The Gentle Barbarian (35 page)

I have not yet said “Thou hast conquered, O Galilean.” That clever, brilliant and crafty speech, with all its peculiarities, is based totally on deceit … And what is the purpose of that
universal man
whom the public so furiously applauded … To be original Russian is better than to be characterless universal man. The whole thing is the same old pride—disguised as humility … The Slavophils have not swallowed us yet.

Turgenev's triumphs had another piquancy.
A Month in the Country
was put on in Moscow and acclaimed. The young actress Savina had transformed the part of Vera, the young girl who is Natalya's rival in the play. He told her the play came from his own life and Rakitin was himself. The actress had been at first overwhelmed by attentions from so great a man and was afraid of him, but his skill in pleasing, in advising in a fatherly way—she was being divorced from her husband and had another, a railway magnate, in view—and in showing a close interest in her career, flattered her. He wrote to her often from Paris, tenderly and with the usual hand-kissing phrases and when he returned to Russia and she was travelling to Odessa, he plotted to get on her train at Mtsenk and more than half-hoped to persuade her to get off at Orel and stay with him at Spasskoye. They did travel to Orel together but she continued her journey. He dreamed of her being at Spasskoye “and kissing her little feet in ecstasy.” And went on:

I can just see the headline “Scandal at Orlov Station: An extraordinary thing happened here yesterday. The writer Turgenev (by no means a young man), was seeing off a famous actress Savina who was travelling to Odessa to fulfil a star engagement. Suddenly as the train drew out of the station he dragged Mme Savina from the window of her compartment despite her desperate objections, as if possessed by a demon … And yet it could have happened—it hung by a thread; so, incidentally, does everything in life.

And a week later, he wrote:

Alas, I will never be your sin…. And should we meet again in two or three years I shall be quite an old man, you will have settled down at last and nothing of the past will remain. This will not affect you much for you have all your life before you and mine is behind me—and that hour in the train when I felt almost like a young man of twenty was the last flicker of the holy lamp.

He asked, as he had asked so many women, “Am I in love with you?” and said:

I do not know—in the past such things were different. This irresistible desire to merge, possess—and to surrender—when even the urging of
the flesh loses itself in a kind of lambent flame—I am probably babbling, but I should have been immeasurably happy if only … if only …

In 1881 Savina did come to Spasskoye. The Polonsky family were staying with him and, knowing she liked swimming, Turgenev had a bath hut built for her in the deep water of the lake there. The country people came to a party for her. There was singing and dancing. He took her to his study and showed her the table at which he had written
Fathers and Sons.
By his bedside she saw the screens made by his mother's orders and the album which his mother had brought back from Sorrento. The branch of a lime tree was by the open window by the desk. Savina heard him read a
Poem in Prose
to a woman, he said, to whom his whole life had been given and who would not bring a single flower or shed a tear on his grave. He was not going to publish this poem because “It might hurt her.” He was weeping as he read and Savina was very moved. On the day she left he read to her the last but one of his stories,
The Song of Triumphant Love.
She says tritely that she could not think of anything clever to say about it.

The story gushes forth and was enormously popular with the sentimental public, but the critics thought that it was trash. They could not make head nor tail of it. It is one of his fantasies, set in Italy and seems to be an attempt to convey the power of music on Turgenev's mind and may have been conceived as an attempt at an opera. Two devoted friends love the same woman. She chooses one and the rejected lover goes away to the Orient and returns years later with a dumb Malay servant to occupy a pavilion in the married couple's garden. At night from the pavilion strange music comes and appears to draw the wife from her bed to the garden: she is sleepwalking. Whether she ever reaches the rejected lover is unclear, but the suspicious husband kills the lover. The Malay injects a mysterious substance into the body and the dead lover is led away, walking: the wife is relieved of her torment and is now pregnant for the first time. The story may be put among his dream stories on the theme that love conquers death.

Pauline Viardot afterwards claimed to have worked with Turgenev on this story and it is this that inclines one to believe that it might stand as one of their
operéttes,
an attempt above all to explore
the erotic power of music and the dream life it can evoke. Turgenev was tiring of realism at this time, as we have seen in one or two earlier explorations of dream and the unconscious, and he seems to be playing with the bizarre effects of surrealism, long before its time; but the stagey character of the story gives it the effect of artifice and surfeit.

Of course in his naive way Turgenev told Pauline and Didie about Savina and they were caustic about her. He did not tell quite all: they did not hear that she had stayed with him at Spasskoye where Pauline had always refused to go. He simply said that Savina was a talented, ambitious but typically neurotic actress with a
grisette's
common speech. But he wrote often; on his last visits to Russia he saw her and heard of her love affairs. She even came to Paris to see a doctor there and he paid her bills and back she went to get married. Turgenev was gentle, kind, paternal and was saddened by the impossibility of his love; he said it was the last flare of the “holy lamp.” And it was, for he did feel something of what he felt for Pauline when he was young and, indeed not only his public triumphs but the greater importance of being in love with a young girl made him appear youthful and excited by life to his friends when he returned to France after his first meeting her. The feeling remained with him until his death.

His letters to Savina are very moving. They have an erotic note which is missing from all his known letters to Pauline Viardot and they resemble those he wrote to the Baroness Vreskaya and to Didie, but they are resigned, and show deep caring for her as a person and an artist. He had always been a teacher to the women he loved and a good one.

But as regards the tragedy in
verse
—you are not so good at reading verse. Do you know why? You read it as if you were afraid of it, and without the naturalness which is characteristic of you. You drop into a rather monotonous sort of voice—which is known as
elocution.
One should be perfectly at ease with verse (especially verse by Averkiyev) and simply observe the metre without giving unnatural emphasis to the words and so forth. You see I can even be critical of you. It seems to me I could be of some use to you. In any case, it would be very
pleasant for me to do so. But this, like many other things, must be assigned to the realm of the impossible.

And, in another, he says::

I won't deny that at this moment—day-dreaming and taking advantage of your permission—I am clinging to your adorable little lips, the touch of which can never be forgotten until the end of life.

By this time Savina had made her grand marriage, but the tone of the letters does not change.

You know I love you very, very much. Adieu, I kiss all of you. “All?” you will ask. “Yes, all,” I repeat. And then I will kiss your dear hands.

He had persuaded her, as he had persuaded Pauline Viardot years before, to let him have a cast of her hands.

In the final period of his life, after
Virgin Soil,
Turgenev wrote a number of short Poems in Prose and although it is claimed that they give us glimpses of his inner life, they do not match what can be discerned in his stories and novels, or indeed in his letters. The
Poems
strike one as being poetically vapid and self-conscious, if we except things like his apostrophe to the Russian language and his struggle with his pessimism and his ultimate assertion that in some way “love conquers death.” Each poem crystallises either a mystery or the passing flash of a moment or a mood. But he wrote two more remarkable stories of “possession”—
Father Alexey's Story
and
Clara Milich
—the latter written during his last illness—and one very fine thing,
The Relic,
which takes one back to the manner of
A Sportsman's Sketches. Father Alexey's Story
is about a man whose son becomes possessed by “the devil” or “green man” of folk lore: it is made to seem a real event troubling the common imagination of the people of the steppe and recalls something of Hogg's
Confessions of a Justified Sinner.

Clara Milich
is a transmuted version of a true story of theatre life. A well-known actress, Kalmina, had committed suicide by taking poison on the stage two years before, because of an unhappy love-affair. From this and possibly as the result of the
épanouissement
he experienced in Savina's company, he turned to literature for a hint. First of all to the character of Clara Mowbray in Scott's
St. Ronan's Well.
He had probably read this novel when he was staying at Pitlochry and although he took only the girl's name from it and her terror in her misuse, a man like Turgenev who had spent so much of his life in spas and with hypochondriacs must have been amused by a tale which comes from Scott's lyrical period and owed its feeling to Scott's memory of an early love affair of his own. The other, and stranger, literary tip, as Turgenev himself said, came from Edgar Allan Poe. One often comes across such literary echoes in Turgenev: he never ceased to be something of a
littérateur.
The story itself is concerned with Avator, a young man who has become haughty, timid and self-enclosed through too much reading. He abruptly dismisses the advances made to him by a provincial actress at the theatre, falls in love with her only when she has died on the stage and has guilty delusions of seeing her in his room. The point of the story is that she avenges herself by hypnotising him
after
her death, so that he is possessed. Whenever Turgenev writes such strange stories or fables, they become physical scrutinies; their power lies in his habit of staring at every person or thing so that its visual exactness is magnified and detached from normal experience; this is the habit of the surrealists:

in Clara's image … he saw her fingers, her nails, the little pores on her cheeks near her temples, the little mole under the left eye … her walk and how she held her head a little on the right side.

And when, in hallucination, she appears to come to his room her lips curl: he kisses them “and even felt the moist chill of her teeth.”

Clara might very well be an exact portrait of Pauline Viardot detached from her life:

A half-Jewish, half-gypsy type, small black eyes under thick brows almost meeting in the middle, a straight slightly turned up nose, delicate lips with a beautiful but decided curve, an immense mass of black hair, heavy even in appearance, a low brow still as marble, tiny ears—the whole face dreamy, almost sullen. A nature passionate, wilful—hardly good-tempered, hardly clever, but gifted.

Avator is not in love with Clara but is possessed by her, is in her power and no longer belongs to himself and he will die as he tries to touch the vision.

The difficulty with the story is the old one: Turgenev is too elaborately careful in providing small clues that would suggest a rational basis for the hallucination—for example the lock of hair in the youth's hand when he dies as he embraces the ghost is a lock of Clara's hair left by her sister in her diary which he has been reading. The story is far too prosaically drawn out, but it has what seem to be autobiographical hints of what was passing through Turgenev's own mind as he wrote, in moments of respite, when he was dying. It is impossible not to see a direct reference in the youth's words when the vision has gone.

Next time I will be stronger. I will master her … But what next. Then must I die so as to be with her? … Well, what then? If I must die let me die. Death has no terrors for me now. It cannot then annihilate me? On the contrary only
thus
and
then
can I be happy … as I have not been happy in my life, as she has not. We are both pure! Oh that kiss.

Such a kiss, he says, even Romeo and Juliet did not know—the allusion to Shakespeare is characteristic—art gives us the only immortality possible to us.

We must prefer to see Turgenev's genius in his last years in the story he wrote not long before illness destroyed all hope:
A Living Relic,
a story in which he suddenly recovered the simple feeling and transparency of
A Sportsman's Sketches.
It opens with one of those plain off-hand sentences which make us confident at once:

For a hunter rainy weather is a veritable calamity.

The young sportsman and the glum Yermolai stand under dripping trees in the woods, a day's shooting is done for. They give up and find a hut and eventually find an old shed among the weeds of the abandoned garden of a ruined cottage. In the darkness inside they hear a voice: a sick woman is lying on some boards. The head is withered, the skin is bronze in colour, the colour of an old ikon, the
nose as thin as a knife blade, the lips have almost disappeared. The only light from the face comes from the eyes and teeth; the woman's fingers move over the coverlet like a pair of sticks and over the face “a smile was striving to appear on it, to cross its metallic cheeks, was striving and could not spread.” She is not an old crone. She is Lukeria, a young woman of thirty, not many years ago the most beautiful and brightest of the house serfs who used to lead the singing and dancing as it might be at Spasskoye. She had run downstairs in excitement to greet the young man she was going to marry, tripped and fell over. She is paralysed. From that moment, though doctors and hospitals had done everything for her injury, she has in seven years wasted to the condition of a mummy.