The Gentle Barbarian (34 page)

The political perspicacity of Turgenev is astonishing and now the state of our world has changed it seems closer to our political experience than it was to English admirers of Turgenev in 1900 who saw in him something close to the experience of an English country gentleman of sensitive tastes. The only thing that really shocks in
Virgin Soil
is Nezhdanov's suicide: the “superfluous man,” whom Turgenev invented, seems to die as a convenience in the interests of early Romanticism and Turgenev's preoccupation with death.

At Les Frênes, his “little idol” Didie used often to sit drawing or painting in his room while he wrote: he needed the tremor of a feminine presence. He had written funny and serious letters to her since she was a little girl and he continued to do so after her marriage in 1874 and also to her husband who charmed him. Many of these letters of his have lately been discovered and published in Paris and they put his feeling for Pauline's daughter in a strange and touching light. In an introduction to them Alexandre Zviguilsky thinks there is some reason to believe that Maupassant saw those letters after Turgenev's death and that on them he built his novel
Fort Comme la Mort.
It is the story of a famous portrait-painter who falls in love with the daughter of his mistress because the girl reminds him of the mother when she had been young when he had first loved her. A parallel with Turgenev's situation is certainly there, and such transferences of feeling are not unknown, but Maupassant would not have needed Turgenev's story in order to write one of his well-known sentimental exercises in unusual love.

Turgenev's special delight in Didie was paternal in the godfa-therly and innocent if faintly sexy way of old gentlemen. Although he was only fifty-six when she married, Turgenev had been posing as an old man for years and he was to go on flirting with young girls,
and he had the old philanderer's harmless daring. One interesting thing about these letters is that they have the youthful tone of his early letters to her mother: he uses the similar flowery phrases in German and the second person singular (which he used only once, in a reckless moment, when writing to her mother. Of course, as one of the family, he would be entitled to continue the usage to a “goddaughter.”) It is also interesting that he can permit himself to write an occasional playful sensual passage:

Je bénis ton beau corps tout entier et j'embrasse mille fois ce que tu me permets d'embrasser

Et maintenant, Madame, figurez-vous vousêtes assise sur le rebord du billard et que je me tiens devant vous, vous balancez vos pieds mignons comme cela vous arrive souvent; je les attrapes, je les baise l'un après I'autre, puis tes mains, ton visage, et tu me laisses faire, car tu sais qu ‘il n'y a pas d'être au monde que j‘adore plus.

He wrote little fables about pee-ing and chamberpots for her babies. The letters tell us something of the family-games atmosphere of the Viardot household, some of the fantasies became scatological in the French way—or, as some psychologists might think—indicate a deep sexual repression; but one is most struck by the phrase “You see I tell you everything” which he often used in writing to her mother. And so he writes seriously about the horror of going to see the murderer Tropmann in the condemned cell and the hanging; and a great deal about art and writing. One of Didie's attractions was her talent.

I think there is something for the novelist—in regard to truthfulness—not in details and realistic description, but in describing feelings and states of soul. Even the greatest writers have done this, but according to established conventions which seem like reality but are not. It is possible to be bolder and go to the heart of things especially into double or contradictory feelings. I have these double feelings which almost cry out to meet and which disappear into one another.

In 1878 Tolstoy was fifty. Seventeen years after his violent quarrel with Turgenev he was approaching the spiritual crisis he described in his
Confessions
and, feeling that it was wrong to have an enemy, he wrote to the sixty-year-old novelist offering his friendship once
more. Turgenev was in Paris and replied eagerly that Tolstoy was right in supposing he himself had no hostile feelings. On his return to Russia that year the two men met in Tula in the August and Tolstoy went to meet him there and drove him to Yasnaya Polyana. They shut themselves up and talked about religion for hours, but no troubles came from this dangerous subject and when they joined the family, Turgenev got on well with the children and was soon playing chess with Tolstoy's eldest son.

Turgenev towered in height above Tolstoy but his legs, Tolstoy's eldest son wrote, looked flabby. He was wearing wide-toed soft boots, a velvet jacket and, with his usual elegance, a silk shirt and cravat. He amused the young people with his tricks; he mimicked a chicken, one of his favourite comic turns. Tolstoy tolerated this, but afterwards said that charming though Turgenev was, “he was a fountain spouting imported water and gave one the feeling that the jet might cease playing.”

The Countess, who had known Turgenev when he was young and had always liked him, enjoyed his high spirits. She made an important observation about his marvellous talk: it was not the talk of a conversationalist, she said, but of a story-teller in flow—which may in some degree account for the impression we have of a man often made invisible in the changing words that glide continually over his life. (He nearly lost the chess game with Tolstoy's son because he was carried away by a boast that in France he was known as the
Chevalier du Pion:
the bishop's knight.)

The two novelists met again in October and Tolstoy was restive; he wrote dismissively: “Turgenev is still the same and we know the degree of closeness that is possible to us,” and began to suspect, as he had in the past, that Turgenev was laughing at him behind his back. It was the old suspicion that Turgenev was a patronising mocker and, of course, he did have an unguarded tongue. Tolstoy may have heard that Turgenev thought the military part of
War and Peace
was puppetry. Tolstoy seems not to have known that Turgenev had done everything to press Tolstoy's genius in France and England, and to forward translations of
War and Peace
abroad, even though he said that in
Anna Karenina,
Tolstoy was obsessed with “the Moscow swamp”: “orthodoxy, nobles, Slavophils, enmity to everything foreign; sour cabbage, soup and the absence of soap,” but that the horse racing, the mowing scenes and the hunting were marvellous.

They met again several times in the next three years. Both enjoyed shooting. They went out to shoot woodcock one spring evening and while Turgenev was getting his gun ready, the Countess asked “Why have you not written anything for so long?” Turgenev said in his frank and touching way, “Are we out of hearing? Well, I will tell you. Whenever I have planned anything it is when I have been shaken by the fever of love. Now I am old and can neither love nor write.” But later he told Tolstoy: “I had an affair the other day and I found it dull.” “Ah,” Tolstoy boasted, “if only I were like that.”

Turgenev was speaking the truth, for he must have been referring to the young actress Savina, who had played in
A Month in the Country
when it was put on for the first time in 1872 and by whom his heart was agitated. One day Tolstoy drove over to Spasskoye and the driver of the trap lost his way and they did not arrive until after midnight. This did not prevent Tolstoy, Turgenev and Polonsky, the poet, from arguing until three in the morning. The next day Turgenev's cook got drunk and Turgenev went off to get the dinner himself, but a servant drove him out of the kitchen. Tolstoy noted in his diary afterwards: “Turgenev fears the name of God, but acknowledges Him. He is naively tranquil, living in luxury and idleness of life.” When Turgenev read a copy of Tolstoy's
Confessions
which had been banned by the censor, he admired its sincerity, truthfulness and strength of conviction, but wrote “it is built on false premises and ultimately leads to the most sombre denial of human life…. This too is in its way a kind of Nihilism.” (A profound insight.) Oddly, Tolstoy now admired Turgenev's
Enough
which years before he had dismissed as worthless. And he wrote: “I love (Turgenev) terribly, pity him and always read him.” The most amusing visit to Yasnaya Polyana was in 1881, two years before Turgenev's death. There were amateur theatricals, the children were astonished to see Turgenev carried a watch in every pocket of his waistcoat and that he kept taking them out to check the time. There was a quadrille and suddenly the sixty-three-year-old Turgenev took off his coat, stuck his thumbs in his waistcoat and struck comic figures with his legs: he was doing the genuine old style can-can. Everyone was enchanted, except Tolstoy who wrote in his diary:

Turgenev. Cancan—sad. Meeting peasants on the road was joyful.

Another time Turgenev read his prose-poem
The Dog
after a day's shooting:

Outside a fearful storm is howling

The dog sits in front of me and looks me straight in the face. And I look into his face.

He wants, it seems, to tell me something. He is dumb.

He is without words, he does not understand himself—but I understand him. I understand that at this instant there is living in him and me the same feeling, that there is no difference between us. We are the same; in each of us burns and shines the same trembling spark. Death sweeps down, with a wave of its chill broad wind …

And the End!

Who can then discern what was the spark that glowed in each of us. No. We are not beast and man that glance at each other. They are the eyes of equals, those eyes rivetted on one another. And in each of these, in the beast and in the man, the same life huddles up in fear close to the other.

Neither Tolstoy nor Urusov, the Vice-Governor of the province of Tula, who was with them, agreed with Turgenev's attitude to the dog, man and death. A hot discussion about religion started and Urusov fell off his chair with excitement. There was loud laughter and relief: death was a dangerous subject with Tolstoy. Seeing that they were thirteen at table, Turgenev cried out, “Hands up those who are afraid of death.” Tolstoy put his hand up and so did Turgenev, but Tolstoy asked how it was that Turgenev was not afraid to be afraid of death. When he was a very old man, Tolstoy said to Gorky:

If a man has learned to think, no matter what he may think, he is always thinking of his own death. All philosophers were like that. And what truth can there be, if there is death?

This attack on philosophers shows no resigned spirit; the rational Turgenev was resigned; he had long seen death advancing slowly and inevitably, had no belief in religion or immortality.

In 1878 Turgenev went to England for a few days to stay with old friends, the Bullock-Halls at Six Mile Bottom, and to Didie he
wrote he had fired like a pig and had brought down only eleven birds. Oxford charmed, although he found himself staying in a large cold room at Balliol where the room stank of the smoking fire—the pervading sulphurous Victorian domestic smell. He wandered in the empty streets on Sunday and heard the dogs barking behind the closed doors of the houses and went fast asleep in church where the emotional preacher unfailingly dropped his voice at the end of his sentences. The following year he was again in Oxford where the University gave him the degree of Doctor of Civil Law which bewildered him, but he loved the brilliant red gown. He said it would be useful for charades at the rue de Douai. The other honorands were Ruskin, the Governor of Fiji and Leighton, the British Ambassador in Petersburg, which gave the occasion a Pickwickian air. He was rather nervous because of anti-Russian feeling in England (because it was the time of the Turko-Bulgarian war) and he was anxious because he had lately written a skit in verse called
Croquet at Windsor
in which Queen Victoria was seen using Bulgarian heads for croquet balls. But everything passed off delightfully, he was overwhelmed by praise, though he missed the tempests that occurred at Russian literary occasions. He went on to Cambridge and was once more regaled and met George Eliot for the second time, drank her health at a dinner and sat beside her at Newmarket Races—of all entertainments—and fascinated her by talk of Russian sporting habits. An important reason for his fame in England was that he had been introduced to the best society not only as an enemy of serfdom but that, in spite of being an artist and a foreigner, he was before anything a sportsman and a gentleman.

In 1879 Turgenev went off to Russia once more. He was again very short of ready money. His daughter's marriage had broken up and she had fled to Switzerland to get away from her bankrupt husband and Turgenev was obliged to sell his Paris pictures—at a loss, as usual, when he was a seller—in order to help her. In the January his brother, Nikolai, died and left him 50,000 roubles instead of the 100,000 that he had expected. The brother had become a hermit and changed his mind and left most to the nephew of his dead wife. But these private trials were followed to Turgenev's astonishment by the enthusiastic ovations given to him by University
students in Petersburg. He had thought the young hated him. Young girls rushed to kiss him, the students cheered him again and again and placed a wreath of laurel on his head: a miracle! The younger generation loved him. After the attempts on the Tsar's life by the Terrorists, the new government was repressive and Turgenev knew in his heart that he was being used as a symbol of liberal protest. Still, there was a large dinner of a hundred covers for him and, as he said, he was almost suffocated by “the flowers of eloquence.” The actress Savina read a scene from his play
A Provincial Lady.
He had a terrible cold. In Moscow, a party was given for him in the enormous hall of the Noblemen's Assembly. Tickets had been sold out a week in advance. The excited speeches of the students alarmed the Rector of the University and Turgenev tried to make a speech that would preserve some sort of calm. He had to be rescued from the clamouring, cheering crowds by the police. In Petersburg at a dinner given him by writers, he made a speech saying that the breach between the generations he had described in
Fathers and Sons
was over, but he innocently added that all could now work “to crown the edifice.” Crown! The word aroused the suspicions of Dostoevsky who worshipped the Tsar and understood very well that Turgenev was arguing for a constitutional monarchy. This was not the last skirmish with his enemy. That occurred at the Pushkin Memorial celebrations the following year when the pair appeared on the same platform. Turgenev's mumbled speech bored the audience by its analysis of Pushkin's art. What they wanted in these euphoric days was a “manifestation” and eloquently Dostoevsky gave it to them and they were swept off their feet. Even Turgenev approved of it, the excited Dostoevsky said. Turgenev most emphatically did not. The confirmed Westerner wrote to a friend: