The Gentle Barbarian (15 page)

What captivates us is the simplicity, the easy grace of this novel, the tact with which he makes short chapters crystallise and contain the talk and the silences in which each character grows more clearly under our eyes. Turgenev is a natural master of conversation and of the silent thoughts it starts in people's minds so that the whole thing is leisurely yet, in detail, is always quickened. There will be a change of tone as the people themselves know one another better; each sentence is an event and we are alert for it and its mood as we are in a play. Comedy rises casually as in small things. For example, Darya Mihailovna is delighted with Rudin.
“C'est un homme comme il faut,
” she thinks but mentally she pronounces those words in Russian.

But
Rudin
is not sure in its construction. Lezhnyov's sudden reversal of his judgment is dramatic and this is too obviously a device, and once it has its effect the story droops into hearsay in the last chapters, although Rudin's shame-faced and seedy confession of his subsequent disasters is diverting. His accounts of how patrons always tire of him, and of how one absurd fellow without a penny joined him in a scheme—practical, one reflects, a hundred years later—of making a river navigable, are funny and even touching. The fact is that Turgenev had difficulties. He changed his mind. He listened to the advice of friends. They, like himself, were puzzled by how to end a story that was ebbing away. Four years after the publication, he tacked on a last page where Rudin is seen, without any warrant from the story, dying on the barricades in the Revolution of ‘48 in Paris. This does an ironical justice to a character who is too infused with the novelist himself and who has become a figment of debate; but the page is excellent reporting.

The broken revolutionaries were running for their lives from their barricades as the troops came at them, when a tall man in an old overcoat with a red sash and a straw hat on his grey dishevelled hair jumped on top of an overturned omnibus and shouted in a strained shrill voice. In one hand he held a red flag, in the other a blunt curved sabre. He was at once shot dead.
“Tiens!”
said one of the escaping revolutionaries.
“On vient de tuer le Polonais.”

Bakunin did not die in such a way when he escaped from Siberia; he came back to stir up trouble, a conspirator who did not know he was out of date. He was a type of
déclassé
who lives by making reckless gestures in other people's revolutions, very much a prophetic figure who, by a turn of the historical wheel, reappeared as the “Westerner” of our own thirties in the Spanish Civil War. However, perhaps that remark of Herzen himself in Paris when he saw the revolt fail had stuck in Turgenev's mind. As we have seen, he had heard Herzen say he wished he had died sword in hand in the streets, for then at least he would have retained one of his illusions.

In attempting a novel Turgenev was not by nature equipped for the epic length and the large scheme—he shrank fastidiously from Balzac's exuberance which he found coarse—he had been up to now simply a master of the short story. He had yet to find a coherent way of placing several stories, not into a series but into an organic whole, in which narrative and commentary flow together harmoniously. In Pushkin one is always aware of the voice in attendance on the emotion or dashing tale and giving it the drive of meaning and the authority of a judgment. Turgenev looked back to Pushkin's classical lesson: the commentary is to be part of the composition as a continuing aspect of the story, as Freeborn says in some cogent pages on Turgenev's achievement in
Turgenev: The Novelist's Novelist.
Turgenev himself may address us as “gentle reader” once or twice, but he can allow the role of commentator to be taken by Lezhnyov who is involved in the tale. We have the sensation of people living in and out of their changing judgments on one another and all in a single, clear stream. In Freeborn's words:

The distinction of Turgenev's novels which begin with
Rudin
lies in their historical authenticity. They are portraits not only of particular heroes or heroines but of particular epochs … Moreover it is in the unity given to the fiction by the central figure that a balance is
maintained between the ideological matter on the one hand and the human problem on the other.

We are given two views of human destiny; there is a double narrator:

Man as the rational being who aspires to put his ideas to a service of realizable ideals; and of man as the insignificant creature of a single day, at the mercy of nature and eternity. It is in this duality that the real “realism” of Turgenev's four great novels resides.

Is a non-hero like Rudin strong enough to hold the novel together? That is very doubtful. But we have confidence in Turgenev's truthful feeling for experience. The moments of life are swallowed by the whole. Rudin has left disaster for Natalya behind him; if for others everything had fallen comfortably back into its old order, to Natalya

Life seemed so cruel, so hateful and so sordid, she was so ashamed of herself, her love and her sorrow that she would have been glad at that moment to die … but she was young—life had scarcely begun for her and sooner or later life asserts its claims. Whatever blow has fallen on a man, he must—forgive the coarseness of the expression—eat that day or at least the next, and that is the first step to consolation.

While Turgenev was writing his epitaph on a lost leader of his youth, the Tsar Nicholas, the dull, military “bald eagle,” had led Russia to slaughter and defeat in the Crimea. He died and his heir Alexander II was persuaded by Turgenev's friends at Court to allow him to return to Petersburg though he refused to lift the surveillance by the police. The effect of this was to prevent him from leaving Russia. There was no point in leaving since, despite his letters, Pauline rarely wrote and on her side interest in him had gone dead. He sent her a translation of Pushkin's poem,
Adieu,
in reproach. The last verse goes:

Reçois donc, compagne lointaine
L ‘adieu de mon coeur
Comme une épouse devenue veuve
Comme une amie qui étreint en silence son ami
Avant son éxil.

His letters suggest that Paulinette was troublesome and had been put into a boarding-school: there is even a suggestion that she be sent back to Russia but Turgenev refused to have her, saying that her position would be impossible for her there. Although he was rich in
land he was often short of ready money and often late in sending it for the child's support—a cholera epidemic, the effects of the war, crop failures and bad management of the estate had meant a large if temporary loss. The Tyutchevs had cost him 300,000 francs and a hundred thousand of that had, he said, been thrown out of the window; wages had gone up, no improvements had been made and his income had been cut by a third. Turgenev was turning out to be as improvident as many of the bad landowners. So he got rid of the Tyutchevs—they parted friends—and he got in his kindly old uncle who had married again and who brought in a crowd of his wife's relatives. It was one of Turgenev's lazy decisions and in the long run turned out to be just as bad as the arrangement with Tyutchev. The novelist was a natural victim in these matters and notorious for being at the mercy of his servants. One thing his mother had done to him was to remove the voice and capacity of command. And that must have been an additional reason for his failure with Pauline.

He came back to Petersburg grey-haired but still a dandy, a wit and a gourmet and made effective play with a pose of saying “Farewell to life.” He began to end all his phrases with a favourite word “Enough.” It grew on him and was a kind of signature tune. His arrival in Petersburg was celebrated by dinners given by his friends on
The Contemporary,
on which he was the leading contributor.
Rudin
was a success, although those who heard that the central character was based on Bakunin said that it was far more a portrait of Turgenev himself.

He allowed himself further dissipations. He said to a friend that he was “going the rounds of the suburban dances with a charming Polish woman, giving her silver plate and spending nights with her until eight in the morning,” but that after two months of it he had to give it up out of physical exhaustion. This Polish adventure, his youthful seduction, the touching affair with the miller's wife—who asked him for no more than some scented soap so that her hands would smell as sweetly as the hands of the society ladies he kissed—and some casual incidents he reported to the Goncourts, are the only known episodes of his sexual life besides the two that produced children. There may have been more in Paris and Italy but he was shocked when Tolstoy told him of his debauches. If Rakitin in
A Month in the Country
is in some respects a self-portrait, Turgenev always said he was not a Don Juan. To the Goncourts, the
“doux géant”
said he was timid in love; he approached women with respect, emotion and was surprised, he said, at his happiness. Yet among the pious, aristocratic ladies of Petersburg he had the reputation of “living immorally,” They meant that he had rejected the Orthodox Church. When he was staying with the Aksakovs in the country his hostess said that his ideals were sullied and that he was “only capable of physical sensations: all his impressions pour through his nerves, he is not capable of either understanding or of feeling the spiritual side of things.” He might be a huge man but—this was wounding—“he lacked even pagan force.” On this Yarmolinsky in his
Life
makes a far more sensitive commentary:

Certainly his response did not stop short of spiritual matters. With him, as with so many artists, the intense perception of the physical world alone was so transcendent an experience as to unlock the gates of the spirit.

One glance at his stories shows the truth of this and it is illustrated by a passage in one of his finest pieces of prose,
A Tour of the Forest,
part of which was being written at this time—he added to it in old age. It has a Shakespearean echo:

I raised my head and saw at the very end of a delicate twig one of those large flies with emerald head and long body and four transparent wings, which the fanciful French call ‘maidens' while our guileless people call them ‘bucket yokes'. For a long time, more than an hour I did not take my eyes off her. Soaked through and through with sunshine she did not stir, only from time to time turning her head from side to side and shaking her lifted wings…. that was all. Looking at her, it suddenly seemed to me that I understood the life of nature, understood its clear and unmistakable though mysterious significance. There is a subdued, quiet animation, an unhasting restrained use of sensation and powers, an equilibrium of health in each separate creature. Everything that goes beyond this level, above or below, she flings away as worthless. Many insects die as soon as they know the joys of love, which destroys the equilibrium. The sick beast plunges into the thicket and expires alone … and the man who from his own fault or from the fault of others is faring ill in the world—ought, at least, to know how to keep silence.

If the pious Vera Aksakov spoke bitterly of Turgenev, there was another no less religious woman living in the highest circles of the Court who thought to rescue him from impiety and the paralysing effects of his love for Pauline Viardot which all his friends deplored and his enemies mocked him for. She was the Countess Lambert. He was cultivating her because she had influence with the Tsar and he was begging her to use it to get him a passport, precisely for the reasons she did not favour. A friendship that lasted began and on his side was one of the
amitiés amoureuses
or confessional philanderings in which his charm made him expert. He ended by troubling her feelings and she was for a time closer to him than Pauline and there is a trace of her in his next novel,
A Nest of Gentlefolk.
The bond between them was that they were both unhappy.

The Countess was of French and German stock and was unhappily married to one of the aides de camp of the Tsar—a plain woman of thirty-five, who had given up the vanities of her high social position and, but for her children, would have become a Sister of Charity. Brought up as a Lutheran, she was a strict convert to the Orthodox Church and her piety and Turgenev's atheism gave a piquancy to their talks when he spent his evenings with her. If she was trying to save his soul, he, of course, was the novelist who was studying her. She listened to the sad story of his frustrated love for Pauline not without jealousy and said she admired Pauline as a singer but added that Pauline had made him waspish and bitter; that he was a pagan who was “corrupted by the cult of Venus” and she appealed to him to replace it by the sterner call of Christian duty. She received him but propriety and a taste for the long-winded in personal relationships led her to prefer knowing him by correspondence which—for her at least—made their occasional meetings more disturbing. She was inclined to tears. If she could have converted him she would have been lost. On his side, Turgenev was careful to play the man of the world and, in time, she had to remind him sharply that she was “a creature of reason,” and wished to be treated “as a true friend.” When, in one of his letters, he wrote that he “respectfully kissed her charming hands,” she replied sharply that “a woman would prefer to have a little more ardour from men without compromising them.”

The bond between them was that they were both fanciful enough
to declare that “life was over,” that they were already on the brink of old age though under forty. Both were hypochondriacs. She did not entirely approve of his work, for politically she was very conservative; and when he came to write
First Love
she told him it was “one of his bad deeds” but that he committed evil or sin in an irresistible manner. The Empress had hated the story, she said, but the Emperor had thought it delightful. Many times they got on to the subject of the “ideal” in literature and there he had to correct her. She was at heart a sentimentalist; she supposed, he told her, that the ideal should be an addition or an embellishment in the portrayal of character and he replied with the faith he had learned from Goethe: