The Gentle Barbarian (10 page)

How wonderfully a Russian peasant dies! The temper in which he meets his end cannot be called indifference or stolidity; he dies as though he were performing a solemn rite, coolly and simply.

It has been objected that Turgenev confined himself to the serfs who lived on his mother's estates and, even there, that he knew only the house serfs intimately and from the immediate master-and-man point of view. He was the outsider and the country gentleman. This judgment is too sweeping, as many incidents in the
Sketches
show, and, in any case, a writer's talent has a right to itself. If he was born an outsider, he also
chose
to be an outsider or scrutinising spectator who was in the classical tradition he inherited from his love of Pushkin: from the outside he can summarily penetrate the inside—by his images and sentences—and see his truth. This power of “telling the truth” grew and when he attempts the subjective he is less successful and falls into sentimentality. There is one story in the
Sketches,
“The Tryst,” in which he tries to evoke a peasant girl's feelings about love, where we see this happening and in which he falls into the falsity of the non-peasant writer writing about peasants from the inside.

During these three years in France, Turgenev was not always at Courtavenel. When he got money for his
Sketches
or when he could borrow from Mme. Garcia, he stayed in Paris and he also managed to run up debts to the tune of 6,000 roubles, on his expectations. (It may be that this troubled the precise Louis Viardot more than anything else.) In 1848 he had a flat near the Palais Royal and then moved to a cheaper place at the corner of the Boulevard des Italiens and the rue de la Paix and was working on two plays:
A Provincial Lady
and
A Month in the Country.
Pauline Viardot had turned his mind to the theatre. Like most of the Russian gentry in Paris, he was there to despise the French. The Russians met to shout out their souls through the night at the house of the rich Annenkov, the perpetual traveller, talker and fat lazy gourmet, who amused himself by analysing the characters of his friends who borrowed money from him. Turgenev disliked the formal sameness of the city, but he loved the food; he shared the general Russian opinion that the Paris of Louis Philippe was “unbeautiful”—Herzen called France “the cuspidor of Europe.” And Belinsky, who died that year, called Paris meaningless. Throughout the nineteenth century only Gogol seems to have been captivated by Europe, but for him Europe had meant Rome. Turgenev, more instructed than
most, understood their nostalgia for the timeless, empty distances of the Russian landscape and the dilapidated condition of Russian life. Russia was feudal, but, at least, it was not middle-class. It was not packed with the characters of Balzac's novels which nauseated him. The Latins, he explained eventually to the Goncourts, are men of
“la loi”
but in Russia
“la loi ne se cristallise pas.
” The Russians are thieves and yet even a man who confesses to twenty thefts if it is shown that he was in need or hungry will be acquitted. But:

vousêtes de la loi, de l'honneur, nous tout autocratisé que nous soyons, nous sommes moins conventionnels, nous sommes des hommes de l'humanité.

And another time he said the Russians were a race of liars in life because they have been slaves so long but in art they love truth and reality.

In February of that year he followed the Viardots to Brussels to hear Pauline sing and there one morning the hall porter woke him up and shouted “France has become a Republic”: the riot-spotted reign of the bourgeois king, Louis Philippe, had come to an end. He took the train to Paris at once. Crowds were in the streets. News of revolution in Poland, Italy and Germany was coming in. The wretchedly paid factory workers in Paris were demonstrating. George Sand was editing
Le Bulletin de la République:
socialism had almost arrived. But by the time of the bloody “June days” the middle classes had triumphed: the Republic was dead and Louis Napoleon was nosing his way towards the throne. Turgenev wrote to Pauline Viardot, who had gone on to Hamburg and Berlin to take the part of Valentine in
The Huguenots,
describing the disturbances in the Paris streets, and was struck by the now half-festive, indifferent, expectant state of the crowds. He was amused by the cigar pedlars. He questioned the workers when they marched on to the Constituent Assembly. They were waiting, the workers said. But he couldn't for the life of him, he said, find out what the workers wanted or what side they took. Was history an act of God, accident, irony or fatality? He was asking the same question about his impossible love for Pauline Viardot.

Twenty years later, he put down in his
Reminiscences
a remarkable account of the insurrection in June:
My Mates Sent Me!
He
always said that he was a physical coward; but if he hated and feared violence his eyes were not cowardly. They were alive to every change of scene and mood. A column of the National Guard, occupying one side of the Boulevard, turned to face a barricade. The day was hot:

In spite of the arrival of such a considerable number of people everything grew much quieter around; voices were hushed, bursts of laughter became less frequent and shorter; it was as though a haze had fallen over the sounds. An empty space suddenly appeared between the barricade and the National Guard, with two or three small, slightly spinning columns of dust whirling along over it and—looking round apprehensively, a little black and white dog walked about on thin legs in it. Suddenly—it was difficult to say whether from the front or from behind, from above or below—there came a short, loud report; it was more like the sound of an iron bar falling heavily on the ground than a shot and immediately after this sound there came a strange, breathless silence. Everything seemed to grow tense with suspense—and suddenly over my head there came an unbearable loud rattle and roar, like the instantaneous tearing of a huge canvas. That was the insurgents firing through the Venetian blinds of the top floor of the Jouvin factory they had occupied.

He bolted with some of the crowd to a side turning, catching sight as he ran of a man on all fours in front of the barricade, a man in a cap with a red pompom and the black and white dog spinning in the dust. He reached a small barricade in one of the back streets where a boy of twelve was pulling faces and waving a Turkish sword and a fat national guardsman white as a sheet ran stumbling past, moaning, with blood dripping from his sleeve.

Herwegh, the German poet, had fled from the fighting in Baden-Baden and was hiding in the flat above Turgenev's and a workman had come across Paris, risking his life, to tell Herwegh where his baby son was. Turgenev gave the man something to eat and thanked him and offered him money. He refused it. Turgenev asked his name. He refused to give it.

There is no need for you to know my name. To tell you the truth what I did I didn't do for you. My mates sent me. Good bye.

Turgenev's comment tells us everything about his humanity as a man and his truthfulness as a writer:

It was impossible not to admire the old man's action and the unconscious, almost majestic complicity with which he accomplished it. It evidently never occurred to him that he was doing anything extraordinary, that he was sacrificing himself. But it is impossible not to admire the people who sent him, either, those who at the height of the desperate fighting, could remember the worry and anxiety of a “bourgeois” they did not know and took care to set his mind at rest. It is true that 22 years later men like these set Paris on fire and shot their hostages; but he who has even a little knowledge of the human heart will not be shocked by these contradictions.

Herzen was in Paris at the time and the effect of the revolution of ‘48 on him was to put an end to the political illusions he shared with the Russian Romantics. It had destroyed their dream. As E.H. Carr pointed out in
The Romantic Exiles,
the Romantic movement had come thirty years late to Russia. Up till now they had believed that the ideas of the French Revolution were still a force in Europe: the events of ‘48 had shown them that, above all in France, it was no longer a force. Napoleon had killed the Revolution for good; money and the
petit-bourgeoisie
were in power. Herzen understood that the views of the Russian revolutionaries like himself had been out of date. There had always been a deep strain of original scepticism in him and now it had become bitter and pungent. He ridiculed the absurd antics of the out-of-date conspirators in Paris. Yet he said he wished that he had died with a rifle in his hands on the barricades, for at least he “would have carried with him to the grave two or three convictions.”

Turgenev saw the Herzen family every day. They lived in the Champs-Élysées, close to the Arc de Triomphe which had just been finished, and Turgenev read poetry to Natalie Herzen's daughters and distracted them all by his mimicry and play-acting, even alarmed them by his bursts of light-headedness and left them depressed. Once he dressed up in Natalie's velvet cape and pretended to be a madwoman, another time he sat on the window-sill, pretending to be a cockerel and screaming in a high voice “Cock-a-doodle-do.” In one of his comic fits he pulled down a curtain and stood himself in
a corner with a dunce's hat on his head. Afterwards he fell into silent brooding and Natalie Herzen, who was on the verge of a miserable love affair with Herwegh, tried to draw him out on the subject of love. Perhaps Turgenev's failure to respond to her attempts to find out the truth about his relations with Pauline and Louis Viardot—a matter of exemplary interest to her, for her Herwegh was married—caused her to turn against Turgenev: she said he gave her the sensation of being in a damp, musty, empty house.

Were his antics and his moods of depression the symptoms of the sickness of an impossible love?

The cholera terrified him; it was the Russian plague following him to Europe, eating its way from street to street. Presently he had a fever and he bolted out of Paris to the Ville d'Avray and there slowly the fever abated. His capacity to create the symptoms of illness—bladder trouble is one, for example—seems to be at one with his genius for fantasy and to his general sensibility. One of his beliefs was that he had a thinner skull than other men.

He recovered and went to Courtavenel. The Viardots had left for a long series of engagements in England which they disliked but where Pauline always had enthusiastic audiences, so he went off to Hyères to convalesce, and he wrote to “the most loved, dearest and only woman” asking for every detail of her performances and chattered about his journey—thirty-six hours to Lyons in a crowded compartment with a French grocer who boasted that he himself had killed seventeen insurgents in the street.

“Ah! voyez-vous,” disait-il, ce n'était pas long, on leur criait: “ àge-noux, gredins, “ils se débattaient—mais paouf, un coup de crosse dans la nuque, paouf! une balle à bout portant entre les deux sourcils—et drig, drig, drig
—
les voilà qui gigotaient sur le pavé.“

The grocer was a fat man, a regular at the Opéra Comique. Turgenev went down the Rhône by steamer to Avignon and then on to Hyères. In his letters the ardent German phrases to “my dear beloved angel” and “to the whole of your dear being” from her “old and faithful lover who loves you,” continue.

At the heart of his troubles was the knowledge that his long stay in France must come to an end. His
Sketches
were a success and he knew that his presence in Russia was indispensable to him as a
writer. On the other hand, Russian officials kept an eye on Russian exiles and were especially sensitive at this moment, for after the revolutions of ‘48 any Russian who was in touch with the revolutionaries like Herzen and Bakunin, as Turgenev had been, were under suspicion. Pauline Viardot had allowed Bakunin to use her Paris address for his letters and Turgenev had been warned by friends that he had better wait until the political climate became milder, yet, if he stayed on, the Russian government might go as far as cancelling his passport and sequestrating the money he eventually expected from the Spasskoye estate. This had nearly happened years before to Herzen, who had, however, cleverly made arrangements with the Rothschilds to get his fortune out of Russia before the ban fell, but Herzen was now an exile for life. Her control of money was Varvara Petrovna's weapon against her sons. Turgenev wavered; he wrote to Pauline:

Russia can wait—that immense and sombre figure motionless and masked like the Sphinx of Oedipus. She will gulp me down later. I can see her coarse, inert look fixed on me with gloomy attention, as befits eyes of stone. Set your mind at ease Sphinx. I shall return to you and you can devour me at your leisure if I do not solve your riddle for yet a little while.

The powerful image—Oedipal indeed—showed how strong and ineluctable his involvement with the Russian situation was. It amounted to a passion. But the Sphinx did not wait. His mother was very ill, slowly dying of dropsy. At Courtavenel there may have been a decisive incident—perhaps with Viardot. Changing his mind from week to week, so that the Viardots in London did not know exactly when he went, weeping and his head burning, he packed up his things in misery and on a night in June 1852 he took the boat from Le Havre to Petersburg, looking gloomily at the sea and holding his precious dog Diane on his knees. At the last moment he left his bedside rug to Pauline, asking her to put it in the little salon where she worked, so that she would remember him every day. (It is a Sterne-like gesture yet, unlike most Russians, Turgenev hated Sterne!) “Farewell,” he wrote, “my dear kind family, my only family, the ones I love more than anyone in the world. I embrace you all … Come for the last time into my arms so that I can hold you
against my heart.” The flat coast of Finland came up. The sky was pale:
“C'est le Nord.
” And he quotes lines from a song of Gounod's
Vallon, “D'ici je vois la vie”
and
“Repose-toi, mon âme.“