The Gentle Barbarian (20 page)

“Yes, and they are not few in number; and you know them too.”

“What words?”

“Well, even Art—since you are an artist—Country, Science, Freedom, Justice.”

“And what of love?” asked Shabin.

“Love too is a word that unites but not the love you are eager for now; the love which is not enjoyment, the love which is self-sacrifice.”

Presently, when we are introduced to the family with whom the young men are staying, we meet Insarov, the man who is in the minds of these philosophers.

Insarov is a poor Bulgarian student who is slowly revealed to us as a man deeply involved in a conspiracy to free Bulgaria from Turkish domination, a man determined on self-sacrifice. He is a consumptive. A young girl, Yelena, falls in love with him and his cause. She goes off with him when the call comes. They get as far as Venice and while they are waiting to be smuggled across the Adriatic, Insarov dies and the girl goes on and vanishes into a war where she is nursing the wounded. No more is heard of her.

Despite Turgenev's delicacy and his power to move us from joy to tears, despite his “irresistible” qualities, the reader at once realises there is something wrong with
On The Eve.
The fundamental reason is the astonishing one that in his search for a hero he worked from another writer's manuscript. A few years before, one of his young neighbours, a certain Vassily Karatayev had given him the story of a girl he had once known who had fallen in love with a Bulgarian patriot and had gone to Bulgaria with him and died. Karatayev had tried to write the story but found he lacked the talent and gave the manuscript to Turgenev and told him to do what he liked with it. Turgenev wrote:

The figure of the heroine Yelena, in those days still a new type in Russian life, was outlined clearly in my mind; but I lacked the hero, a person Yelena could give herself to in her still vague, though powerful, craving for freedom.

He retained only one of Karatayev's chapters about a jaunt to a country town near Moscow, though he amended it. It is crudely out of tone with the rest of Turgenev's narrative; but the weakness of the rest of the novel is that it labours. Turgenev himself wrote to Countess Lambert:

Planning a novel is very fatiguing work, particularly as it leaves no visible traces behind it; you lie on the sofa turning some character and situation over in your mind, then you suddenly realise that three or four hours have passed and you don't seem to have anything to show for it… to tell you the truth there are very few pleasures in our trade.
And quite right too; everybody, even artists, even scholars must live by their sweat of their faces.

The bother is that Turgenev could not succeed with an unfelt and unknown character. He knew nothing about conspiracy—that required a novelist with a gift for the novel of plot and exciting action. Insarov is a dour, dull, cardboard figure: the only sign of action in him appears when, in the chapter Turgenev retained, Insarov violently pitches a drunken German into a pond. The conspiracy exists only by hearsay. The only originality is one of approach: the book examines Yelena from the point of view of each character and one of these, the painter Shabin, is a silly caricature of the conventional Bohemian artist and an embarrassment to the reader, who skips past him as fast as he can.

The other characters are a collection of drolls, whose opinions of Yelena are not worth hearing. No doubt Turgenev had not rid himself of the “type” figure—the superfluous man—and was arguing that there was no Russian male with convictions and vigour who would be worthy of Yelena and her force of character—an argument that made the young critics indignant.
On the Eve
marks the beginning of a crack in his reputation which later became a gulf. Yet when he lets Yelena live for herself before our eyes she is a real, troubled girl whose doubts and courage are clear to us. If Turgenev fails to create a hero he does create a heroine simply because of his gift for showing a girl grow into independent determined womanhood through loss, disillusion or, as in this case, fatality. Once more the son of Varvara Petrovna can draw Russian women who are becoming strong; indeed in all his best work the fully drawn women, whether evil or good, are stronger than the men. The critics who denounced him for his lack of social commitment were wrong in dismissing his love stories as fairy tales: they were tests.

Of course there are fine things and some of the criticism was puerile—the critics were annoyed that the conspirator was a Bulgarian: surely the condition of Russia was more important than the overthrow of a government in Bulgaria? What annoyed the official classes—of whom the Countess Lambert was a typical member—was that a revolutionary or patriotic conspiracy should be approved in the portrait of Insarov and that a Russian girl should deny morality, her family and society and go off with him. Ruling society had
become prudish by the mid-century: the days of Pushkin had gone.

And there was more trouble. The young critics who attacked him had been taken on by
The Contemporary,
in which Turgenev was the star. In one of his fits of temper he broke with the periodical and from then on they began personal attacks on him. He was mocked as a fashionable novelist who is “trailing in the wake of a singer and arranging ovations for her at provincial theatres abroad.”

Once his temper had calmed, Turgenev bore no malice to his critics and indeed often expressed his admiration for them. This can, of course, be taken as masochism, a false humility, a desire to keep in with “the movement” and the young, and a form of Olympian patronage. But he had his unchanging views of the values of art which they denied; for the utilitarians it must be socially “useful.” Before he died, he was telling Tolstoy to stop preaching and to return to his art; and in the next generation Chekov was to attack the utilitarian doctrine.

Turgenev's spirits were low when he wrote
On the Eve.
He told the Countess that his heart had turned to stone. And the novel brought with it another painful quarrel which had its roots in something more than ordinary literary jealousy. For many years Ivan Goncharov, the author of
Oblomov,
had been, to all appearances, a close and admiring friend. They had been in the habit of meeting and reading works in progress to each other in the peculiar Russian custom which suggests not so much a lack of self-confidence or dramatic vanity as a curious desire for consensus. Turgenev himself more than once accepted the advice of his friends, deleted passages they disapproved of, adding what they suggested. But in these exchanges Goncharov scarcely concealed a jealousy that was turning into paranoia. His novel,
Oblomov,
had appeared at the time of
The House of Gentlefolk
and had far less success. Even in the course of their private readings, Goncharov had accused Turgenev of stealing a scene from his own novel and Turgenev, always willing to bow to others, removed the scene. But Goncharov had also read part of the manuscript of a novel called
The Ravine
—it was not finished until thirteen years later—and Goncharov now told friends that Turgenev had stolen
On the Eve
from him. The matter became a scandal. A committee of friends sat in arbitration on it and said that any
resemblances were due to the fact that “the events were common to the times and to the Russian soil.” Turgenev was angered that the committee was not more explicit and broke with Goncharov though, in his usual dignified manner, soon forgot the matter. But Gon-charov's fantasy became something like insanity. He said Turgenev not only copied him but that when he went to Paris he passed his ideas to his European friends so that Alphonse Daudet, the Goncourts and George Sand, and even Flaubert, were using them at his expense. The ease with which some Russian temperaments take to suspicious envy and paranoia—it is striking in Dostoevsky—seems to indicate a real difference of character between the Russians and Western Europeans.

The quarrel itself is unimportant but Goncharov's personal history does throw an oblique light on Turgenev's position in Russian letters, and also on Tolstoy's, at this time. Goncharov was not an aristocrat: his family came from the laborious merchant class—they had been in the grain and candle-making trades and certainly produced men of intelligence and, as his first novel,
A Simple Story,
shows, he came under Romantic influences close to those that affected all his generation. The family came from Simbirsk, a town which was a byword for sleepiness. They rose by diligence, but a diligence so applied that it left Goncharov with a deep melancholia and reserve beneath the hard, ironical surface of his character. The hard-working Goncharov had a core of lethargy in his nature which indeed enabled him to create the beatifically idle Oblomov of his great novel and above all the blessed somnolence of the most deeply Russian part of it: “Oblomov's Dream.” Goncharov admired the aristocratic ease of Turgenev, the grace of manners, the taste, the critical excellence and tact of his writings: he himself wrote slowly, awkwardly, lost himself in inward divagations: it took him years to write a single novel and this was not entirely due to having to earn his living as a civil servant. The tedious necessity of the desk was a source of pride and he told Turgenev: “you slide through life superficially … I plough a deep furrow,” and envied him his education, his talent, his income of ten thousand roubles, and freedom and “earthly paradise beside a beloved woman”—the paradise above all; he envied Turgenev's freedom to travel if he liked to the sun of Europe, whereas he had to sit at a desk in the gloom, fog and cold winds of Petersburg, like one of Gogol's poor clerks and indeed felt
obliged to accept the ungrateful task of Chief Censor when the liberal reforms came in during the sixties.

Goncharov's view of Turgenev as an effete and fashionable figure and his resentment of Turgenev's life abroad was shared by some circles in Petersburg; but it is characteristic of Goncharov's deep personal malady that, after the quarrel, he craved to do small services for Turgenev. One sees a similar split in Dostoevsky's attitude to Turgenev. The tragic irony is that, in
Oblomov,
he had created a comic character on a scale far greater than anything within Turgenev's powers, a figure at once Russian and universal.
Oblomov
is one of the finest, most generous, broken monuments in Russian fiction. The strange thing is that where Goncharov failed in
Oblomov
was in its long and tedious love story in which (one is inclined to say),
he
was trying, and failing, to copy Turgenev. There is further irony in the fact that
Oblomov
satisfied the committed critics who saw the novel as an attack on Russian landlordism, when its greatness arises from the active Goncharov's buried craving for inertia as a quality almost saintly.

If Turgenev quarrelled in Petersburg, at Spasskoye he worked. After the failure of
On the Eve,
he turned to his past and produced a masterpiece in the art most natural to him, the story that runs to a hundred pages. The story is
First Love,
the tale, which he said was autobiographical, of a father and his sixteen-year-old son who are in love with the same young girl. It was the story that shocked Countess Lambert. It also shocked Louis Viardot when he read it in translation in the
Revue des Deux Mondes.
Viardot, the older man and husband, wrote sternly as friend to friend, that it was nothing but a glorification of adultery à la
Dame Aux Camélias
and that Turgenev was drifting into the sewer of the modern novel. The characters of the dirty, snuff-taking Princess and her daughter were odious. How could the father in the story be charming and adorable when he had cynically married a rich woman in order to spend her fortune on his mistresses? Why not, at the very least, make him a widower—the censor had made a similar complaint years before when he rejected
A Month in the Country.
Worst of all, Viardot said, the narrator is a man of forty who ought to have known better than to expose the vices of his father. This letter gives us one of those rare
sights of the remote Louis Viardot who struck people as being an outsider in his own family and who indeed is known to have complained to his wife that the manner in which she left him out of the conversation with her famous friends at Courtavenel was causing gossip. He begged her to restrain herself. The respectable atheist and Republican enjoyed an extremely indecent piece of
gauloiserie
so long as it had the blessing of history and concerned the vices of Kings and Courts, but he held sternly to the morality of the middle class.

The story and its intention are, of course, quite unlike Louis Viardot's caricature of it which can only have sprung from the anger of a good man who had had to endure the insinuations conventionally made about an elderly husband married to a famous young wife. The story is a study of the devastating loss of innocence and the revelation of the nature of adult passion and, as usual in Turgenev's stories, it turns on the growth of knowledge of the heart. Love is not the simple yet tormenting rapture of a touching adolescent; it is a violent, awe-inspiring passion which leaves its trail of jealousies and guilt. There was some truth in the criticism that Turgenev's love stories have something of the emblem or fairy tale in them, but
First Love,
like the later
Torrents of Spring
and the love story in
Smoke,
contains one of his rare statements about the nature of physical passion—rare because of his own romantic idealism or the conventions of the time. There is no pressing on the pedal in the powerful scenes: they are quiet. Truth-telling—quite different from the highly coloured naturalism which Louis Viardot had read into the story—rules every turn of feeling. The boy sees his father at night talking to a woman at the open window of a house. She is Zinaida with whom the boy is in love. She is refusing the father something:

My father gave a shrug of his shoulders, and set his hat straight on his head, which with him was always a sign of impatience … then I could hear the words “Vous devez vous séparer de cette …” Zinaida straightened herself and held out her hand. Then something unbelievable took place before my eyes. My father suddenly lifted his riding-crop, with which he had been flicking the dust off the folds of his coat, and I heard the sound of a sharp blow struck across her arm which was bared to the elbow. It was all I could do to prevent myself from crying out. Zinaida quivered—looked silently at my father—and raising
her arm slowly to her lips, kissed the scar which glowed crimson upon it.