The Gentle Barbarian

by V. S. Pritchett

  Turgenev always understands how to insert points of rest during which a story can grow of itself. The boy narrator goes away for the summer. In the autumn he goes out shooting snipe and sees a stranger riding Harlov’s horse. It is the first sign of the truth of Souvenir’s prophecy. Horse and carriage have been taken from Harlov by Anna and Sletkin her husband. Harlov is being starved and stripped of everything. The two sisters are at odds. Evlampia is having an affair with Sletkin—Souvenir catches them in the woods—and when he hears of this Harlov rushes in a state of madness to the big house. In his great bid for power, Harlov has exhausted his will. His terrifying force has become helpless, acquiescent and meek. This is Souvenir’s moment. He mocks the old man for his fall, jeering without pity. Suddenly the old man rises to the taunts, recovers his old violence and rushes back to his manor, and in a terrible scene climbs to the roof and starts tearing down what he has built with his own hands. The peasants cannot stop him, as he rips away the rafters and knocks down chimneys. In a final triumph of strength he wrenches a gable and a cross beam off and is crushed when he falls with them to the ground.

  One does not expect such a scene of violence from Turgenev. It succeeds because it is made to seem likely among the people of the steppe. The two daughters have been skilfully kept in the background where, by one small touch or another, they have aroused our apprehension. We have seen Anna’s cold smile; we have seen Evlampia, silent as stone, a still, sensual beauty with a store of power in her. Of Anna, the boy remarks in a disturbing Turgenevean reflection:

  In spite of the negligence of her attire and her irritable humour, she struck me as before, as attractive and I should have been delighted to kiss the narrow hand which looked malignant too, as she twice irritably pushed back her loose tresses.

  The tragedy is over and the story is restored little by little to the norms of peasant life. In studying the peasants as a group, Turgenev has gone beyond the scope of A Sportsman’s Sketches, though the luminous quality of that early work gives the scene perspective and truth. At first the peasants stand aloof from Anna, but for Evlampia there was a kind of sympathy, except from an old man who said: “You wronged him; on your soul lies the sin.” At the funeral the faces of the crowd condemn the family, but the condemnation has become impersonal. That is the next stage.

  It seemed as though all those people felt that the sin into which the Harlov family had fallen—this great sin—had gone now before the presence of one righteous Judge and for that reason there was no need now for them to trouble themselves and be indignant. They prayed devoutly for the soul of the dead man whom in life they had not especially liked, whom they feared indeed.

  Anna’s voice, we remember, was “very pleasant, resonant and rather plaintive… like the note of a bird of prey,” but she says nothing. Evlampia, fierce, monumental—“a free bird of the Cossack breed”—fierce in the glance of her dark blue eyes, was silent too. Sletkin tries to get a word out of her, but she treats him as she has treated the absurd Major who had wanted to marry her.

  In a day or two she has sold her interest to her sister and has vanished. Years later the narrator sees her again, driving in a smart pony trap, splendidly dressed. She has become the founder, the dominant mother of a dissenting Order of Flagellant Sisters who live without priests. Whether this is a genuine order is uncertain: is her house a place of rendez-vous? For the peasants wink and say the Police Captain does well out of the Order. It is she who inherits the primitive spirit of her father, maybe is honest—but maybe not: the spirit of an extremist.

  Sletkin, Anna’s scheming husband, has died—the peasants say, probably untruthfully, that she poisoned him and she is now an excellent farmer, better than her father was, clever in the legal negotiations that have followed the change in the land laws after the Emancipation. The great landlords and officials respect her judgment.

  In other words, after tragedy and indeed crime, a new generation rises and forgets, as Turgenev always likes to show when the present grows out of the past. Human life is short.

  There is little of love in this tale, but one notices his skill in suggesting there has been an act of sexual love. The boy comes across Sletkin and Evlampia in the woods.

  [Sletkin] was lying on his back with both hands under his head and with a smile of contentment gazing upwards at the sky, swinging his left leg which was crossed over his right knee… A few yards from him Evlampia was walking up and down the little glade, with downcast eyes. It seemed as though she were looking for something in the grass, mushrooms perhaps: now and then she stretched out her hand. She was singing in a low voice. An old ballad.

  Hither, hither threatening storm cloud

  Slay for me the father-in-law

  Strike for me the mother-in-law

  The young wife I will kill myself.

  Louder and louder she sings while Sletkin laughs to himself while she moves round and round him.

  “The things that come into some people’s heads,” Sletkin says.

  “What were those words you were singing?”

  “You can’t leave the words out of a song,” says Evlampia.

  And then they see the boy, cry out and rush away in opposite directions.

  The scene tells us all, even to the fierceness of an act of lust, and what hidden fantasies it releases in the mind.

  A Lear of the Steppe is, no doubt, a drama seen from the outside, but it shows Turgenev’s mature power of suggesting the inside of his people and of concealing its documentation. The kind of documentation that obtrudes, say, in Zola’s La Terre, or indeed in most stories of peasant life done by writers who are not peasants, is mercifully absent. In the manner of the greatest artists, he contrives to make us feel that people should be seen as self-justified themselves. The choice of a growing boy as the narrator, with some character of his own, makes this possible and evades the smoothing over of hearsay.

  In defending the scene of hallucination in the story of Lieutenant Erguyvov, Turgenev wrote that he merely wanted to present the imperceptibility of the transition from reality to dream which “everyone has experienced for himself … I am completely indifferent to mysticism in all its forms,” although one or two of the stories in the Baden period venture into this unseizable world. Turgenev is not dabbling in spiritualism, which was a mid-nineteenth century fad; he is indulging his own morbidity. A Strange Story does describe a visit to a peasant medium. The narrator fortifies himself with drink, and the maniacal old medium who, in a scene excellent for its atmosphere of suggestion, makes the former think the figure of his dead tutor has possibly been evoked. But the medium is not the disturbing figure, nor is the possible ghost: it’s a young girl of the gentry whom the narrator has met at a dance, a childish creature with a face of stone. She disturbs us. She has run away from her family and is obsessed with the idea of self-abasement and self-sacrifice. The narrator meets her long after trudging the roads with the medium who turns out to be a classic Russian holy fool. Her childishness has gone. She is bold, resolute and exalted. She refuses to be rescued.

  She seemed possessed by a sort of wrathful, vindictive excitement, without paying any attention to me, setting her teeth and breathing hard, she urged on the distracted vagrant in an undertone… To follow a half insane vagrant, to become his servant! She had lain down to be trampled underfoot.

  The great talker seems to make a personal reflection in the end: “Her words were not opposed to her acts.”

  This is not one of Turgenev’s important stories: it suffers from being too much a discussion at times, but it has the interest of being on the prevalence of wandering “holy souls” in Russia and peasant superstition and one has the impression that when he returned to Russia, even for a month, he was at once in touch with a life where the edges were less certain than they were in Europe, a life in which loneliness can make a human being take the sudden leap into frenzy or extremes. There is the slide into frenzy in two other tales of this period: The Dog, written at Spasskoye in one spont
aneous burst; and also in the Knock, Knock, Knock, where a man prone to “fatality” is comically haunted by sounds that soon turn out to be hauntings of conscience and delusion which drive him to suicide. There is too much explanation here. Another story, The Watch, is interesting only as an ironical account of a weak youth’s fear of the eye of his hero.

  The chief drawback of Turgenev’s happy life in Baden was perhaps not being out of Russia but of living in too cosy a milieu. The Viardot ménage was too much given to little concerts, the exchange of literary conceits, parlour games and intellectual pastimes. There was no loneliness and he could work only with part of himself. It is noticeable that he began to work on Torrents of Spring after the end of the Baden period. (It is called Spring Freshets by one or two translators, thereby losing, in my opinion, the more forcible image.) As a love-story it is Turgenev’s masterpiece although some Russian critics despised it because it was a love-story and also because it was set in Germany. It is in fact very Russian if we think of inconsequence in matters of feeling and honour being Russian, though of course what the story is really about is honour and has implications far beyond the love-story itself. Comedy can only be written by serious minds and this one brims with the spontaneous and unthinking delight of youth and youth’s misreading of the future:

  First love is like a revolution: the monotonous routine of life is smashed; youth takes its stand at the barricades.

  Not only first love: the story can be felt to be true to the passion, especially to its passage from illusion to illusion, at any age. One knows that Sanin and Gemma are only twenty-two; but it is a surprise that the second implicated couple, Polozov the sleepy gourmet and Maria, the femme fatale, his wife, are only three years older, though the kind of young who are born old and without innocence. The story is a comedy in which the hours of the day smile at the characters as they pass over them, until passion moves them out of real time and into a state where time seems to stop. For Turgenev, love is an accident, contrived by Nature for its own purpose, and when love becomes sexual passion, honour is lost. There is something in Leonard Shapiro’s suggestion—made in a valuable essay printed with his own translation—that Turgenev had been reading the fashionable and pessimistic Schopenhauer. (Tolstoy was affected by him too.) And of course there is something of Turgenev’s mysterious attitude to sex in which love and sex are kept in separate compartments. Whatever conclusions we come to about this, they do not alter the fact that a story set in the 1840s in old-fashioned Frankfurt and Wiesbaden but written from the point of view of the 1870s has the tone, the directness and, above all, the economy which bring it near to ourselves. The comedy is also a crystallisation of Turgenev’s sense of his personal tragedy. We are discreetly made aware, by his detachment, of a double view: he has caught the evanescence of the surface of experience—as I have said of the hours flowing through the fond yet baffled people and the scene, and yet we are aware of the moral undertow which drags at the swimmers who are living from moment to moment, drawing them out of their depth. To Turgenev the inevitable passing of youth and of its freedom was agonising and one can see his pose of premature old age or a perpetual Goodbye as a device for preserving the sense of youth untouched. The very naïveté and child-like qualities that were hidden behind his perfect manners suggest that his feeling about lost youth was more than the common nostalgia but rather a wonder always awake in his battered, personal life. Youth was a work of art in itself. The double view of love we find in the story, of middle age looking back on a folly that turns into betrayal and shame, gives the comedy of Torrents of Spring its moral complexities.

  As in several earlier stories, notably A Correspondence and Acia, the ghost of the Turgenev-Viardot situation stands in the shadow of Torrents of Spring, but the characters have no resemblance to them. Sanin, the impulsive young Russian nobleman, travelling in Germany, is a sort of Turgenev without his convictions or gifts; novelists find it useful to put a derogatory half-picture of themselves into a story in order to gain perspective and to free the story from the maudlin or from the blur of introspection. The tale is said to have started in his mind from the memory of meeting a beautiful Jewish girl in Frankfurt when he was twenty-two. She had, like Gemma the Italian girl in the story, rushed out of the confectioner’s shop when he was passing to ask him to save her brother who was thought to be dying inside. The young Turgenev himself went on to Russia, but the image of the beautiful girl remained in his mind: the rest of the story is invention. Most important is its frame: it opens with Sanin-Turgenev at the age of fifty-two coming back at night from a party of brilliant people in which he himself had been a brilliant talker. He is exhausted physically and spiritually and is suddenly attacked by the taedium vitae, the disgust with life, as a man who talks too well may easily be.

  He thought of the vanity, the uselessness, the vulgar falsity of all things human … Everywhere was the same everlasting futility, the same ineptitude, the same kind of half-genuine, half-conscious self-delusion … And then all of a sudden like a bolt from the blue, old age comes upon you and with it the ever-growing corroding and undermining fear of death.

  And once more he sees the familiar nightmare image of death about which Turgenev had written in Phantoms. He is in a boat, looking down into the transparent water, and out of the slime below he sees huge hideous fishes; one of these monsters rises to the surface as if to overturn the boat, but sinks once more. He knows that “when the appointed hour comes” it will rise up again and sink him for good. This is the classic nightmare of Turgenev’s pessimism. Sanin goes to his desk to rummage among old papers in order to drive the despair away and to his surprise comes upon a garnet cross. At once he is back in his youth in Frankfurt and sees the beautiful girl rushing out of the confectioner’s who has now become the Italian Gemma. The spring of youth begins to flow, Sanin loses his fifty-two years and standing over his shoulder presents the ingenuous young Sanin. This world-weary, even sentimental conventional gambit is common enough in story-telling but there is something different in Turgenev’s handling of it: that opening portrait is a dramatic shadow that will run with the narrative so that the past will be seen running towards an inescapable present. Turgenev is free to mock his youth and to watch the defeat of innocence without abusing it.

  He worked for two years on this story. He wrote the fifty thousand words at least three times. His art is the pursuit of truth-telling and balance; he does not allow one character to obscure another; he lets every character do what it is his nature to do. And each one delights because of the gentle but firm manner in which he makes them add unsuspected traits to themselves. All is movement.

  The story also owes much of its freshness to its division into forty-three short chapters, most of them only five or six pages long and reading like variations on a deepening melody. The Italian family is delightfully drawn. There are the fond, shrewd mother, Frau Leonora with her headaches and her tears; the dramatising Panteleone, who had once been on the operatic stage but is now sunk to the state of half-servant, half-family friend; the beautiful Gemma who is charming but has a mind of her own; her fiancé Herr Kluber, the pompous rising shopkeeper; the rude blustering German officer, Baron von Donhof whom Sanin challenges to a duel; the handsome Italian son of the family who wants to be an artist and not a shopkeeper—they are all moved into action. Sanin and Gemma are bemused by each other, each is a wonder. In Sanin, Gemma sees an eloquent young hero, free of the pettiness of shop-keeping, a young man of honour, enchantingly free. Sanin sees Gemma as a goddess and his love begins when he is jealous of Herr Kluber and horrified to think of her becoming the wife of a stiff, obsequious shopkeeper. Kluber, as it turns out, is afraid to stand up to a rude German officer who shouts his drunken admiration of Gemma across the tables at a restaurant. Kluber takes his party away, but Sanin stays behind to challenge Von Donhof to a duel. Already the feet of Sanin and Gemma have left the earth. What accident will Nature trick them with to make them fall into each other’s arms? As Sanin stands
near her window he and Gemma are literally blown together.

  Suddenly, amid the dead silence and in an entirely cloudless sky, there arose such a violent gust of wind that the ground seemed to tremble underfoot, the faint starlight to quiver and shimmer and the air began turning round in a whirlwind. The wind, not cold but warm, almost burning hot, struck the trees, the roof of the house, its walls, the street.

  The din lasts only for a minute and in that time the two have grabbed each other for protection.

  In no time the whole Italian family are in love with the lovers. Madness seizes them all. Sanin says he will sell his estates in Russia instantly, take a job in the diplomatic service: better still, turn confectioner. Even Frau Leonora starts innocently working out how she will enlarge the shop. They are all living unreal lives.

  Sanin leaves the shop to find someone who will buy his estates. Idiotic luck is on his side: he meets a Russian friend Polozov, who had been at boarding school with him, and tells him what has happened. Polozov says that he cannot offer any money, but says that, very likely, if managed in the right way, his rich wife probably will. The Polozovs are staying in nearby Wiesbaden. This prospect seems quite normal to Sanin. We now see one kind of illusion in love, turning to a darker one.

  Sanin goes with Polozov to Wiesbaden to meet his rich wife. Love is not a miracle for the Polozovs: it is a sophisticated arrangement, a tolerated enslavement which takes the form of freedom. Polozov, an idle and impotent gourmet, is married to a sexually ravenous woman, half-gypsy and possibly of serf background, apt to be vulgar in speech, intelligent, a beautiful animal, who has married in order to be free to take on any lovers she wants. The chaste Gemma has inspired the idealist in Sanin: Maria Polozov is struck by him and settles to drawing out his sensuality, promising him the money but working on him until his love for Gemma is adroitly turned into sexual desire for herself. The scenes in which she negotiates this are wonderfully done and they end with an afternoon on which Sanin and Maria go riding into the mountains and the animal exhilaration of the ride ends in her victory.