The Anna Karenina Fix

by Viv Groskop

  Soon, though, both Tolstoy and Dostoevsky overtook Turgenev’s reputation both at home and abroad. When I was first studying Russian in the mid-1990s, he was not fashionable at all, and it was quite by chance that I had picked up a copy of A Month in the Country and started reading it: I thought it looked an easy read (and I did not want to read his novel Fathers and Sons, which was what was on my reading list). When I was at university, no one particularly liked or approved of Turgenev, even the daffiest of lecturers who were madly in love with Chekhov (also slightly unpopular at the time). It was considered bad form to spend too much time reading him, instead of twentieth-century avant-garde writers. Turgenev was seen as soft and inconsequential.

  Nowadays, he is not entirely reviled: he’s well known as a dramatist, his plays are popular on stage and adapted for the screen. But he is not what you would call ‘up there’ for everyone. The seeds for this fate were sown in the latter part of his career, when Turgenev, the writer first known abroad as the one and only voice of Russia, suddenly became seen as ‘too Western’. This was code for being too caught up with the aesthetics of the novel and not enough with the moral and spiritual principles of the characters. Virginia Woolf wrote that he was appreciated ‘more for his formal artistry than for his political or social commentary’. ‘Formal artistry’ is code for writing about human nature and the natural world and love and flowers, instead of writing about God and why the serfs should be emancipated. (This was slightly unfair, as Turgenev did believe the serfs should be emancipated and wrote about this, too.) Basically, Turgenev became more closely associated with the style of Henry James, Hemingway and Flaubert. He was supposedly not enough like Tolstoy and Dostoevsky to be properly Russian. This was – and is – both his charm and his downfall.

  For someone who comes across in all his biographies as sensitive and mild-mannered, Turgenev is a surprisingly divisive character. Virginia Woolf and Henry James loved him. Tolstoy wasn’t sure about him. And Dostoevsky straight up hated him. Nabokov, however, a notoriously plain-speaking critic of other writers, listed him as the fourth most important Russian writer. If you think that’s mean and Turgenev should have been placed higher up, please believe me when I say that, coming from Nabokov, this is the most gigantic compliment you can ever imagine. While listing him as one of the best writers ever, he also sniffed that Turgenev was ‘pleasant’ but not ‘great’. The other writers on the list were Tolstoy, Gogol and Chekhov, in that order. (Dostoevsky would be gutted, I’m sure.)

  It’s not a recommendation that every writer would necessarily want to receive but, later on, Lenin was a big fan of Turgenev. He loved Turgenev’s novel Spring Torrents. Lenin supposedly became obsessed with Turgenev’s works after the death of his brother, who was reading Turgenev shortly before he died. Lenin’s passion for this colourful, aristocratic writer is strange enough in itself: Turgenev was a dandy partial to silk waistcoats and velvet smoking jackets. He spent more time in Europe than he did in Russia, travelling, partying and going to the opera. He spent his whole life devoted to an opera singer who was married to another man. And he is the only Russian author I have come across who was open about having a favourite champagne: Roederer, served with ice. (Now you see why I love him.)

  He was also extremely entertaining and eccentric. He once said that the actress Sarah Bernhardt reminded him of a toad. He threw an inkwell at Pauline Viardot one time when she annoyed him. When he was suffering acutely from an undiagnosed severe physical condition, only months away from death, immobile and miserable, he described himself as a ‘human oyster’. At the same time, he cheerfully undertook a ‘milk cure’, which, predictably enough, consisted of drinking nine or ten glasses of milk a day and not much else. He reported that it made him feel much better. He sat in bed and dictated his last short story, entitled, appropriately enough, ‘The End’. Later, it turned out that he had cancer of the spinal cord. No amount of milk is going to cure that.

  I like to think of Turgenev as being charming and a bit bonkers. He liked to have a good time and make jokes. These were jokes which not everybody understood, and especially not Dostoevsky. Virginia Woolf reviewed a biography of him under the title ‘A Giant with Very Small Thumbs’. This was not an unreasonable description. Woolf saw him as a literary giant. And he did have very small thumbs, by his own account, at least. In one account of Turgenev’s time in England, Anne Thackeray (eldest daughter of Vanity Fair author William Makepeace Thackeray and step-aunt of Virginia Woolf) tells of the time she invited the Russian author to tea and he didn’t turn up. ‘I am so sorry I could not come,’ he said later. ‘So very sorry. I was prevented. Look at my thumbs! […] Yes, my thumbs! See how small they are. People with such little thumbs can never do what they intend to do, they always let themselves be prevented.’ (Relating this story in Turgenev and England, the biographer Patrick Waddington assumes that Turgenev means he was ‘prevented’ not by his thumbs but by the fact that he was with his mistress.)

  Turgenev was a great fan of the nineteenth-century dinner-party custom of interrupting proceedings to ask guests an important question, like ‘Who was your first love?’, ‘Do you believe in God?’ or ‘Is there life after death?’ Turgenev captures one of these dinner-party moments in the opening pages to his 1860 novel, First Love, in which the hero, Vladimir Petrovich, answers the question about his first love: ‘In my case there was no first love. I began with the second.’ Doesn’t this sound romantic and intriguing? Ah, Turgenev! But he immediately cuts it down to size: Vladimir says his first love was his nanny, when he was six years old. So she should count as his first love (because he really did love her). But at the same time, she doesn’t really count. This is typical Turgenev: appearing to say something profound and philosophical but undercutting it with something light and frothy, trying to make fun of his own hopelessness in matters of the heart.

  Tolstoy was always wary of stating too much appreciation for Turgenev, although they had a cautious friendship for most of their lives, with occasional upsets. The two once had a huge falling-out when they disagreed over whether it was a good thing for Turgenev’s daughter to take in ‘the poor clothing of the paupers’ for mending. Turgenev considered this a generous act of charity. Tolstoy thought it was pretentious and hypocritical. Turgenev uttered an unrecorded swear word. There’s also a suggestion that Tolstoy disapproved of the illegitimacy of Turgenev’s daughter, who was the child of a serf. (Which is silly in itself, as Tolstoy had also fathered a child by a serf, telling his wife about it just before they got married, which upset her immensely, as already discussed.) They later exchanged letters, variously demanding and requesting apologies and culminating in Tolstoy challenging Turgenev to a duel. They both managed to wriggle out of this by sending more letters, and Tolstoy, during one of his religious phases, eventually apologized. Tolstoy wrote that Turgenev ‘lives in luxury and idleness’ but that he was ‘the most likeable of pagans’.

  Tolstoy and Turgenev did have some good times together, though, with Turgenev visiting Tolstoy at his estate at Yasnaya Polyana. He was well known among Tolstoy’s children for impersonating a chicken while eating soup. When Turgenev visited friends, he would make a great show of checking the two watches he carried at all times, one in the pocket of his (usually dark green velvet) jacket, one in the pocket of his waistcoat. He would get them both out and make certain they showed the same time. There’s a sense that he sometimes got a bit carried away with his own japes. He told Tolstoy’s children stories about Jules Verne, referring to him as ‘a stay-at-home and a frightful bore’. He was also happy to dance for them, just to amuse them, and to amuse himself. That night in his diary, an unimpressed Tolstoy wrote, ‘Turgenev’s can-can. Sad.’

  But Turgenev wasn’t really as much of a show-off as he seemed. When unprovoked, he was a modest and reasonable man. In his letters, he writes that, compared to the work of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, his own pen was like a ‘thin squeak’. He was the one who arranged for the translation of War and Peace i
nto French and it was he who urged Tolstoy not to give up writing fiction: ‘Be warned by my example. Do not let life slip between your fingers. These are the words of a deeply and deservedly unhappy man.’ Turgenev wrote this to Tolstoy from his deathbed (presumably surrounded by pints of milk), begging Tolstoy to continue, describing A Confession, the extremely depressing essay about spiritual transformation, as ‘the gloomiest negation of human life’. (As previously discussed, it’s worse than this.) ‘My friend, resume your literary work!’ he urged, in vain.

  Turgenev’s argument with Dostoevsky was serious and lasting. It took place in Baden Baden, the spa town that became ‘Europe’s summer capital’ in the mid-nineteenth century. (Even before this time, Russian literary cartoons were fond of depicting Pushkin disappearing to Baden Baden at the faintest slight. ‘Right, that’s it, I’m going to Baden Baden.’) The row between Dostoevsky and Turgenev was mostly about whether it was good to be German and therefore bad to be Russian. It started with a remark Dostoevsky made about Turgenev not understanding Russia because he lived in the West: ‘Train your telescope on Russia and examine us, because otherwise it really is hard to make us out.’ (For some reason, this always reminds me of Tina Fey doing an impression of Sarah Palin saying, ‘I can see Russia from my kitchen.’) During this argument, Dostoevsky screamed that the Germans were ‘rogues and swindlers’. This so incensed Turgenev that he lost it completely and said, ‘You should know that I have settled here permanently and I consider myself a German, not a Russian, and I’m proud of it!’ Oh dear.

  What was ridiculous about this exchange – which was purely a battle of egos – was that Turgenev himself was prone to railing about how much he hated Europe and wanted to return to Russia. He wrote that the only decent things in Paris were music, poetry, nature and dogs, and they couldn’t even do those properly. (The hunting is ‘disgusting’.) He couldn’t stand the French: ‘Everything that is not theirs seems to them wild and stupid.’ The philosopher Isaiah Berlin recalls Turgenev’s letters hankering for ‘the smells and sights of the Russian autumn’: ‘… bread, wisps of smoke, the sound of the head peasant’s boots in the hall’. Dostoevsky never got over his animosity towards Turgenev and caricatured him as the lisping and irritating character of Karmazinov, a pretentious and foppish writer in The Devils. In fact, it soon became something of a national literary sport to make fun of Turgenev in your work. Chekhov referred to him in his short ‘An Anonymous Story’, lampooning his idealistic notions about love.

  But despite all this silliness about wanting to be German, Turgenev is essentially lovable, as only a person who loves a woman his whole life who cannot love him back can be. He did not have a happy childhood, and his mother is said to have bullied him. One of my favourite anecdotes about him is the one concerning something that happened to him when he was nineteen. While in Germany, he was travelling on a steamboat that caught fire. During this incident, Turgenev supposedly ‘reacted in a cowardly manner’, a character flaw that saw him denigrated in Russian high society. This is the perfect example of how easy it was to become an object of ridicule in that tittle-tattle world of nineteenth-century Russian letters. And what a claustrophobic and paranoia-making world that must have been.

  In those uncertain times, with everyone bitching about his cowardice and comparing him to new writers like Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, and with Turgenev himself travelling all over Europe, trailing after Pauline Viardot, their relationship, however one-sided, must have seemed like the one constant comfort to him. It made him into a sensitive writer, at least. When an apprentice writer asked Hemingway for reading tips, Turgenev was the only author whose entire oeuvre Hemingway recommended. Virginia Woolf praised his ‘generalised and balanced view of life’. It’s sometimes hard to work out whether Turgenev was a great comedian with razor-sharp black humour or a manic depressive who portrayed things so blackly that they couldn’t help but be funny. One of the first stories he wrote, ‘Mumu’, is about a deaf and dumb peasant who is forced to kill the one thing he loves the most, his dog, Mumu. If you had to write a parody of a depressed Russian writer’s most depressing story, you would write this story.

  Turgenev could also be deadly serious. In ‘Smoke’, one of his best-known stories, he describes life in a way that sounds almost like Tolstoy at his most depressing: ‘Everything in the world, and, particularly, in Russia, as well as everything a man does, is just a puff of smoke which disappears without a trace without achieving anything.’ Quick, pass the Roederer before he expands on this. In many ways, Turgenev’s life lessons can be said to be as frustrating as those of Tolstoy. Isaiah Berlin wrote of Turgenev: ‘He knew the Russian reader wanted to be told what to believe and how to live.’ (Yes, please, we would like this, too! We are waiting for the great message of wisdom! Bestow it upon us!) But he wasn’t going to give them what they wanted, he adds. ‘Problems are raised and, for the most part, left unanswered.’ Oh, thanks a lot, Turgenev. Thanks a lot. Go back to your sad can-can.

  That said, although Turgenev is no better at offering definitive answers than Tolstoy, he is unmatched in his ability to describe the tragicomic reality of certain situations. And just by portraying things as they really are, he shows the truth about life more clearly than any piece of well-meant advice. I’m not sure I was directly influenced by A Month in the Country to take the course of action I took that summer in Odessa. But it must have played some part. There are several scenes of confrontation in the play where the person who is tragically in love decides to challenge the object of their affections directly. It is the moment of the greatest folly and the purest bravery. It is the moment of ultimate knowledge: love me or reject me. It was a moment I decided would happen on a beach in Odessa.

  I was coming to the end of my time in Ukraine (where I was on holiday, at the end of my university year abroad in Russia) and would soon be facing my return to England. I needed to know whether God’s Gift, Son of God’s Gift, wanted to be with me or not. I wanted a commitment or, at the very least, an indication. I would settle for some small sign of non-coerced physical passion. Most Saturday nights, we would hang out on the beach with a group of people drawn from the band and its many hangers-on. The alcohol would run out at around 10 p.m. and the party would move on to someone’s house. That night, I made sure it ran out more quickly than usual, by drinking as much of it as possible myself and discreetly pouring away plastic cupfuls of portvein (‘port wine’ – actually more like cough syrup) into the sand. Soon the cry went up for beer, and most of the party headed up the sand dunes to the alcohol kiosk.

  ‘Ostanem’sya. Razdenem’sya,’ I said, in the direction of God’s Gift, Son of God’s Gift – ‘Let us remain here and undress ourselves.’ As soon as the last straggler had disappeared out of sight over the sand dunes, I began to take my clothes off. I had decided. On this night, I would not be English or Russian or anything. I would be myself. And I would do something reckless, just because I felt like doing it. (And also because I was really quite drunk.) I left my clothes in a neat pile on a slope above the waves and ran screaming into the foam – just as I remembered that I never went swimming in Odessa because the water was too polluted. When the water got up to my belly button, I started as something floated past me. It was an ice-cream wrapper printed with the word ‘Eskimo’. ‘My reading speed in Cyrillic is equal to my reading speed in English now,’ I thought to myself, pleased.

  Before my shoulders were under I turned back – God’s Gift, Son of God’s Gift, was long gone, miles away up the beach. Unrequited love is painful and humiliating. Avoid it at all costs if you possibly can, while acknowledging that it’s almost impossible to avoid. Sometimes, we have to do stupid things, because we are inherently foolish. If Tolstoy had been around to write in his diary that day, he would have put: ‘Viv’s skinny-dip. Sad.’

  5. How to Not be Your Own Worst Enemy: Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin

  (Or: Don’t kill your best friend in a duel)

  ‘Bliss was near, so al
together/unattainable …’

  You cannot be a student of the Russian language without encountering Pushkin at some point. And most Russian teachers will want you to learn him off by heart and weep and wail and gnash your teeth as you recite his words while mournfully waving a handkerchief soaked in the blood of your enemy whom you have just shot in a duel. Because to know Pushkin is to know the ways of the duel. By some estimates, he fought in as many as twenty-nine duels. Which was apt, because most of the time when I first read his work, under duress, I really wished that someone would shoot me. The lesson of Pushkin is: don’t be an idiot. This is ironic, because Pushkin himself more or less died of being an idiot. He barely needed all these other foes who wanted to challenge him. He was already his own worst enemy. (He was shot in an arguably unnecessary and ego-driven duel.)

  Eugene Onegin is the classic starting point for Pushkin. It’s about a man who is the author of his own misfortune. Eugene Onegin metaphorically shoots himself in the foot (before eventually non-metaphorically shooting his best friend) by not realizing that a woman who is madly in love with him is his soulmate. Instead, he spurns her. Later he understands, and thinks, ‘Doh.’ I’ll be honest: it took me a long time to get into it. For many years, not even the four-page digression on the beauty of women’s feet at the ball did it for me. (‘… dear ladies’ feet fly past like hail … I love their feet … my little feet, where have you vanished … to lie down at her feet like slaves! … to smother her dear feet with kissing …’) This is a very famous bit, known in academic circles solemnly as ‘the pedal digression’. It all builds up to Pushkin’s idea of a punchline: ‘But now I’ve praised the queens of fashion, enough of my loquacious lyre: they don’t deserve what they inspire in terms of poetry or passion – their looks and language in deceit are just as nimble as … their feet.’ Whether all that was worth four pages, I’m not sure. But I’m glad he gave it a go. You can tell from this tiny extract from the stanzas about the ball in Chapter 1 that this is the most classical of all classical works; it’s more like reading Homer than Tolstoy. We are not talking beach read here.