The Gentle Barbarian

by V. S. Pritchett

  I went to him in the morning at 12 o’clock and found him at lunch. I tell you frankly: even before this I didn’t like the man personally. Most unpleasant of all, I owe him money from 1857 [in fact it was from 1863] from Wiesbaden—and have not returned it yet. Also I don’t like his aristocratic, pharasaic embrace when he advances to kiss you, but presents his cheek. Terrible; as though he were a General.

  Turgenev had the French manner of kissing. There sat Turgenev, the rich writer whom Dostoevsky had, as he said, “adored” when he was young as the model aristocratic and man of genius, now waited on by a butler in a frock coat, eating a cutlet and drinking a glass of wine. Dostoevsky had read Smoke and disliked it and began to nettle Turgenev at once, telling him that it wasn’t worth while to be as wounded by the critics as Turgenev was.

  It is not easy to tell truth from fiction in what happened in the next hour. One can only say that Turgenev was apt to lose his head. It seems likely that he did say he was going to write an article denouncing Russophils and Slavophils. In a moment the two were at loggerheads about their convictions. Dostoevsky’s hysteria was, as Solzhenitsyn has written in another connection, an evasion of his conflicts. He may not have quoted Potugin’s own words from Smoke that the only contributions Russia had made to civilisation were “the best shoe, the shaft yoke and the knout—and hadn’t even invented them,” but at the height of the wrangle, with Turgenev’s temper rising—Dostoevsky said he kept calm and ironical—he hit upon one of those small phrases that turn dispute into farce. If Turgenev was trying to write about Russia, he said, he had better get a telescope.

  “A telescope,” said the startled Turgenev. “What for?”

  “Because Russia is a great distance from here. Train your telescope upon Russia and it will not be difficult to see us distinctly.”

  On his decision to settle in Baden-Baden with the Viardots, Turgenev was sensitive. He understood Russian malice. He praised the Germans to Dostoevsky and spoke of the debt his generation owed to German philosophy. At which Dostoevsky said he had found the ordinary Germans a collection of cheats and swindlers. Turgenev denied this and said with rage:

  You insult me personally. You must know I have settled here and that I consider myself a German.

  Dostoevsky said he did not know that, but if it was the case, he apologised and left, exalted by indignation. A German!

  Such naked combats about convictions, as Mochulsky says in his book on Dostoevsky, rose from the endemic “self-consciousness” in the Russian nature which, more accurately put, is a spontaneous consciousness of the self as an absolute, extended to the universal. (It resembles that capacity of the Spaniard to leap suddenly from his ego into a universal expansion of it.) Dostoevsky believed, as he often said, in going to extremes, in pushing beyond the limit in search of revelation, in going to the brink of the precipice. He was at the beginning of his vision of the Russian Christ, the mission of the Russian people to rule the whole Slav world and under the leadership of the Tsar to save mankind from the corruption of the West—even “with rifles.” But, as Mochulsky suggests, the difference between Turgenev and Dostoevsky as artists was fundamental and irreconcilable.

  Turgenev was a fatalist lacking in will and saw history as an impersonal, predetermined process. Dostoevsky affirmed freedom of will and the power of personality. Turgenev wrote “Is there a God? I don’t know. But I do know the law of causality. Twice two is four.” Dostoevsky, with the frenzy of despair, fought against the law of necessity and by a volitional act “acquired” faith in God.

  Dostoevsky was the spiritual gambler: his greatness as a novelist lies in dramatising to the limit the swaying conflict between “knowing” and “not knowing.”

  The quarrel was part of Dostoevsky’s development. He needed an imagined enemy at the roulette table to reanimate his genius. On Turgenev it had no effect but of disgust and the feeling that Dostoevsky was a sick soul. But it had a disagreeable aftermath. After his trajectory from self-abasement to exaltation, Dostoevsky often fell into cunning and double-dealing. He had his report of the quarrel copied and sent to be preserved for posterity “in the archives”; obviously it would be publicised. Turgenev wrote to his friend Polonski in 1871:

  I have been told that Dostoevsky has “unmasked” me. Well, what of it, let him enjoy himself. He came to see me in Baden five years ago, not to pay back the money he had borrowed from me, but to curse me because of Smoke which, according to his ideas, ought to be burned by the executioner. I listened to his philippic in silence—and what am I finding out now? That I seem to have expressed every kind of offensive opinion which he hasted to communicate to Bartenev. (Bartenev has written to me about it.) It would be out and out slander if Dostoevsky were not mad which I do not doubt in the slightest. Perhaps it came to him in a dream. But my God, what a petty dirty gossip.

  Worse followed. If Turgenev had caricatured the Radicals in his portrait of Herzen’s friend Ogarev in Smoke, Dostoevsky caricatured Turgenev in The Devils: he became the shrill, lisping figure of Karmazinov and a “Red.” The portrait is spiteful. Karmazinov is an effeminate, vain, aging celebrity who is mocked from the floor at a public reading; the Baden lunch is more fully guyed, but we learn that Turgenev did at any rate offer him a cutlet and sat with his knees under a plaid rug because, although it was August, he found Baden cold.

  Turgenev is made to say “I still cling to honour but only from habit… Granted it’s from timidity; you see, one must live somehow what’s left of one’s life.” The malice, indeed the hatred, reach their height when he parodies Karmazinov giving a reading of Phantoms. Karmazinov says that he has helped the town council to lay a new water pipe.

  I felt in my heart that this question of water pipes in Karlsruhe was dearer and closer to my heart than all the questions of my precious Fatherland.

  And then goes on to parody Enough, which he called Merci, in which Karmazinov says he is laying down his pen for good—as indeed Turgenev often did say—and if angels from heaven or the best society were to implore him, he would not change his mind. Dostoevsky’s humour is broad. He underlines his jokes with a heavy hand. But when he parodies Phantoms as an account of Turgenev’s first kiss, he is very funny indeed about the political tour of the earth. The lovers are sitting near a gorse tree—look up your nature notes—there is a touch of purple in the sky:

  Suddenly they see Pompey or Cassius on the eve of battle and both are penetrated by the chill of ecstasy. Some wood nymph squeaks in the bushes. Gluck plays the violin among the reeds…. Meanwhile a fog comes down, everything disappears and the great genius is crossing the Volga in a thaw, such a fog—it was more like a million pillows than a fog. Two and a half pages are filled with the crossing and yet he falls through the ice. The genius is drowning—you imagine he was drowned? Not a bit of it: this was simply in order that when he was drowning and at his last gasp he might catch sight of a bit of ice, the size of a pea, but pure as crystal “as a frozen tear.” And in that tear was reflected Germany, or more accurately the sky of Germany and its iridescent sparkle recalled to his mind the very tear which “Dost thou remember fell from thine eyes when we were sitting under the emerald tree and thou didst cry out joyfully There is no crime!’” “No,” I said through my tears, “but if that is so there are no righteous either.” We sobbed and parted for ever.

  She goes off to visit some caves down the coast and he flies off to dwell for three years under the Suharev Tower in Moscow and hears a hermit sigh. This reminds him of her first sigh thirty-seven years before, when she said:

  “Why love? See ochra will cease to grow and I shall cease to love.” Down comes the fog again, the wood nymph whistles a tune from Chopin, Aneus Marcus appears over the roofs of Rome. A chill of ecstasy ran down our backs and we parted for ever.

  This parody has its seamy side. Dostoevsky had published Phantoms in his own paper, Epoca, because he had thought Turgenev’s name would draw readers: the truth is that noble as Dostoevsky seemed to his wife Ann
a, who passed the quarrel over lightly in the revised version of her account of him at the end of her life, he was undoubtedly a pathologically jealous man, as she knew from her own frightening experiences with him.

  Turgenev wrote to a correspondent that Dostoevsky’s conduct had not surprised him: “he hated me even when we were both young” and added, “Groundless passions are the strongest and most prolonged.” He and “the most spiteful of Christians” did not meet again until they orated from the same platform when they were old men.

  During the eight years Turgenev lived in Baden he put on weight and mockingly called himself the “Badenbourgeois” and acted the part: there was always a tension between himself as a personality and himself as an artist. Very aware of the dangers of expatriation he went five times to Russia for visits of a month or two. There were journeys to Paris also where he went to see his daughter, Paulinette, who had been married in 1855 and in one of his letters he complains that spring in Europe lacks the sudden explosiveness of the Russian spring. On one of his Russian visits in 1867—his climacteric year, he said, because he was forty-nine, the multiple of 7 X 7, one of his mother’s superstitions—Pauline was singing in Karlsruhe, Breslau and Berlin and he met her in Berlin when he was on his way to Petersburg. They spent five days together. April Fitzlyon quotes in full the German passage which had been suppressed from an earlier published version of one of his letters to Pauline:

  I cannot tell you how endlessly depressed I was. Those days in Berlin, that unexpected, wonderful meeting, all that—and then a cruel separation—it was really and truly too much for me … I was positively broken under the burden of those unforgettable impressions—broken as I have never been before. Oh, my feeling for you is too great, too powerful. I cannot live away from you any more, it’s beyond me. I must feel your nearness which is so dear to me, revel in it: the day on which your eyes do not shine on me is a lost day. But enough, enough! Or I shall lose my self-control …

  He was happy, he said, that everything in him, to his very depths, was linked with her being.

  The uncle who had long before succeeded the Tyutchevs had naturally come to feel that he owned Spasskoye. He had become not only lazy and incompetent but angrily obstructive. When Turgenev compared his own income to his brother’s who had shared the inheritance and had improved it in a business-like way, he realised the uncle was hopeless as a manager. There was nothing for it but to turn him out. Since his mother’s time Turgenev had shied away from confrontations but after the ecstatic days with Pauline he had to face the old fellow who was revelling in a sense of injury and moved on to insults and dangerous threats in his letters. He called his nephew an Assassin. When Turgenev told him he would have to go the old man turned vindictive and presented the two promissory notes Turgenev had left with him as an insurance, but on the understanding they would never be called in. The uncle took steps to distrain on all his nephew’s property, in Russia and abroad including the new house at Baden, so that Turgenev had quickly to make it over to the Viardots. He was obliged to explain his financial difficulties to his daughter. Her husband, a glass maker, seems, like her earlier suitors, to have had his eye on Turgenev’s money. He had already spared no expense on Paulinette and had given her a substantial dowry. Now he was obliged to write:

  If my uncle had not acted so infamously towards me I would have been in a position to give you 50,000 francs. However, I have just spent 75,000 to buy back the bills of exchange I gave him 11 years ago (without actually receiving a sou), to be presented on my death. And not only did he present them now with me alive but he is also demanding to be paid himself with compound interest: that is to say more than twice the principal. That has come as a blow to me and with the present state of my affairs my fortune is pretty well shaken.

  He set off for Moscow and Spasskoye to face his uncle. It was in March. The train left at five-thirty in the morning and took him as far as a little place called Serpoukhov; after that he went by sleigh with a new bailiff and a valet. He was ill and at once started coughing. There was a bad journey over the unmade roads which had been torn into holes and gullies as the snow softened in the thaw. By now Turgenev had bronchitis, a high temperature and was forced to stay in a miserable inn. And his gout had started again. Bad health always came to his aid when he wished to dodge a personal crisis, so he sent his bailiff on to deal with his uncle and he himself returned to Moscow, where he quickly recovered.

  It is obvious from his correspondence about money, with Louis Viardot, that he was one of those unworldly gentlemen who—like so many of the Russian gentry—had amateur notions about the management of money. To him it was a sort of fluid, capricious in its flow. When short of money owing to his extravagance or to some failure of crops—and he was often short enough to have to borrow his fare from a friend—he simply sold another farm or took to the landowner’s common device of selling off more timber from his forests—and put the transfer of the funds to France into the hands of friends who were as amateur and forgetful as himself. He and they mistrusted banks. At home he was easily robbed by his agents. Perhaps he assuaged his guilt as a landowner by agreeing that it was right that he should be robbed and that he was, in any case, the victim of having a position he had not chosen. In his heart he did not and could not think of money as real. To Viardot, of course, it was very real.

  Turgenev put off the meeting with his uncle until the June of ‘68. It was a terrible year of desolation in Russia. To his brother he wrote:

  I spent two weeks in Spasskoye and, like Marius, can say that I have sat upon the ruins of Carthage. In the present year alone the “fetid elder”—that plunderer of money, cattle, carriages, furniture and other possessions—has fleeced me of 3,500 silver roubles. (I had to pay a 5,000 rouble debt of his.) I will not mention that he left the estate in a loathsome disorder and chaos, that he paid no one, tricked every one etc.… During my entire stay at Spasskoye I was like a hare on the run; I could not stick my head in the garden without serfs, muzchiks, small merchants, retired soldiers, sluts, peasant women, the blind, the lame, the neighbouring landowners of both sexes, priests and sextons—my own and other people’s—rushing forward from behind trees, from behind bushes and almost out of the ground to assault me—all of them emaciated by hunger with their mouths agape like jackdaws, throwing themselves and shouting hoarsely “Dear master! Ivan Sergeivich, save us! Save us, we are dying.” I finally had to save myself by fleeing lest I be stripped of everything. Moreover a terrible year is on the way: the spring crops have perished; the rye is enormous on the stalk, but the ears contain not a kernel. What a picture Russia presents now—this land everyone contends is so rich. The roofs are all uncovered, the fences are down and not a single new building is to be seen except for the taverns. The horses and the cows are dead; the people are thin—three coachmen could hardly lift my trunk between them. Dust is everywhere, like a bank of clouds; around Petersburg everything is burning up—the forests, the houses, the very land… The picture is not a happy one, but it is very accurate.

  Back in Petersburg he was depressed. The white nights got on his nerves. There was a nasty, sweetish, humid smell in the air. He stayed with his friend Annenknov and his wife and baby, in a dacha which shook at the slightest wind. They sat freezing before the fire, with rugs over their shoulders—it was June. He longed for Baden. He gazed sentimentally at the house on the Nevsky Prospect, opposite the theatre, where he had met Pauline on her first visit to Petersburg twenty-five years before.

  One thing he did achieve: he sold a large amount of timber and the money was to go to a fund for Didie’s dowry: “I adore that child.” Her birth in 1852 had killed all his hopes of a life with Pauline, but he worshipped this daughter. She was very much a dark Spanish type like her mother and grew up to be a talented painter. When she was ten he said the little girl had an extraordinary power over him—“and she knows it.” And adds the words he always used to women he loved: “I kiss her hands.” He sent her a caricature of himself a
s Don Quixote and asked if she would want a Don Quixote like that for a husband when she grew up? There is—he told her mother—“only one Didie in the world… and she knows, without my telling her, that I belong to her utterly and she could put a collar round my neck like she does with Flambeau [one of the Viardot dogs], and the worst of it is I wouldn’t be cross.” The desire to belong, to be a possession, was at the core of his affections.

  In Baden, the little theatre he had built for Pauline in the garden of his house was opened and Pauline and her pupils gave performances of three little operas for which Turgenev had written the libretti: he also played minor parts himself; the Queen of Prussia and the Duke and Duchess of Weimar who were present raised their eyebrows at the sight of the great novelist and aristocrat lying on the floor in the part of a ridiculous pasha. The operas were not a success. At Pauline’s musical matinées when she played the organ, at which she was remarkable, the Russians were not impressed by the sight of their great writer pumping away at the instrument. They saw him frittering his talents away as a clown.

  Turgenev was restless. He went again to Paris to correct the French proofs of a collection of stories and he went to see his daughter and her in-laws. The girl was pregnant, the mother-in-law detested her, the marriage was having its troubles. He went on to see Flaubert who sat red in the face, dressed in red, in a red room. He called on Sainte-Beuve who was ill. The critic took a piece of paper and made a drawing of the cancer of the bowel of which he was dying: he offered drawings of the cancer to all his callers. In June of 1870, Turgenev was off again to Berlin on his way to Petersburg and sat opposite the ominous Moltke at a dinner and studied him. With his fair wig, his calm clean-shaven face and penetrating blue eyes, Moltke seemed the tranquil personification of power, intelligence and will, an enemy Napoleon III had underrated. In Petersburg Turgenev had one of his violent attacks of gout which had now become chronic, worked on the draft of one of his four finest stories, A Lear of the Steppes and bought 6,000 Russian railway shares for Didie’s dowry, which brought the capital value up to 50,000 francs. The beautiful girl was now eighteen.