The Gentle Barbarian (26 page)

For Litvinov this is bad enough but when he looks at the ladies to whom the officers are showing off, he has a shock. Among them he sees a young woman with whom he had been deeply in love ten years before when he was a green student and who had thrown him over for a rich man. Litvinov gets away as fast as he can: he is horrified by what Society has made of her.

Down in Baden when he is walking in the gardens, an interesting, shy, intelligent man called Potugin, rather older than himself, attaches himself to him and Potugin becomes the chief voice of the debating part of the novel. Potugin is a haunted melancholy fellow, but he shares Turgenev's own views on the Russian situation: his
dislike of the Slavophil faith in the Russian mission and the “untutored instinct of the Russian people.”

Potugin's speeches to Litvinov are long and the essence of them has already been given in the letters Turgenev had written to Herzen. Turgenev knows how to make them come out with explosive passion from a human being who is modest and even tentative by nature. We hear the argument about the nature of civilisation:

We owe everything we know about the sciences, industry, justice to civilisation and more—even our sense of the beautiful and of poetry cannot grow without its influence—what one calls spontaneous national talent is nonsense. Even in Homer one can trace the germs of a rich and sophisticated culture … I repeat, without civilisation there is no poetry. Have you ever asked yourself what the poetic ideal of the primitive Russian is? Look at our legends. If love appears in them, it is the result of chance or a magic charm. Our epic literature, alone in the literature of Europe and Asia, offers not a single example of two people who love: the hero of holy Russia begins his courtship by treating her without mercy.

The Russian is a natural slave, who calls for a master whom he calls his leader. He is a natural liar out of indifference and love of mischief.

In the course of the novel these conversations go on. They are well-done, but we begin to see that Turgenev has blurred the novel by giving it in effect
two
central characters who are convenient aspects of himself. What redeems the novel is the love story which puts Litvinov to the test, a test which in some degree is the larger moral and political theme of the novel. It is true that Potugin's private role in the love story is, at one point, incredible. There is a tangle of hearsay about dealings with an illegitimate child which is hard to follow. It is confusing because Turgenev is secretive here—he is telling what might be a private story of his own through the victimised Potugin, when the real victim in the novel is going to be Litvinov. The duplication is a strange mistake; nevertheless the story recovers.

It now turns out that the young woman who had jilted him had sent Potugin to get Litvinov to come and see her. She wishes to explain why she jilted him. Irina Ramirov—as she now is—is one of
Turgenev's destructive heroines, torn in half by her desires, bewitching, sensual, calculating but incalculable and tenacious. But what is remarkable about the portrait of Irina is Turgenev's sympathy and delicacy in showing the the confusion of self-will, greed, real feeling and lust in her nature. She will turn out to be a mixture of the sly adventuress and the guilty neurotic who must have her victory if only for a moment. The story is an account of her gradual seduction of Litvinov. We fear for Litvinov and we fear for her as she tells him that she only wants to confess her shame in jilting him in favour of a “protector”; that her marriage to Ramirov has shown her the shallowness of society and the mistaken vanity that made her crave for it. She has to fight Litvinov's cold revulsion. She at once knows and does not know what she is doing as she advances inch by inch to her difficult victory. She is completely a woman. She is one of the very few women in Turgenev's novels who are openly moved by sexual desire. Her feelings proceed from guilt about the past to bitter jealousy of Litvinov's love for his fiancée (who will soon arrive). This desire is made intense by her indignation at his eventual remorse at his loss of honour in breaking with an innocent girl. (To Turgenev, in his novels as in his life, questions of honour are crucial.) In other stories of young love, the insight that jealousy is an actual
source
of love does not arise. Love is simply born; a discovered faculty. But in these later loves, like Irina's, jealousy is the prime mover: the greed for power and possession is there without innocence. This is more than love; it is passion and passion knows good and evil.

The scenes in which this is shown are done exactly and delicately; the duologue is astonishingly true, alarming and fresh. There is no melodrama which so commonly occurs in Victorian novels where sensuality and love are the theme and, except in
First Love,
the deviousness and drive of passion have not yet appeared in Turgenev's writing—and indeed the lack of them sometimes suggests something tepid in his view of love and a desire to evade its reality. But in
Smoke
we have a real sense of passion taking possession of Litvinov against his will. Why is Turgenev now willing to show the other half of love? If there is a personal reason we can only surmise. But, as far as the novel is concerned, we are given a strange hint in a throw-away line about the Osinins, Irina's family. They were, he briefly says, an ancient family of Princes who having been

maliciously accused of witchcraft, fell into disgrace; they were ruined without mercy, their titles were abolished, they were sent into exile and never recovered their power.

Romantic nonsense? It was Turgenev's habit to account for every detail of a character's background when he planned his books and the word “witchcraft” was meant to stick, for a vein of atavistic superstition ran through his rational mind though, as in his “uneasy” stories, it put a question into which the psychologist must go. For him “bewitchment” meant what it meant to Litvinov when he is shaken by finding he loves Irina for the second time in his life against his will. He says:

Another life has infiltrated you; you cannot free yourself of it; you will never be cured of this poison.

He is “possessed” and against every honourable wish.

The account of Litvinov's incapacity to think when he is under Irina's spell shows a far greater moral penetration into the inner life than Turgenev has shown us in his passages of romantic tenderness and melancholy. After a first parting with Irina—which for him is final, yet not final, Litvinov

felt no pain and did not weep; a glum
engourdissement
carried him away. He had never before felt like this: there was an intolerable sense of emptiness, an emptiness in himself and around himself, everywhere. He was not thinking of Irina or Tatiana. He felt one thing: that the knife had fallen, the rope that held him to the quay had broken and he was seized by something icy and unknown. Sometimes it seemed that a whirlwind was passing over him and he felt that rapid swirl, the uneven beating of black wings in the air. But he was resolved. He was going to leave Baden. In his mind he had already left; he was in a clattering and smoky train carrying him forward, on and on to a far-off, lost and desolate country.

That emptiness describes the loss of his moral existence. He goes back to Irina, nevertheless. The time has come for Irina to advance to the next stage of her victory and she
murmurs
that she loves him and will follow him to the ends of the earth. That finishes him, for her willingness to go off with him presents itself as a wild revenge
as well as a recovery of the love she once gave and took away. He goes off to prepare for the meeting with Tatiana, who is arriving the next day at the railway station:

Confidence, peace, self-respect had vanished in him; he stood in the debris of his moral collapse; what had just happened had put a mask upon his past. His sensations were new, intense, vivid, but hateful; a mysterious parasite had entered the sanctuary and sat there in silence and mastered him as one takes possession of a new dwelling. Litvinov was ashamed of himself no longer, but he was afraid: he burned with an intense and desperate fear: prisoners experience these opposite feelings and thieves after their first theft.

The disturbing moments before the seduction, itself halting, half-sulking, inevitable, are carefully given that air of accident so necessary to incitement and yet covering the act. There is a tiny incident in which some dresses Irina has bought for a Ball that night slip off a table to the floor. They are expensive dresses such as she always craves, but now petulantly she stamps on them and bursts into tears; exactly the igniting detail required. What strikes one in this scene is something we had not noticed in this designing woman: she, too, at the last moment, has to find courage. Turgenev understands the strangeness of that.

Of course, once the seduction is accomplished, she fails to live up to her promise that they will go off together, taking their “freedom.” She is, after all, a coward in doing evil and tries to wheedle him into coming to Petersburg where he can be her lover from time to time at a discreet address, while she goes on enjoying the wealth of her husband and, since he is already suspicious and jealous, enjoy the excitement of using her skills in deceiving him. Litvinov refuses. In victory Irina has lost her power.

This is an interesting and subtle conclusion: when untried young girls win or lose in first love, in Turgenev's stories, they are shown moving into womanhood, but Irina—the experienced—is diminished by her success. In years to come she will be written off by old and young in Petersburg as a
fantasque
—the fashionable cliché of the time. They fear her and keep away. She makes life a meaningless byword.

As for Litvinov, he goes home to recover his self-respect and to
be forgiven by Tatiana. That sounds trite but unhappiness has turned
her
into a woman; her childish insipidity has gone.

The story of Irina is said to be taken in part from the life of a Petersburg girl well-known to be the Tsar's mistress, and the publisher was nervous and wanted to make alterations which Turgenev refused to do. What has surprised biographers is that Pauline Viardot approved of
Smoke,
for so plainly does the story contain one strong aspect of her character. The stress on Irina's “witchcraft,” her hypnotic power and her possession of him, is surely taken from Pauline's nature, as he saw it, and indeed as his friends saw it. This is not to say she is like Irina in any other way, any more than Litvinov resembles Turgenev. But Turgenev is an infallible observer of
how
certain events happen; he can be ecstatic about feeling but—such was his dual nature, he never missed a physical gesture or a fact in a scene and one can be pretty certain that the scene in which Irina seduces Litvinov is taken from life: that fluster of the senses, that stamping foot, those tears which are not tears! If at any time Pauline and Turgenev became lovers it would have been briefly and wildly like this: certainly Pauline would have refused to go off with him. Still, this is, of course, speculation. But it is strange that what has been called his second love for her was so clearly acceptable to her in Baden. The novel could have been done in malice, of course—for he did not lack it—and we cannot but note it has a great deal of angered caricature and fierce irony. He was in his drily masochistic way aware that his strange love had exposed him to being used. He and Pauline were, by all accounts, on cool terms in the early sixties and there must have been times of rancour and recrimination. Biography has the fundamental weakness that it can rarely tell us what was said or unsaid between the parties: it is a novel without dialogue. Pauline may have simply approved of
Smoke
in a very general way because it came to her as Turgenev translated from the Russian orally; the finer points would vanish and how could she not approve, conventional as she was, when a wicked woman who confuses love with lust comes to a futile end. She would be able to think of many a woman like that. And one thing which, as a very intelligent woman, she may have understood: that Turgenev had penetrated into the inner life of his two lovers, especially in his clear account of Litvinov's torments and remorse, and that this was a development of his talent as a psychologist.

In
Smoke
one sees that Baden is beginning to insulate Turgenev and that although he was deeply aware of its dangers, expatriation had begun to tell. Although his ideas are strongly held he seems to have been trapped by his self-irony and a Narcissim which prevents him from using his dilemma. It was impossible for him to make of his expatriation what Henry James made of his, for James's “international situation” had arisen from two attitudes to a common culture. There was nothing in common between Russia and Europe. Also, as a
rentier,
Turgenev was not aware of the corruption of money although he does see that the love of wealth and ease, as in Irina's and in Madame Odintsov's lives, nullifies them.

Russian critics were enraged by the book. Some were prudish about the “immorality” of the love-story. But the chief objection was to the utterances of Potugin who had said he both “hated and loved” his country—taking the love-hate from Catullus—and had even added that, as far as civilisation was concerned, Russia's disappearance from the face of the earth would be unnoticeable. The defeat of the Crimean War still scalded the patriots. Herzen was annoyed by Potugin and said his speeches ought to have been cut by half (which is true), but Turgenev replied that Potugin did not talk enough and he added that if Herzen were to sniff the vegetable oil the Slavophils smell of, he would restrain his feelings. But Turgenev's vanity was again hurt although he affected to be indifferent to the general rage.

The public quarrel about
Smoke
was crowned by a farcical row between Turgenev and Dostoevsky when they enacted a scene which might have come straight out of Turgenev's own novel. In August 1867, Dostoevsky and his new wife, Anna, arrived from Dresden. She was the young stenographer to whom he had dictated
The Gambler
and
Crime and Punishment
(which had not long been published), and who had rescued him from his dead brother's predatory family and from the son of his first wife who had encumbered him with debts to the tune of 20,000 roubles. With the money of her own dowry and with the help of his publisher, she had got him out of Russia and into Europe, where they were to travel for four years while he entered on his long struggle to write
The Idiot.
After the misery of his imprisonment in Siberia, the death of his first wife and his destructive affair with Polina Suslova, Dostoevsky was entering on the finest creative period of his life. He had been in Europe before and, like so many Russians, had taken to roulette at the German gambling tables. He was at the height of the gambling fever when he reached Baden-Baden, where he had come solely to play. He had lost every penny: Anna had been obliged to pawn her wedding ring and her earrings, her furs and a lot of her clothes. The couple had once or twice been obliged to live only on tea. After a
short euphoric stay at an expensive hotel, they were driven to living in two cheap rooms over a blacksmith's on the outskirts of the town, where the noise of the anvil and the screams of the children were wrecking Dostoevsky's easily damaged nerves. He was soon out on the streets looking for a fellow Russian to borrow from.