The Pritchett Century

by V. S. Pritchett

  Her hands were beautiful and he worshipped them all his life. In a letter sent to her in 1849 he said in German:

  All day I have been lost in a magical dream. Everything, everything, all the past, all that has been poured irresistibly and spontaneously into my soul … I am whole … I belong body and soul to my dear Queen. God bless you a thousand times.

  In July ’49 at Courtavenel he went off to a village fête, studied the faces and watched the sweating dancers. He passed the next day alone and wrote to her in German:

  I cannot tell you how much I have thought of you every day, when I got back to the house I cried out your name in ecstasy and opened my arms with longing for you. You must have heard and seen me!

  There is a line in one letter in which, once only, he addresses her as “du.” From this and from the paragraphs in German some biographers have thought that Pauline and he had become physically lovers and that German was used to hide the fact from her husband who is said not to have known the language. This is most unlikely: Louis had been many times to Germany; as a capable translator in a bilingual family, he must at least have picked up some German in the course of his business and indeed from Pauline’s singing. German is more likely to be “a tender little language” between intimate friends and Turgenev, the polyglot, liked to spice his letters with foreign words for he could not use more than a word or two of Russian to her. Perhaps in using German he was simply using the romantic language of the sublime he had learned in Berlin when he was nineteen. Expressions of love are at once more extravagant and frequent in a foreign tongue and, for that reason, have the harmless sense of theatrical fantasy or flattery: platonic love affairs live by words and not deeds. George Sand wrote with the same exaltation in her novels; and young women of the period would expect no less from a correspondent, especially from the Russian “openness.” There is no sign that Pauline ever replied to Turgenev in such terms.

  It is impossible to say more about the nature of this love for the moment; but there is strong reason to suspect that Pauline, duty or no duty, “hot southern blood” (as she once or twice said) or not, was one of those gifted young women who do not feel physical passion until later in life and have something mannish in their nature. And what about the guilt Turgenev may have felt in being in love with the wife of a generous friend? This is also a mystery: there is only a slight sign of this embarrassment in his stories.

  In their biographies, Yarmolinsky, Magarshack and April Fitzlyon differ considerably in their interpretation. Yarmolinsky is vivid, engaging and ironical in the disabused manner of the nineteen-twenties and regards the love affair as purely platonic on both sides, a deep amitié amoureuse, which would go a long way to explaining why Turgenev never gave it up and why Louis Viardot tolerated it. (Louis was to become the father of four children.) Magarshack asserts that Pauline did become Turgenev’s mistress and that the affair came quickly to an end because she gave him up for Ary Scheffer, the painter, who often came to Courtavenel and that when she and Turgenev were reconciled she was unfaithful to him and her husband again. He also accepts the common gossip that her second daughter, Didie, and her son Paul were probably Turgenev’s children. Neither of these writers has closely considered the character of Pauline and all the evidence as searchingly as April Fitzlyon has done. She believes that Pauline did fall seriously in love with Turgenev and indeed felt passion for the first time; that it is just possible they were briefly lovers, though to neither of them was physical love important—indeed Pauline may have been put off by a dislike of “conjugal duty”—and that, in any case, she put her art before personal relationships always and is well-known to have disapproved of the Bohemian morals of her profession. Far from having been her lover, Ary Scheffer—a man as old as her husband and a stern moralist—would be the counsellor who prevented her from leaving her husband for Turgenev and made her control her heart by her will which was certainly very strong. She says it is indeed just possible in the case of the son that Turgenev was the father, but it is unlikely and there is no evidence. And that although Turgenev made bitter remarks in the vicissitudes of his attachment to her and in his masochistic way said that he lived under her heel as many of his incredulous friends thought, he endured what he did endure because he was in love with his own chivalrous love.

  In this situation Louis Viardot behaved with dignity and concealed the pain he must have felt. He was passionately in love with his wife and was no cynic: he remained friends with Turgenev all his life, although some thought their attitude to each other formal.

  The situation indeed changed, as we shall see.

  Whatever went on at Courtavenel in those early years there is no doubt that Louis and his wife must have regarded Turgenev affectionately as an extraordinary and exotic case. Viardot himself, as a traveller and one who had felt the Spanish spell of his wife, must have felt the Russian spell of Turgenev. They must have been astounded by the story of his barbarous experience at Spasskoye, and have been amazed that the giant had grown to be grave and gentle, as well as gifted. And Louis must have recognised a wit and a mind far richer than his own. The Viardots felt concern for his talent and both pointed to the dangers of idleness to a man who was rich enough to do nothing. Pauline was no amateur: she was an artist and a professional and it can never have entered her head that Turgenev, who was incapable of managing money or any practical matter, could replace her husband. One can see by their kindness, and especially Louis Viardot’s, that although they saw his distinction and originality, their feeling must have been protective. Viardot had no small vanity in his own taste and exercised an almost fatherly right to give sound advice to the feckless aristocrat and was aware of having two artists on his hands whom he could keep in order. He was a rational man but quietly firm in requiring moral behaviour and decorum. There is a line in A Month in the Country, the play that Turgenev began to write before he left Courtavenel and which in many respects is drawn on his situation as a lover. Rakitin, the lover, is made to say at the crisis of the play:

  “It is time to put an end to these morbid, consumptive relations.”

  Consumptive? Or self-consuming? It strikes one that those words must have been actually spoken at Courtavenel not by Turgenev but by Viardot. They have his manner.

  There comes a moment, in one of the last letters Turgenev was to write from Courtavenel, when he adds a sentence in German:

  What is the matter with Viardot? Is he upset because I am living here?

  (1977)

  FROM

  Chekhov: A Spirit Set Free

  SAKHALIN

  Although friends of Chekhov had heard him say that he saw no difficulty in chasing two or even more hares at the same time, they were alarmed when, in 1890, the news leaked out that he was planning to travel across Russia and Asia to the Russian penal colony on the island of Sakhalin, Russia’s notorious Botany Bay in the Far East. The nomad had been reborn. When he asked Suvorin to back him, Suvorin refused. That hare, Suvorin said, had died more than a generation ago. Even the story of Manon Lescaut was dead. Chekhov’s duty was to literature, not to documentary investigation. And in any case, there was no trans-Siberian railway; the appalling land journey through barbarous country would kill him. Stirred by opposition and anxious to refute both his liberal and radical critics, who accused him of lacking “a general political idea,” Chekhov fought back.

  Sakhalin can be useless and uninteresting only to a society which does not exile thousands of people to it.… We have sent millions of men to rot in prison, have destroyed them—casually without thinking, barbarously … have depraved them, have multiplied criminals, and the blame for all this we have thrown upon the gaolers and red-nosed superintendents. Now all educated Europe knows that it is not the superintendents that are to blame, but all of us.… The vaunted [political idealists of the] sixties did nothing for the sick and for prisoners, so breaking the chief commandment of Christian civilization.

  When Mikhail Chekhov was asked what had put the idea
into his brother’s head, he said it was an accident: Anton had happened to read a penal document lying about in an office. In Petersburg the gossip was that he wanted to go in order to recover from an unhappy love affair with a married woman, Lydia Avilova, a sentimental novelist. This is certainly untrue. After his death she wrote Chekhov in My Life, which has been shown to be a wishful illusion. More interestingly, when he had graduated as a doctor he had not written his dissertation, and the desire to make amends by writing a serious medical document that would qualify him was strong. Indeed on his return from Sakhalin he did submit a manuscript to the university, where it was at once rejected as unacademic.

  There is no doubt that Chekhov felt he had the “duty of repaying my debt to medicine.” But it is very important also that ever since his boyhood he had been a passionate reader of the journeys of Przhevalsky, the greatest of Russian explorers, and had read Humboldt’s journey across the steppe and George Kennan’s famous expedition to Siberia. More intimately human are his words to a friend, the writer Ivan Shcheglov, who supposed, naturally, that Chekhov was going simply to observe and “get impressions.” Chekhov replied that he was going “simply to be able to live for half a year as I have not lived up to this time. Don’t expect anything from me.”

  Suvorin gave in. Chekhov got his sister, his brother Alexander and friends to do exhaustive research for him in Petersburg. Among other responsibilities he had to see that his family had enough money to live on while he was away. He described his own state of excitement medically: “It’s a form of lunacy: Mania Sakhalinosa.”

  He set off at last late in April 1890 on a four-thousand-mile journey that would last over three months. He had been spitting blood that winter. His sister and a few friends saw him off on the river steamer at Yaroslavl. He was equipped with a heavy leather coat and a short one, top boots, a bottle of cognac, a knife “useful for cutting sausages and killing tigers” and a revolver for protection against brigands—he never had to use it.

  His account of his land and river journey is told in vivid letters to his sister and his mother.

  The rain poured down during the river trip to the ravines of Kineshma. After leaving the steamer he took to the road, jolted in an open public coach from one posting house to the next, though he hired private carriages when he could, and sat there freezing “like a goldfinch in a cage.”

  He writes to his sister:

  I have my fur coat on. My body is all right, but my feet are freezing. I wrap them in the leather overcoat, but it is no use. I have two pairs of breeches on.… Telegraph poles, pools, birch copses flash by. Here we overtake some emigrants.… We meet tramps with pots on their back; these gentry promenade all over … Siberia without hindrance. One time they will murder some poor old woman to take her petticoat for their leg-wrappers; at another they will strip from the verst post the metal plate with the number on it—it might be useful; at another will smash the head of some beggar or knock out the eyes of some brother exile; but they never touch travellers.…

  He is by now well past the Urals. If the small towns are gray and miserable, the country people are “good and kindly,” and

  have excellent traditions. Their rooms are simply furnished but clean, with claims to luxury; the beds are soft, all feather mattresses and big pillows. The floors are painted or covered with homemade linen rugs.

  No bugs, no “Russian smell.” The explanation: these people have forty-eight acres of black earth, which they farm themselves.

  But it cannot all be put down to prosperity.… One must give some of the credit to their manner of life.… they don’t search in each other’s heads in your presence.… There is a cleanliness of which our Little Russians can only dream, yet the Little Russians are far and away cleaner than the Great Russians.

  Food! Pies and pancakes are good, but all the rest is not for what Chekhov calls his “European” stomach. Duck broth is disgusting and muddy; there is the terrible “brick tea” tasting like a “decoction of sage and beetles.”

  The last of the bad Moscow air was out of his lungs and he had stopped coughing. But in Siberia there were freezing gales, food was scarce; the bad roads, the floods and the days and nights of jolting along brought on his cough again and he spat blood. He had bought a cart of his own by now because it was cheaper, but he was continually repairing it. His cheap boots cramped his feet and for the rest of the journey he suffered agonies from piles. His whole body was aching.

  He changes to a public coach. It is like traveling on roads flooded to the size of lakes and he has to be rowed across them. As for fellow passengers—they seem chiefly to have been drunkards and boasters. There was a police officer who had written a play and insisted on reading it. He also exhibited a nugget of gold. There was constant talk about gold in Siberia.

  Tomsk turns out to be a dull and drunken town—“a pig in a skullcap” and the acme of “mauvais ton.” It is regarded as a distinction that all its governors die in it.

  After the freezing gales the heat of summer comes suddenly. He had his first bath at Irkutsk, “a very European town,” and threw away his filthy clothes and bought new ones. Then on by river steamer to the famous Lake Baikal, a little sea in itself, and at last he reached a paradise on the Amur River. On the left, the Russian shore; on the right, wild and deserted China. What a region for a summer villa, among duck, grebes, herons and all sorts of creatures with long beaks, young girls smoking cigarettes, old ladies smoking pipes. Marvelous crags and forests, everyone talking about gold, gold, gold.

  And what liberalism! Oh what liberalism.… People are not afraid to talk aloud here. There’s no one to arrest them and nowhere to exile them to, so you can be as liberal as you like. The people for the most part are independent, self-reliant and logical. If there is any misunderstanding at Ustkara, where the convicts work (among them many politicals who don’t work), all the Amur region is in revolt.… An escaped convict can travel freely on the steamer to the ocean, without any fear of the captain’s giving him up. This is partly due to the absolute indifference to everything that is done in Russia.

  At last, after two and a half months, on July 5, 1890, he is at Nikolayevsk, a town of respectable smugglers on the Tatar Strait and the port of embarkation for the island of Sakhalin on the other side of the strait. On the crossing he found himself with three hundred soldiers and several prisoners, one he notices “accompanied by his five-year-old daughter, who clung to his shackles as he came up the gangway.”

  The first sight of the town itself alarmed him. Smoke was drifting across the strait from huge fires. He eventually wrote in The Island: A Journey to Sakhalin:

  The horrifying scene, compounded of darkness, the silhouettes of mountains, smoke, flames and fiery sparks, was fantastic. On my left monstrous fires were burning, above them the mountains, and beyond the mountains a red glow rose to the sky from remote conflagrations. It seemed that all of Sakhalin was on fire.

  Chekhov had had no difficulty in getting permission to talk to the convicts or the settlers, but his official permit forbade him to talk with political prisoners. He had given practical forethought to his inquiry and he had shrewdly decided to begin by making his personal census of the population. He devised a card of twelve questions, which requested simple particulars of each settler’s status, age, religion, education and year of arrival, and included the very cogent question: Married in Russia or in Sakhalin? He claimed to have filled out ten thousand of those cards. There was no Impressionist in Chekhov, the doctor. Most of the settlers were of peasant origin and illiterate. Some didn’t know where they came from. There were twice as many men as women in the penal colony, and in addition there were the “bachelor soldiers,” who were as dangerous, he noted, as “roughnecks building a railroad” near a Russian village.

  If he is writing a flat documentary prose and rather overloads his book with the statistics, he has the storyteller’s eye for the grim and the bizarre. When word of a new delivery of woman convicts gets around, we shall
see, the road is crowded with men going south to the port of arrival. These are known to everyone, not without irony, as the “suitors,” or prospective bridegrooms.

  They actually look like bridegrooms. One has donned a red bunting shirt, another wears a curious planter’s hat, a third sports shining new high-heeled boots, though nobody knows where he bought them or under what circumstances. When they arrive at the post they are permitted to enter the women’s barracks and they are left there with the women. The suitors wander around the plank beds, silently and seriously eyeing the women; the latter sit with downcast eyes. Each man makes his choice. Without any grimaces, without any sneers, very seriously, they act with humanity toward the ugly, the old and those with criminal features.… If some younger or older woman “reveals herself” to a man, he sits down beside her and begins a sincere conversation. She asks if he owns a samovar and whether his hut is covered with planks or straw.… Only after the housekeeping examination has been completed, when both feel that a deal has been made, does she venture to say: “You won’t hurt me in any way, will you?”

  The conversation is over. The civil marriage is completed and he takes his “cohabitant” home.

  With the exception of women from the privileged classes or those who arrived with their husbands, all female convicts became “cohabitants.” Most of the women convicts were neurotics who had been “sentenced for crimes of passion or crimes connected with their families.” They say, “I came because of my husband,” or “I came because of my mother-in-law.”