The Gentle Barbarian (23 page)

Bazarov and Arkady return to the Kirsanovs. There is a watchful truce between Bazarov and Pavel Petrovich. Pavel even shows polite curiosity about Bazarov's microscope. But Bazarov is morose and he eventually tries to rid himself of Madame Odintsov's image by recovering his audacity with women. He sets out to see if the simple Fenichka is vulnerable. Once more the test of love appears in the story. Fenichka is an ingenuous young mother; Bazarov puts her at her ease. The only person she fears is Pavel Petrovich who keeps an eye on her. In fact, the old aristocrat sees something of his own lost Madame Odintsov, the Princess, in the blooming face of the young mother and his gazes are almost but not quite innocent; he longs for the impossible return of youth, the wild youth which Bazarov has and he guesses what Bazarov is up to. One day he sees and hears Bazarov making up to Fenichka, who is confused and does not know what to do when Bazarov suddenly kisses her. The opportunity for revenge has arrived for Pavel.

In a splendid, icy, formal scene he challenges Bazarov to a duel. Bazarov of course regards this as farcical, but the very pointlessness, the destructive aspect, makes him accept at once. He'll certainly stand up to a gentleman. (Turgenev the sportsman is excellent in duel scenes: he has one very good short story on the subject and knows that duels conceal an underlying attraction between the parties.) This one satirises the formalities and is comical. Bazarov wounds Pavel, who falls and behaves with polite sang-froid and is obliged to let Bazarov attend to his wound. Pavel eventually recovers and realises he has acted a good deal out of snobbery. The fact is that Turgenev is preparing, once more, a test of love for his characters: Pavel tells his brother and Fenichka that if they love each other they must marry. They overcome their nervous shyness—they were afraid of Pavel's authority.

In the final act, Bazarov packs up once more and while he does so he tells Arkady that their friendship is over. Not because of the trouble he has caused but because Arkady, he says, has changed.
Arkady, who had also been sentimentally in love with Madame Odintsov, has been drawn to her younger sister whom she has dominated in her regal way. In this Turgenev shows his subtlety in showing the two sisters in another light. Madame Odintsov's idle, exalté mind veils a managing, possessive nature. Bazarov sees that Arkady has been clear-headed in love when he himself is still suffering from the romantic disease and has failed. He is not rancorous but he tells Arkady that in accepting the conventions of marriage he has lost the Nihilist spirit.

“There's no audacity in you; no venom … Your sort, the gentry, can never go farther than well-bred resignation and that's futile … you won't stand up and fight… you enjoy finding fault with yourself; but we've had enough of all that—give us fresh victims! We must smash people!

Bazarov returns to his parents. This is the moving finale of the novel. The old people realise that their son has changed and dare not ask him what is on his mind. They are relieved when they see him taking an interest in helping his father in doctoring the peasants from time to time. The father listens with admiration to his son's talk of new knowledge in medicine. The doting mother restrains her effusive love and is in awe of him. But an accident occurs. Bazarov goes off to perform an autopsy on a peasant who has died of typhus and in doing so makes a small cut in his finger. He comes back asking for silver nitrate. There is none in this backward part of the country and Bazarov understands—and so does his father—that he is a dead man if he has caught the infection.

The scene of Bazarov's death is famous. It is one of the most moving and beautifully observed things that the great observer ever wrote—Chekhov admired it as a doctor and as an artist who himself was a master of recording human sorrow. The power of this narrative owes something to the hypochondria and sense of the presence of death which Turgenev felt so continuously in his own life; and in this the writing is one of those cleansings which a great artist achieves in his maturity. If the death, by such a small misadventure, may strike one as trivial and therefore not tragic—the point made by hostile critics—it has its own ironic logic: for Bazarov the Nihilist cannot object to accident or the random hostility of nature. When
the death occurs, Turgenev writes, the experience of life on earth is not altogether in our hands. The last lines that describe the visit of the parents to Bazarov's grave are devastating:

Vassily Ivanych was seized by a sudden frenzy. “I said I would rebel,” he shouted hoarsely, his face inflamed and distorted, waving his clenched fist in the air as though threatening someone—“And I will rebel, I will!” But Arina Vlassyevna, suffused in tears, hung her arms round his neck and both fell prone together. “And so,” as Anfisushka related afterwards in the servants' rooms, “side by side they bowed their poor heads like lambs in the heat of noonday …”

In the years that follow, the two frail old people support each other as they walk, year after year, to the cemetery, kneel at their son's grave, yearning over the silent stone.

The storm caused by
Fathers and Sons
was violent and went on rumbling for years. The Right did not enjoy the ironical portrait of Pavel Kirsanov and Turgenev's tolerance of Bazarov. The word “nihilist” had caught on—very much as the idea of “the superfluous man” had done years before—and the Radicals thought the portrait of Bazarov a libel on the young generation and their views. Bazarov is indeed silent on what he and his friends would do once the task of destruction was done; whereas those among the Nihilists who did think about this had a belief in some kind of Populist democracy which was too vague to become an effective Cause. Turgenev was in the impossible situation of being an apolitical man, a detached diagnostician in a period when the politically minded called for polemic and propaganda. Turgenev made matters worse by his comments. To the Conservative Countess Lambert he wrote:

The convictions of my youth have not changed. But I never have been and never will be occupied with politics. It is alien and uninteresting to me. I pay attention to politics only in so far as a writer who is called upon to depict contemporary life must. You do wrong to demand from me in literature what I cannot give—fruits that do not grow on my tree. I have never
written for the people
… I have written for that class of the public to which I belong.

To others he wrote that he found himself agreeing with most of the views of Bazarov, excepts his views on art and literature. That sounds harmless enough but it was damaging, for under Russian despotism, with political discussion subject to censorship, art and literature had a peculiar covert political prestige. All literature was judged—as it continues to be in Russia today—by its social “tendency.” But for Turgenev, as Sir Isaiah Berlin says, “acts, ideas, art, literature were expressions of individuals, not of objective forces of which the actors or thinkers were merely the embodiments. The reduction of men to the function of being primarily carriers or agents were as deeply repellent to Turgenev as it had been to Herzen or, in his later phase, to his revered friend Belinsky.”

Politically Bazarov was not a revolutionary but a pre-Revolution-ary; a type thrown up by a period which seemed “on the eve” of perhaps violent change: the peasantry were 80 percent of the population of the country. Bazarov thought them stupid. Two objections to him have some point: first, he was not, in the Nihilist sense, a true type, for he was not really an urban figure—as the active politicals inevitably were. Secondly, his ruling interest was not in politics but in natural science. Had he been a writer he could have been prophetic of Chekhov who, as a doctor, also stood outside the philosophical and literary influences which had formed the main stream of Russian novelists—including Turgenev himself.

The only weakness of the novel—it seems to me—is in the chapter on the visit to Madame Odintsov. It has some of that over-scented claustrophobic sentimentality into which Turgenev sometimes falls. She is the standard dissatisfied rich woman, but there is an embarrassing lushness in his writing when he tries to probe her mind:

Sometimes, emerging all warm and languorous from a fragrant bath, she would fall to musing on the futility of life, its sorrow and toil and cruelty … Like all women who have not succeeded in falling in love she hankered after something without knowing what it was. In reality there was nothing she wanted, though it seemed to her that she wanted everything.

It is not hard to believe that Bazarov would feel the angry sensations of lust in her presence, but that he could have endured all those long,
educative walks in the woods and the solemn conversations in her drawing-room is hard to believe, although we take the ironic point. We suspect Turgenev of one of his bouts of self-castigation for the long drawn out “ideal” love for Pauline Viardot and his chats with Countess Lambert, and that here the book suffers from the blur of autobiography unassimilated.

Of course there were critics who defended Turgenev, even among the political young; but the attacks wounded him deeply. He had been looked upon as a leader by the young of his generation, now the new generation of young people despised him. They were indeed supplanted in their turn but for one who drew so much from the springs of youth as he did and who regretted the loss of his youth so bitterly—as the early pose of precocious old age shows—the blow was terrible. The effects lasted into his real old age.

As he had said in
Rudin,
the young require simple answers even if they are illusory. The irony is that Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, who were hostile to radical politics, were treated with respect. The reason—apart from the fact that their range and strength as novelists was far greater—was that they were obsessed men. They had their missions which, in their different ways, were aspects of the feeling that Russia had an untainted Messianic role to play in the world; both had their religion and indeed in Dostoevsky's journalism the idea of mission was politically imperial: the Russian right to Constantinople. Turgenev had no mission: he thought Dostoevsky's large talk of humanity mere rhetoric. Like Pavel Kirsanov, though not in his arthritic way, he stood for “civilisation,” spelled out letter by letter, for what had been a long, patient, intricate growth.

The philandering friendship with Countess Lambert limped on, despite her disapproval of
Fathers and Sons.
He still annoyed her by playing the man of the world and she annoyed him with her sentimental philistinism.

There was a good deal of talk on his part of how his heart had died and that there was no hope for him but to prepare himself to face the lugubrious facts of mortality. The only thing he or she could do, he said, was to allow themselves to float together hand in hand on the waves of life. She with a firm grip on his hand, one notices, not hers firmly gripped by his. No master steersman he, nor was he very
complimentary. “You and I expect so little for ourselves,” he said. The Countess, who disapproved of his politics, his books and his lack of religion, was piqued to hear that she would get very little as they floated along.

Floating was very much in his mind. About this time, sick of Russia, he turned to fantasy. For some reason or other the dream he had told Pauline about when he was a young man at Courtavenel came into his mind and he wrote a strange story,
Phantoms.
It can be read as an erotic dream or even as a tour of the futile history of political power in the world; or as a literary experiment by a poetic realist who has felt an impulse towards surrealism, or as a non-mystical venture into the occult. The reader looks for allegory or for images from the unconscious—does it tell one something of the life the rationalist has buried?—but Turgenev said that
Phantoms
was simply a stream of disconnected pictures without allegorical meaning. A woman in white who appears to be spun out of mist seizes the writer, in the familiar way of such erotic dreams, declares she loves him. By unlucky chance Turgenev gave her the English name of Ellis; he may have intended Alice. He feels the touch of her lips—“Leeches might prick so in mild or drowsy mood”—and she bears him away night after night into the sky and they fly over the world into the civilisations of the past. He sees Caesar's Rome, Pompeii, the Russian steppe, Paris, Germany, St. Petersburg in a series of nightmare and splenetic pictures in a grotesque travelogue of terror. The woman cannot reveal who she is except that she is a spirit in limbo craving not to be utterly extinguished until she sees

a thing bulky, dark, yellow-black, spotted like a lizard's belly, not a storm cloud, not smoke was crawling with a snake-like motion over the earth. A wide rhythmic undulating movement from above downwards and from below upwards, an undulation revealing the malignant sweep of the vulture as it sweeps over its prey; at times an indescribably revolting, grovelling in the earth, as of a spider stooping over its captured fly … It was a power moving; that power which there is no resisting, to which all is subject, sightless, shapeless, senseless, sees all, knows all … Ellis,” I cried. “It is death itself.”

If there is the bizarre attraction of meaningless horror, the suggestion of a sexual struggle against extinction in
Phantoms,
it was followed by
Enough
which might be called a rationalist's Commination service, a Psalm of despair. Turgenev was noted for saying “Enough,” as if in angered longing for an End of some kind: it suggests the desire to be done with all that accompanies the brilliance of a mind, the force of a desire intellectually before it can be lived through, the malady of the sentimentalist. It is more obviously an utterance about the evanescence and futility of life. Nature is inexorable.

She knows not art as she knows not freedom as she knows not good…. Man is her child; but man's work—art—is hostile to her just because it strives to be unchanging and immortal… [Nature] creates in destroying and she cares not whether she creates or she destroys.