keys; it gave out a faint clear sound; on that note had begun the inspired melody with which long ago on that same happy night the dead Lemm had thrown him into such transports.
This last chapter recalls those scenes in Chekhov’s plays where passing cries of happiness are unbearable and make us weep.
“Welcome lonely old age, burn out useless life,” Lavretsky thinks as he goes off, and the joyous cries sound more loudly in the garden.
We dab our eyes and then it strikes us again that Turgenev himself is moved by the rise and fall of love and not by the fullness of love realised. Hail and farewell. Spring and autumn. No high summer of fulfilment. Therefore no tragedy, only sadness. The pessimism of Turgenev is absolute.
What is most lasting in our minds when we put the book down is the natural ease with which Turgenev evokes the essential solitariness of Lavretsky’s mind and his life as he travels across the steppe:
and as he watched the furrowed fields open like a fan before him, the willow bushes as they slowly came into sight and the dull ravens and rooks who looked sidelong with stupid suspicion at the approaching carriage … as he watched the fresh fertile wilderness and solitude of this steppe country, the greenness, the long slopes, and valleys with stunted oaks, the grey villages and the birch trees—the whole Russian landscape, so long unseen by him, stirred emotion at once pleasant, sweet and almost painful in his heart and he felt weighed down by a kind of pleasant oppression.
He nods off to sleep and when he opens his eyes again:
… the same fields, the stame steppe scenery; the polished shoes of the trace horse flashed alternately through the driving dust, the coachman’s shirt, yellow with red gussets, puffed out by the wind
until the arrival at the house:
“So here I am at home, here I am back again,” thought Lavretsky as he walked the diminutive passages while one after another the shutters were being opened with much creaking and knocking and the light of day poured into the deserted rooms.
And when at last he went to bed that night
It seemed to him that the darkness surrounding him on all sides could not be accustomed to the new inhabitant, the very walls of the house seemed amazed.
It was about this novel that Countess Lambert said it was written by a pagan who had “not yet renounced the cult of Venus, but already understands the sterner call of duty towards which his sick soul is drawn, rather against his will.”
He went up to Petersburg that winter to enjoy the fame and social success his novel had given him. The railway from Moscow to Petersburg was not yet finished and the journey was as bad as ever. He gave a few readings in the capital, caught laryngitis in that damp cold climate, heard through the papers that Pauline was giving something like fifty concerts in England. He went off to Vichy for one of his cures and thought the place ugly compared with the pretty German spas; it was half-empty. The Germans would never have allowed a horrible barrel-organ to play under his window. The rain fell. The river was sickly yellow. So he turned to reading Pascal and wrote to Pauline—for he kept up his side of the correspondence—that Pascal treads down all that is most dear to man, pushes you down in the mud and offers for consolation a religion that is bitter and violent “qui vous abêtit, c’est son mot”—which even repels Pascal himself but which he says it is one’s duty to accept in order to crush the cravings of the heart. Turgenev goes on:
I venture to say the humane view of character is the opposite of the Christian, if one reduces it to the cowardly and narrow doctrine of personal salvation and egoism. But no one has ever written with the force of Pascal; his anguish, his imprecations are terrible. Byron is a pure stream compared with him. And how lucid and profound Pascal is. What grandeur he has. “Nous sommes incapables de savoir certainement et d’ignorer absolument. Nous voguons sur un milieu vaste, toujours incertains et flottants, poussés d’un bout vers l’autre. Quelque terme où nous pensions nous attacher et nous affermir—il branle et nous quitte; et sinous le suivons, il échappe à nos prises, nous glisse et fuit d’une fuite éternelle.
And what crushing blows Pascal gives us. The heart of man is full of filth. And
Le dernier acte est sanglant, quelque belle qui soit la comédie en tout le reste. On jette enfin de la terre sur la tête et en voilà pour jamais.
The waters of Vichy and Pascal between them had made Turgenev bitter. He added a note for Louis Viardot as he often did to his letters, and said he hoped to find him at Courtavenel.
From Pascal he turned to the humanity of Cervantes and Shakespeare who were closer to him. The novelist who read too much had been working on a brilliant pair of character studies of Hamlet and Don Quixote and he had given a public reading of this in Petersburg; and it was, by transference, a study of his own character. Louis Viardot had translated Don Quixote as we have seen and it strikes one that another bond of the long family friendship with the Viardots was language: the sounds of French, English, German and Russian, melting into the language or music.
The influence of Don Quixote on Russian literature had been powerful in Gogol and was to be so in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, but Turgenev believed that in his time there had been more Hamlets than Quixotes in Russia. They are, he says, two ways of conceiving the ideal: one is inside human nature, the other is outside. In one the individual will predominates; in the other something outside the “I” which the individual prefers to the “I.” In his person Don Quixote expresses above all the faith in something eternal and unchangeable, faith in truth, the truth that is outside. He is saturated with the love of the ideal. Life gives the opportunity to pursue the ideal, to establish the triumph of truth and the reign of justice on earth. He is without egoism, his thought never dwells on himself, he is all devotion and self-sacrifice. But, it must be observed, he is slow to feel compassion and finds it difficult to move his mind from one thing to another. He is free to change his opinions. Indeed he is something of a casuist: in love, when he notices his mistress is squalid, he blames this on the magicians. His dreams are chaste; at heart he knows there is no hope of possessing the loved person, indeed he rather dreads that. He is hurt by the world.
“But who hurts Hamlet but Hamlet himself?” Turgenev quotes the Russian proverb: “Those who mock me today will do me a good turn tomorrow.” Hamlet is all egotism, analysis, he is scepticism in person. As an egoist he can have no faith in himself but he clings to the “I” in which he has no faith. He is absorbed in his own personality: he thinks of himself strategically, not of his duties. He has no pity for himself, for his spirit is too elaborately critical to allow him to be content with what he finds inside himself. He delights in self-flagellation, is fascinated by his faults, studies himself night and day. His self-awareness is itself a force. One cannot love him, for he loves no one, but one can’t help admiring him because his outer man, his melancholy, his pallor are attractive. One also rather likes him because he has a tendency to be plump. He never makes Don Quixote’s wild mistakes: windmills will never be giants for him and he won’t take up arms and fight.
The Hamlets of this world are of no use to the masses—they offer nothing, are going nowhere, for they have no end in view. Love they can only simulate; yet his scepticism is not the scepticism of indifference: hence its significance and power and he will indeed fight against injustice … The most important service of Hamlet is that he will develop such men as Horatio.
In Vichy he had begun writing his next novel, On the Eve— the title meant “on the eve of the emancipation of the serfs.” He knew that the Crim
ean War had changed the climate of intellectual opinion, especially among men younger than himself who had already politely suggested that up till now his novels, long or short, had been simply sensitive love stories: “the wanderings of Odysseus always ends in Calypso’s isle.” They were demanding direct political commitment to social reform and in an incoherent way to revolution: the emancipation of the serfs, if it ever came, would merely be a beginning and itself would not go far in solving Russia’s problem. They were, in effect, asking Turgenev to reverse his method: to proceed from idea—the radical idea—to character and not (as he did) to build on character first and to watch ideas at work in it. More than this, they required a Radical hero.
The story opens on an idyllic summer day in the country with a philosophical discussion between two young men, a feckless painter and a minor academic. Shabin is the painter, Bersenyev the scholar:
“Is there nothing higher than happiness?” Bersenyev says.
“And what, for instance?” asked Shabin.
“Why, for instance, you and I are, as you say young; we are good men, let us suppose, each of us desires happiness for himself… But is that word, happiness, one that could unite us, set us both on fire and make us clasp each other’s hands? Isn’t that an egoistic one; I mean, isn’t it a source of disunion?”
“Do you know words, then, that unite men?”
“Yes, and they are not few in number; and you know them too.”
“What words?”
“Well, even Art—since you are an artist—Country, Science, Freedom, Justice.”
“And what of love?” asked Shabin.
“Love too is a word that unites but not the love you are eager for now; the love which is not enjoyment, the love which is self-sacrifice.”
Presently, when we are introduced to the family with whom the young men are staying, we meet Insarov, the man who is in the minds of these philosophers.
Insarov is a poor Bulgarian student who is slowly revealed to us as a man deeply involved in a conspiracy to free Bulgaria from Turkish domination, a man determined on self-sacrifice. He is a consumptive. A young girl, Yelena, falls in love with him and his cause. She goes off with him when the call comes. They get as far as Venice and while they are waiting to be smuggled across the Adriatic, Insarov dies and the girl goes on and vanishes into a war where she is nursing the wounded. No more is heard of her.
Despite Turgenev’s delicacy and his power to move us from joy to tears, despite his “irresistible” qualities, the reader at once realises there is something wrong with On The Eve. The fundamental reason is the astonishing one that in his search for a hero he worked from another writer’s manuscript. A few years before, one of his young neighbours, a certain Vassily Karatayev had given him the story of a girl he had once known who had fallen in love with a Bulgarian patriot and had gone to Bulgaria with him and died. Karatayev had tried to write the story but found he lacked the talent and gave the manuscript to Turgenev and told him to do what he liked with it. Turgenev wrote:
The figure of the heroine Yelena, in those days still a new type in Russian life, was outlined clearly in my mind; but I lacked the hero, a person Yelena could give herself to in her still vague, though powerful, craving for freedom.
He retained only one of Karatayev’s chapters about a jaunt to a country town near Moscow, though he amended it. It is crudely out of tone with the rest of Turgenev’s narrative; but the weakness of the rest of the novel is that it labours. Turgenev himself wrote to Countess Lambert:
Planning a novel is very fatiguing work, particularly as it leaves no visible traces behind it; you lie on the sofa turning some character and situation over in your mind, then you suddenly realise that three or four hours have passed and you don’t seem to have anything to show for it… to tell you the truth there are very few pleasures in our trade. And quite right too; everybody, even artists, even scholars must live by their sweat of their faces.
The bother is that Turgenev could not succeed with an unfelt and unknown character. He knew nothing about conspiracy—that required a novelist with a gift for the novel of plot and exciting action. Insarov is a dour, dull, cardboard figure: the only sign of action in him appears when, in the chapter Turgenev retained, Insarov violently pitches a drunken German into a pond. The conspiracy exists only by hearsay. The only originality is one of approach: the book examines Yelena from the point of view of each character and one of these, the painter Shabin, is a silly caricature of the conventional Bohemian artist and an embarrassment to the reader, who skips past him as fast as he can.
The other characters are a collection of drolls, whose opinions of Yelena are not worth hearing. No doubt Turgenev had not rid himself of the “type” figure—the superfluous man—and was arguing that there was no Russian male with convictions and vigour who would be worthy of Yelena and her force of character—an argument that made the young critics indignant. On the Eve marks the beginning of a crack in his reputation which later became a gulf. Yet when he lets Yelena live for herself before our eyes she is a real, troubled girl whose doubts and courage are clear to us. If Turgenev fails to create a hero he does create a heroine simply because of his gift for showing a girl grow into independent determined womanhood through loss, disillusion or, as in this case, fatality. Once more the son of Varvara Petrovna can draw Russian women who are becoming strong; indeed in all his best work the fully drawn women, whether evil or good, are stronger than the men. The critics who denounced him for his lack of social commitment were wrong in dismissing his love stories as fairy tales: they were tests.
Of course there are fine things and some of the criticism was puerile—the critics were annoyed that the conspirator was a Bulgarian: surely the condition of Russia was more important than the overthrow of a government in Bulgaria? What annoyed the official classes—of whom the Countess Lambert was a typical member—was that a revolutionary or patriotic conspiracy should be approved in the portrait of Insarov and that a Russian girl should deny morality, her family and society and go off with him. Ruling society had become prudish by the mid-century: the days of Pushkin had gone.
And there was more trouble. The young critics who attacked him had been taken on by The Contemporary, in which Turgenev was the star. In one of his fits of temper he broke with the periodical and from then on they began personal attacks on him. He was mocked as a fashionable novelist who is “trailing in the wake of a singer and arranging ovations for her at provincial theatres abroad.”
Once his temper had calmed, Turgenev bore no malice to his critics and indeed often expressed his admiration for them. This can, of course, be taken as masochism, a false humility, a desire to keep in with “the movement” and the young, and a form of Olympian patronage. But he had his unchanging views of the values of art which they denied; for the utilitarians it must be socially “useful.” Before he died, he was telling Tolstoy to stop preaching and to return to his art; and in the next generation Chekov was to attack the utilitarian doctrine.
Turgenev’s spirits were low when he wrote On the Eve. He told the Countess that his heart had turned to stone. And the novel brought with it another painful quarrel which had its roots in something more than ordinary literary jealousy. For many years Ivan Goncharov, the author of Oblomov, had been, to all appearances, a close and admiring friend. They had been in the habit of meeting and reading works in progress to each other in the peculiar Russian custom which suggests not so much a lack of self-confidence or dramatic vanity as a curious desire for consensus. Turgenev himself more than once accepted the advice of his friends, deleted passages they disapproved of, adding what they suggested. But in these exchanges Goncharov scarcely concealed a jealousy that was turning into paranoia. His novel, Oblomov, had appeared at the time of The House of Gentlefolk and had far less success. Even in the course of their private readings, Goncharov had accused Turgenev of stealing a scene from his own novel and Turgenev, always willing to bow to others, removed the scene. But Goncharov had also re
ad part of the manuscript of a novel called The Ravine—it was not finished until thirteen years later—and Goncharov now told friends that Turgenev had stolen On the Eve from him. The matter became a scandal. A committee of friends sat in arbitration on it and said that any resemblances were due to the fact that “the events were common to the times and to the Russian soil.” Turgenev was angered that the committee was not more explicit and broke with Goncharov though, in his usual dignified manner, soon forgot the matter. But Gon-charov’s fantasy became something like insanity. He said Turgenev not only copied him but that when he went to Paris he passed his ideas to his European friends so that Alphonse Daudet, the Goncourts and George Sand, and even Flaubert, were using them at his expense. The ease with which some Russian temperaments take to suspicious envy and paranoia—it is striking in Dostoevsky—seems to indicate a real difference of character between the Russians and Western Europeans.
The quarrel itself is unimportant but Goncharov’s personal history does throw an oblique light on Turgenev’s position in Russian letters, and also on Tolstoy’s, at this time. Goncharov was not an aristocrat: his family came from the laborious merchant class—they had been in the grain and candle-making trades and certainly produced men of intelligence and, as his first novel, A Simple Story, shows, he came under Romantic influences close to those that affected all his generation. The family came from Simbirsk, a town which was a byword for sleepiness. They rose by diligence, but a diligence so applied that it left Goncharov with a deep melancholia and reserve beneath the hard, ironical surface of his character. The hard-working Goncharov had a core of lethargy in his nature which indeed enabled him to create the beatifically idle Oblomov of his great novel and above all the blessed somnolence of the most deeply Russian part of it: “Oblomov’s Dream.” Goncharov admired the aristocratic ease of Turgenev, the grace of manners, the taste, the critical excellence and tact of his writings: he himself wrote slowly, awkwardly, lost himself in inward divagations: it took him years to write a single novel and this was not entirely due to having to earn his living as a civil servant. The tedious necessity of the desk was a source of pride and he told Turgenev: “you slide through life superficially … I plough a deep furrow,” and envied him his education, his talent, his income of ten thousand roubles, and freedom and “earthly paradise beside a beloved woman”—the paradise above all; he envied Turgenev’s freedom to travel if he liked to the sun of Europe, whereas he had to sit at a desk in the gloom, fog and cold winds of Petersburg, like one of Gogol’s poor clerks and indeed felt obliged to accept the ungrateful task of Chief Censor when the liberal reforms came in during the sixties.
The Gentle Barbarian Page 15
