The Gentle Barbarian

V.S. Pritchett

The Life and Work of Turgenev

Acknowledgements

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Sources

Ivan Turgenev was born in the autumn of 1818 in Orel, a provincial capital some three hundred miles southwest of Moscow and halfway to Kiev. It was, in those days, a large town of distilleries, craftsmen in stone, glass, china and timber, and the centre of a rich agricultural trade in hemp, rye, wheat and tobacco, and famous for breeding horses and cattle. The merchants lived in dull stone houses two storeys high; there was a market-place stinking of rush mats and cabbage, there were bazaars which suggested the Orient. Nearby was the pillared mansion of the Governor with striped sentry boxes at the gates and the large private houses of the gentry, some of them with odd turrets on them. There was a promenade where the young trees were dying and scores of miserable taverns giving out clouds of tobacco smoke and the pervasive smells of spirits. On the outskirts were the tumbledown huts of the artisans, known by their sheepskin coats. At night most of them were drunk. Long before the industrial revolution reached Russia, Orel was reckoned to be a prosperous place. At sunrise all roads leading to Orel were crowded with long strings of wagons travelling to the market.

The Turgenevs had a fine house in Orel and another in Moscow. Ivan's mother, Varvara Petrovna, noted in French, the polite language
of her class, that the new baby was twenty-one inches long. He was her second son. She was a very rich, trim but ugly young woman, in her early thirties, fond of dress, six years older than her husband, an almost penniless and handsome young cavalry officer who had been forced by his relations to marry her for her money, and after Ivan's birth he threw up his commission in the army. When the end of the thaw made travel possible the following year, he moved the family to his wife's enormous estate at Spasskoye.

The migrations of the gentry from their town houses to their estates were remarkable processions as they went from post house to post house over the bad roads of the monotonous countryside. The family coach of the Turgenevs was a heavy vehicle drawn by a team of six horses on the eighty-mile journey. A lackey sat on a mat on the rear step holding on by a rope and was either spattered with mud or choked by the clouds of dust. After the coach came a string of inferior carriages and carts carrying luggage and servants. They crossed between the low wooded hills of undulating country that opened into ravines where small rivers ran out into marshland and finally on to the endless steppe where the villages were poor. The peasant huts with their roofs of rotting straw seemed to have been trodden into the soil. In the woodland the huts were spacious and were built of fir logs and roofed by boards. From what one knows of Turgenev's father, the retired soldier who was both superstitious and a sportsman, he would have counted the magpies for luck and studied the edges of the woodlands for the first sight of snipe and woodcock and kept his eye open for pretty women. His wife would be watching the women working with long rakes in the fields, alert to see if any of her serfs were idle. For Varvara Petrovna her vast estate was a kingdom in itself; she owned all its villages and most peasants in them, every horse, cow, pig, goose, even the nightingales that sang in the trees.

What a hissing of marching geese, what a clatter in the rookeries, what barking of dogs when the coach at last arrived at her mansion. Her serf orchestra struck up a tune of welcome as the peremptory mistress got out. What kneeling to the ground, what kissing of hands for the privileged servants, what a ringing of bells from room to room as orders were given, what excited trilling from the scores of cage birds on the walls as the short, gypsyish mistress stared at her “subjects” as she called her forty house serfs, to detect who among them
had disobeyed her orders and what punishments she would award. The barking of the dogs was stopped at once. She could not bear it.

Spasskoye passed as one of the finest mansions of the province but was really a large, rambling manor house. It had an iron roof and was painted white and built mostly of timber. The central part to which verandahs gave a kind of elegance was two storeys high and, inside, a gallery of stone led to the two long low wings. The place gave the impression of being some enormous white owl that had spread its wings ready to swoop and hunt over the avenue of limes and the thirty acres of garden and park and far beyond. Attached to the house were the quarters of the house serfs, the ice house, the bath house, the house for smoking meat, the tannery, the workshops, the water well and even a mill for making wall-papers and the stationery on which Varvara Petrovna wrote her innumerable orders and comments. Most of the shoes and clothes—though not of the mistress—were made on the estate: with a
belle laide's
passion for finery she sent to Moscow and even at times to Berlin or Paris for her own clothes. The estate produced all the food and drink it needed. In addition to the waiting servants, the house serfs included her serf doctor and her office clerks; like many landowners she had her own orchestra, singers and actors and as her sons grew there were nurses and valets and a procession of French and German governesses and tutors. She ran the place efficiently. Spasskoye was less a house than a self-sufficient feudal community, the estate was an empire numbering 5,000 “souls” and extended to thousands of acres and included twenty villages which she ruled as an absolute sovereign. Her retinue were indeed divided by rank and title. There was a Chamberlain; her personal maids were ladies-in-waiting and her private office had a dais on which she sat with her portrait behind her, ringing bells—she had a mania for bells—and gave orders and received deputations. None of her serfs could marry without her permission: many she ordered to marry. They were allowed to have children, but once the child was born it was sent away from the house. The police were not permitted to come to Spasskoye although she did soften a little towards the Chief of Police because he amused her—but he had to come to the back door.

In the finest rooms at Spasskoye the furniture was luxurious. The
chairs were in ebony, ornamented with bronze cupids leading lions by a chain of flowers, and were upholstered in yellow leather. There was an immense mirror—the marvel of the province. Guests were always coming and going, for Varvara Petrovna loved musical parties, masquerades and cards; and if she was giving grand dinners special food was sent for from Moscow three hundred miles away and arrived over the terrible roads by sledge in the winter or wagon in the summer, though usually in the winter the family moved to a house in Moscow until the thaw ended and travel was possible again. In the summer weeks she would go on a state progress to her villages and the long procession would take to the roads. Wagon-loads of pork and geese and other meats and drink for the journey went on ahead, followed by carriages and carts containing serving women, laundry maids, valets, butlers, clerks and the serf doctor, and finally in her own carriage the dominant Varvara Petrovna herself, with her unforgiving eye on everything.

All Ivan Turgenev's biographers and indeed Turgenev himself portray Varvara Petrovna as a domineering woman. She was governed by two passions: pride—as she admitted when she was dying—and
la rage:
the word “anger” is not strong enough.

Her handsome husband was a cooler, more elusive figure. He was an aristocrat of long line: his wife's family were, comparatively speaking, upstarts. The pedigree of the Turgenev family hung beside the portrait of his grandfather at Spasskoye and was an index to the fancy that they had descended from a Tartar chieftain of the Golden Horde. In that remote time they had given up the Mohammedan faith and one, indeed, became a martyr of the Orthodox Church. Two were killed in the Stenka Rozin revolt in the seventeenth century, others served under Peter the Great and the Empress Anna. They were a family of ruined soldiers. A great-grandfather had been taken prisoner by the Turks and the story was that he had escaped because his charm had beguiled one of the Sultan's wives—a tale close to the tastes of the master of Spasskoye who was noted for his love affairs at home and also, when he took his family on a grand European tour in 1822, in Paris. What was deadly to women was his fashionable feminine grace of manner. He was the cool, good-looking dandy, tall and powerful, an excellent horseman, and perhaps in
recording Ivan's length as a baby, Varvara Petrovna was thinking of the height of the husband whom she adored, whom she had passionately pursued, and who did not love her at all. Once he had retired, still young, from the Army he left the management of the estate to her—he himself brought only a tiny place of 130 “souls” to the marriage—and settled to hunting in the fields and among the ladies.

Whether he knew it or not, Turgenev's intelligent but half-educated father was the victim of history. Like others of his class he spoke French in the house and was shaky in his Russian spelling. But not all the Turgenev tribe had been fighting men. One kinsman was the son of a director of Moscow University, another a State official working for the Russian government in Paris, a man of liberal intellect and an important contact in the Paris embassies. It was he certainly who advised the French Marquis de Custine when the Marquis went to Russia and published his notorious account of his journey in 1839, a book which infuriated Russian readers. This Turgenev kinsman had put the Marquis in touch with a Prince Kozlowski who told him that

Russia, in the present age, is only 400 years removed from the invasion of barbarian tribes, whilst 14 centuries have elapsed since Western Europeans experienced the same crisis. A civilisation older by one thousand years, of course, places an immeasurable distance between the manners of nations. Long before the Tartar invasion Russia had received its rulers from Scandinavia and these had received in turn their tastes, their arts and their luxuries from the emperors and patriarchs of Constantinople.

The civilisation conquered by the Tartars and the saints and the rulers of the new dispensation had never heard of the chivalrous tradition of the West. The invaders remained Asiatic. Their mon-archs were like Biblical Kings, they were patriarchs, and the Russian nation was not formed in the school of good faith and honour which had been so important and civilising in the history of the European mind. Indeed—

The extreme despotism of the Russians was established in the very period when servitude ceased in Europe. Bondage became a constituent principle of society.

Turgenev's father was dead before Custine's ill-natured book appeared. He was certainly not a reading man. After his trip to France, Switzerland and Italy he returned to Spasskoye to live lazily to himself. He would have been about thirty-two when the tragic Decembrist revolt of 1825 marked the end of the hopes of reform and enlightenment which briefly followed the defeat of Napoleon. What the father thought about that revolt no one knows, but the fierce repression did paralyse the public spirit of the men of his generation. Reaction and dullness set in and he, like the rest of the gentry, was obliged to conform and to fade into private life on his estate—those little nations where inevitably women ruled and where the role of the men became futile.

In one of his very late stories,
First Love,
which tells of how a father and his young son fall in love with the same young woman, Ivan Turgenev draws a moving portrait of his father and, indeed, told friends that the story came directly from his own early youth. He had never seen, he said, a man more “elaborately serene.”

He took scarcely any interest in my education but never hurt my feelings; he respected my freedom; he displayed—if one can put it that way—a certain courtesy … only he never let me come at all close to him. I loved him … he seemed to me the ideal man—and God knows how passionately attached to him I should have been if I had not felt constantly the presence of his restraining hand. Yet he could, whenever he wished, with a single word, a single gesture, instantly make me feel complete trust in him … Sometimes a mood of gaiety would come over him and at such moments he was ready to play and romp with me … like a boy … Once, and only once, he caressed me with such tenderness that I nearly cried … I came to the conclusion that he cared nothing for me nor for family life; it was something very different he loved …