The Gentle Barbarian (24 page)

Russian critics fell upon
Enough
and though it has a fine sustained and dominant rhythm in which each sentence and phrase strikes hard as an energetic statement of pessimism, it is altogether too personal to be effective. Tolstoy made a sensible remark about it. He said: “The personal and subjective is only good when it is full of life and passion, while here we have subjectivity full of lifeless suffering.” Turgenev, the spectator, had little gift for bringing his inner life to the surface. But one understands that he has reached total despair.

In these the gloomiest days of his life surprising news came to him. Pauline Viardot had decided to give her last performances in the great opera houses of London and Paris: she had her last triumphs in Dublin and Paris, but she knew her voice had lost its highest quality. The voice that had ruled as if it were a separate being inside her began to lose its range. Drastic with others, the perfectionist had enslaved and over-strained her voice and coming of a long-headed family with an austere tradition of musical discipline, she was not going to expose herself to fiasco.

Compared with hers, Turgenev's life had not been driven. Her journeys from city to city in Europe in the first decades of the railway age were long and exhausting. She arrived at each place and had to begin daily rehearsals at once. In one year, she gave fifty performances in England. She had lately created the part of Lady Macbeth in Verdi's opera. Her role in
Macbeth
was considered one of her greatest acting parts and not without a meaning irony Turgenev wrote to her saying that if they could play it together in her little theatre at Courtavenel, he would be glad to play the part of Banquo. In 1861 she had given Gluck's
Orpheus
a hundred and twenty-one times. In a letter to the conductor Rietz—quoted by April Fitzlyon—she wrote about learning her parts:

I have the impression I have a little theatre in my head where my little actors move. Even at night in my sleep my private theatre pursues me—it becomes unbearable at times.

The Viardots decided to give up Courtavenel, and let the house in the rue de Douai. Louis Viardot had often been alone there, playing “mother” to the children. He fumed with hatred of Napoleon III, his politics and his morals and wanted to get out of Paris. The couple settled on Baden-Baden as the ideal place for a semi-retirement in which she could give occasional performances when she wished and turn to composition and rich pupils.

In choosing Baden-Baden the Viardots showed their acumen. Pauline had commanded a kingdom of huge applauding audiences; now she needed a small Court in a place where the élite and fashionable settled and money abounded—in short a Principality. The Germans had been adept at preserving princelings, grand dukes and margraves who combined the overfed bourgeois flush with the elegance of royal satiety and ease. The Rhineland was the country of the
Schloss
with its stagey medieval appeal to the middle-class century; a spa ministered to the most exclusive of diseases: gout, rheumatism, paralysis and the stone. A few miles across the Rhine from Strasbourg and twenty-three miles up the Rhine from Karlsruhe on the main line from Ostend and Brussels, Baden-Baden had become Europe's and especially the Parisian's summer resort, a Monte Carlo without need of a Mediterranean. It had its
Schloss,
indeed it had two. Famous statesmen, great artists in music, the theatre and painting found the season at Baden-Baden indispensable to their health and amusement. It was a pretty town, adroitly placed where nature was a seductive mixture of mountain, forest, decorous waterfalls and streams. Beyond the little valley that climbed gently from the orchards of the Rhineland and the hills where the vineyards stood in peaceable regiments were the tall pines of the Black Forest; in the sheltered avenues of the town itself were a profusion of beeches, acacias, chestnuts, willows and firs, all neatly labelled as in a botanist's paradise. The scene was graceful, instructive and soothing to the indulgent sentiments of middle age. The cakes were rich and creamy, the wines light and tender. The little river Oos running through the gardens from the hills was packed with trout; the mountain lakes (to German fancy), with water sprites. The fountains
played, the statues offered their antique suggestions. In the summer and early autumn evenings a lilac haze gave the scene the sweet wilfulness and contentment of a Victorian painting. At appropriate hours one lay in the baths of ionised minerals, drank the water at a Kurhaus, or sat in long rows listening to the orchestra, paraded to see who had arrived and filed into the gambling tables. Whiskered officers pranced on their horses. Ladies and grooms galloped down the Allées. The age of uniforms, clinking spurs and the crinoline had come. The rich built themselves villas in the grey, steep-roofed château style of Louis XIII. When Viardot sold Courtavenel he brought his distinguished collection of pictures as a compliment to the town, and Pauline soon established her Court.

If Turgenev had almost lost touch with Pauline, he was often in correspondence with Louis Viardot, who received moneys for the education and pension of Paulinette, and also about translations. He was helping Viardot to translate
Onegin
into French when he heard of the move to Baden and made this the excuse for a visit. It was very short and difficult. But in 1863 the embarrassment had receded sufficiently for him to be allowed—there can be no other word—to take a flat in the Schillerstrasse not far from the Viardots' house.

Some biographers, including David Magarshack, think that Pauline's softening towards Turgenev was unscrupulous and one does detect here and there in his work that he knew he was being used. She was proposing to publish several albums of Russian songs and she needed the support of his famous name. His figure would be indispensable to her salon. April Fitzlyon more sympathetically suggests that now Pauline had given up the great opera houses she had time for family life and the emotions she had been obliged to subdue as an artist. In the confessional letters, strange in their erotic overtones, Pauline had written to Rietz, the testy father figure to whom she had turned at the time when Turgenev had attached himself to the Countess Lambert, and said outright that she had crushed her heart ruthlessly. She certainly knew at once when she saw Turgenev in Baden and needed him that she could dominate him absolutely whenever she wished. She wanted a small theatre. Turgenev was soon building one of those steep-roofed Louis XIII—style houses for himself, planting its large gardens and building a theatre for her in the grounds.

Why, after all his sufferings, did he return to the Viardots and
accept, finally as it turned out, the life of an expatriate? The “empty nest” at Spasskoye knew him now only as an occasional visitor. Was it only because, as he sometimes said, and others said quite seriously too, that Pauline's extraordinary eyes had hypnotised him? Did he inevitably submit to the will of others? She had obviously imposed her will on her husband. Of course, Turgenev loved family life by proxy. Her children were growing up and he loved children although his own child bored him. One does not imagine that she was a woman to forget a wrong or that she would accept any criticism of her own behaviour. She had a tongue and in the Spanish way cherished a jealousy. There is one scene, of which almost nothing is known, which may have been important. He brought his daughter Paulinette for a visit to Baden and Paulinette made a violent attack on Pauline: Turgenev was the witness. If we knew the words that passed we would probably know everything about Pauline and Turgenev's relationship in the past; it would tell us what Pauline must have understood when she heard him silence his daughter and saw her only victory: that such victories are dangerous, even though they are victories at the expense of another woman's child and the child's father. Still it does seem that a warmer reconciliation with Turgenev dates from soon after this time. And that what kept Turgenev out of Russia was a renewal, of what he called an autumnal love on his side and, just possibly, on hers.

That happiness can, of course, be regarded as a danger for him as a writer, for he wrote less when he was with her.

Although his life-long complaint was that he had been obliged to live “on the edge of another man's nest,” he had in his early years held the opinion that it was not a good thing for an artist to marry. The artist must serve the Muse, serve her and no one else. “An unhappy marriage may do something for a talent, but a happy one is no good at all.” It was a mistake to be absorbed in a feeling for one person alone. And he said that he himself found he could work best in the glow of a casual affair “especially with a married woman who could manage both herself and her passions.” He may have taken this attitude because of his mother's domination: it is common for men who have been dominated in that way to shy away especially from women of their own class. It is true that in the long separations from Pauline his talent reached his greatest powers; yet what may have been his spiritual love of her was certainly a marriage at its most
exacting. He was very aware of the impoverishing effect of expatriation and his own friends did not stop reminding him of it. But Russia, we must remember, had turned on him, indeed on his greatest book and not only that, threatened him. He had had one unforgettable taste of arrest and exile which had put an end to his happiness when he was a young man.

There was a powerful reason, almost as powerful as love, for keeping out of Russia now. The extreme radical manifestos, the acts of terrorism that followed the emancipation of the serfs and the fact that the conservatives saw Turgenev as sympathetic to the Nihilists, aroused real fears that they might incriminate him. Turgenev knew, as every Russian did, that his freedom of movement was in the hands of the Tsar who could easily find the pretext for sending him into exile once more, even for confiscating his estate. In 1862 Turgenev's Radical opponent, Chernyshevsky, a member of what Herzen called “the bilious set” whose attacks had led to Turgenev's quarrel with
The Contemporary,
was arrested on charges connected with revolutionary socialism and was deported to Siberia, where he remained until 1883. Turgenev was not in the same danger—he had been careful to keep his well-placed aristocratic friends—but he knew how remote from the minds of his countrymen the liberal spirit was: they had been formed for despotism, its paternal thrashings and its Byzantine chicaneries.

A reminder of his own danger had come to Turgenev in 1863. He had gone to London and had visited Herzen, whose brilliant periodical
Kolokol,
or
The Bell,
was still powerful as the voice of dissident Russians abroad. With him was Bakunin, the now dilapidated friend of Turgenev's youth. In 1861, Bakunin, the perpetual revolutionary, had achieved his most romantic coup—he had been in prison then in Siberia when the Austrians handed him over to the Russians in ‘48. Now, with impertinent ease, he had escaped through Japan and arrived in London via New York, eager for news of revolution. Herzen wrote in
My Past and Thoughts:

He had piously preserved all the habits and customs of his fatherland, that is of student-life in Moscow: heaps of tobacco lay on his table like stores of forage, cigar-ash covered his papers, together with half-finished glasses of tea … He argued, lectured, made arrangements, shouted, decided, directed, organised and encouraged all day long, all
night long … and set to work to write five, ten, fifteen letters to Semipalatinsk and Arad, to Belgrade and Tsargrad, to Bessarabia, Moldavia and Belokrinitsa … His activity, his laziness, his appetite, and everything else, like his gigantic statue and the everlasting sweat he was in, everything, in fact, was on a superhuman scale, as he was himself; and he was himself a giant with his leonine head and tousled mane.

At fifty he was still the wandering student, living from day to day, borrowing indiscriminately, throwing other people's money away, giving away his last penny except what he needed for cigarettes and tea. In London he soon got money from Turgenev, who was sorry for the old agitator who had grown up coarse but incurable in his hopes of finding a revolution somewhere. He nevertheless derided Turgenev's views and egged Herzen on to support the Polish insurrection in
The Bell
—a folly as Herzen later admitted. Bakunin was flamboyant as a conspirator and wildly reckless in his correspondence and described the meeting with Turgenev in a letter which was easily picked up by the Russian secret police in Paris and the upshot was that Turgenev was commanded to return to St. Petersburg to be questioned in secret by the Senate. This was alarming and Turgenev wrote a letter to the Tsar protesting that he was a writer with no involvement with politics; but he had to go. He knew one or two of his judges who received him politely: in fact before the first hearing he had gone to a grand soirée given by a Marquis Pepoli who had married a singer. He wrote to Pauline:

And Prince Dolgorouki (listen to this!)the head of all the police in the Empire, one of the most influential people in the government chatted with me for a while; Prince Souvorov (of the Council of State and military government of Petersburg) was charming to me which shows that they don't regard me as a conspirator.

Indeed the fat judge, Venevitinov, once a friend of Pushkin and Gogol, told him the whole affair was a miserable waste of time.

So it turned out. The judges studied the Dossier, asked him one or two questions where his name was mentioned in it and told him he was free to leave Russia whenever he liked, and sympathised with him. He was having one of his first attacks of gout. He went off to arrange for the publication of the first album of Pauline's Russian
songs and spent an evening with “kind old Countess Lambert” whose health was improving.

The exasperating aspect of the case was that it took place after an exchange of published letters with Herzen in 1862 in which Turgenev had explained his profound differences with Herzen's ostensibly Left-ward move in politics which seemed to Turgenev reactionary. One more sad and important quarrel with a friend of many years was the outcome.