The Gentle Barbarian (3 page)

On his [Yakov's] lips the words “goodness,” “truth,” “life,” “science,” “love,” however enthusiastically uttered, never rang with a false note. Without strain, without effort he stepped into the world of the ideal: his pure soul was ready to stand before the holy shrine of beauty.

The two were soon “soul in soul as the saying was.” The language of romantic love had become the fashion under the German influence: it was a reaction from the correct, ironical, formal language of his mother's and father's generation. When Turgenev entered Moscow University the ideals of self-perfection and the sublime absorbed the students and became grandiloquent. His own mind had turned to poetry and there is one of his early attempts in a letter to his Uncle Nikolai, an affable gentleman who had settled on the family in Spasskoye in the easy-going Russian way, and who eased the difficult moments of life there. The poem is about the annual drama of the breaking up of the ice on the Moscow river in the thaw which always drew the crowd. These ice-floes “suddenly fly-bang!”—against the stone banks and are smashed to pieces.

They swallow each other in the wrestling of the waters/
The ice-floes are born of other ice-floes/
A sea is born of another sea.

Once more, one notices, his eye moving from moment to moment.

His growing literary turn is seen in his reading. He has been “enraptured by reading Mirabeau” and the young linguist was soon moving into English literature: Shakespeare, Shelley and above all Byron whom he knows through Pushkin. Shakespeare and Pushkin became his lasting guides. There are no evocations of Moscow's gilded Asiatic steeples and gilded domes in Turgenev's wriing, but, as Gogol did, he was more likely to note oddities like the hundreds of crows perched on the crucifixes and cupolas. Life in Moscow was almost rustic. Alexandr Herzen, ten years older than Turgenev, and to whom one turns again and again for close social observation, says in
My Past and Thoughts
that the houses of the gentry were all huddled together and yet the inhabitants were not of a single type: they were specimens of everything in Russian history, living unhurried and easy-going lives. There
was a spaciousness of their own within them which we do not find in the
petit-bourgeois
life of the West … the rank and file of this society was composed of landowners not in the service or serving not on their own account, but to pacify their relations, and of young literary men and professors. There was a fluidity of relationships not yet settled and of habits not reduced to a sluggish orderliness, a freedom which is not found in the more ancient life of Europe … the Slav laisser faire.

This Moscow lived by its dreams of Berlin and Paris. The talk went on until two in the morning and since it was dangerous to talk about politics, the subject had to be embalmed in literary and philosophical argument. The Muscovites were far from the formal Court life of Petersburg and the brisk coldness of official manners.

All the same, “democratic” speculations were heard among the older students and the professors who had been to Berlin, and Turgenev, in his eager way, picked up one or two opinions that caused him to be mocked as “the American”; the first sign of his private horror of serfdom.

The boys came back to Spasskoye for the holidays and at fifteen—Ivan told the Goncourts—he had his first mistress.

I was very young. I was a virgin and with the desires one has at the age of 15. My mother had a pretty chambermaid who looked a little silly but, you know, a silly look lends a certain grandeur to some faces. It was rather a damp day, no a rainy day: one of those erotic days that Daudet likes to describe. It began to drizzle. She took—mind you, I was her master and she was my slave—she took hold of me by the hair at the back of my head and said to me “Come.” What followed was the sensations we have all experienced. But the sweet clasp of my hair accompanied by that single word—that still gives me a sensation of happiness every time I think of it.

The incident would strike his mother as normal, indeed proper; perhaps she arranged it. His inevitable love affairs would be under her control in the manner of her generation. She distinguished between sexual adventure and the far greater perils of love.

The boy had suddenly grown as tall as his father, indeed into a plumpish young giant with a long body and shortish legs which gave a sway to his walk. He had chestnut hair and large grave blue eyes, a bold nose. When his face was still the expression was of a young man self-absorbed, posing a little, and waiting. He had the fashionable lisp and he had some difficulty in getting his words out at first; the voice was gentle and caressing, but he was easily excited and then in talk and laughter the voice became high and shrill, even boisterous and he started pacing up and down the room like an actor carried away by his part.

In 1834 when he was sixteen, his mother pushed him on to Petersburg University, the proper place for a young nobleman and where she had good connections. He shared rooms with his older brother who was a cadet in the military college. His mother went off to Italy but presently there was the family tragedy. The father was dying at Spasskoye.

So much has been made of the powerful influence of his mother upon Turgenev's character that the father has come to seem a distant and negligent figure who let her run her family as she wished. This is not quite so. When he intervened his was the voice of authority and she had some awe of him. His distance had its spell. He was one of those fathers who have the disconcerting air of being a spectator in his own family. In this Ivan was very much his father's son; he too had grown into a restless spectator, his mind on his inner personal freedom. They went out shooting together: the father, though poorly educated himself, took an awkward interest in his son's education. Although he became a rationalist very early, Ivan was affected by the superstitions his father shared with the servants and one effect of seeing the agonies of his father's death was to convince Ivan for life that he would die of the disease of the bladder that killed his father.

It is tempting to trace Turgenev's life-long hypochondria to this event but when one considers the peculiar emotional conditions of life at Spasskoye, other influences pervade. Cholera moved from district to district among the peasants and the news of it besieged the minds of the landowners who shut themselves up in their houses when it was about. Varvara Petrovna feared it so much that she is said to have been borne round her grounds in a glass-enclosed chair when the plague came near. Spasskoye was a hothouse of imaginary
symptoms and there was only a serf doctor living there to offer his crude remedies. Her temper brought on fainting fits and other disorders, and so strong was her will and imagination that she could act out any illness that suited her, with dramatic effect: it is not surprising that Ivan should have caught something of her morbidity.

Much more important was the effect of the father's death on Varvara Petrovna's attitude to her favourite son. She now turned greedily, almost amorously to him for the love she had not received from her husband. Her possessiveness increased and in the storms she created in the household he fell into the part of the soother, the peacemaker, the slave of her moods. When he was there—as Mme. Zhitova says—Varvara Petrovna forgot her violence, but at the same time, even he had to watch and calculate the moment when he could intercede. For she was capable of punishing the servants for whom he had tactfully spoken: it was a way of punishing him.

He went back to Petersburg to the familiar Arctic Venice with its enormous palaces, its wide, windy, dusty streets down which the cold winds of the Baltic blew; and where, when they were not blowing, the fog of the marshes on which Peter the Great had built the city made the air leaden. It was a city made for hypochondriacs, dangerous to the weak chest and the throat. Its famous staring white nights were hard on the nerves of the sleepless. The capital seemed, as Herzen said, a façade, a screen, an inhuman artifice.

One had to visualise behind the screen, soldiers under the rod, serfs under the lash, faces that betrayed a stifled moan, carts on their way to Siberia, convicts trudging in the same direction, shaven heads, branded faces, helmets, epaulettes and plumes.

What Petersburg really meant to Turgenev was that it was the stepping-stone to Berlin and Europe. In his
Reminiscences
he wrote:

I had long dreamed of that journey. I was convinced that in Russia one could acquire only a certain amount of elementary knowledge and that the source of true knowledge was to be found abroad. In those days there was not a single man among the professors and lecturers
at the University of Petersburg who could shake that conviction of mine; indeed they themselves were imbued with it … The aim of our young men … reminded me of the search by the Slavs for chieftains from the overseas Varangians.

There was no order in Russia. Everything he knew about his country disgusted him. He was for “plunging headlong into the German sea,” as soon as he could. He was ready for the Greek and German classics. And in his third year he showed Pletnyov, his professor, a laborious attempt to write a Russian
Manfred:
a play called
Steno
in iambic pentameter in the required Italian setting—“a perfectly preposterous work.” The professor invited him to his flat and made gentle fun of it and he met a little literary society and caught sight of Pushkin, the demi-god, at the theatre.

I remember his small, dark face, his African lips, the gleam of his large teeth, his pendent side-whiskers, his dark, jaundiced eyes beneath a high forehead, almost without eyebrows and his curly hair.

Not long after the poet was dead, killed in a duel, and he saw him lying in his coffin. He does not mention that his distant Turgenev kinsman was one of the only two persons permitted by the Tsar to escort the body by sleigh to his grave at Pakov.

The times were bad for literature. Writers were still suffering from the effects of the repression that had begun twelve years before, after the aristocratic revolt. There was no free press—indeed to start a new paper or journal was forbidden—no public opinion, no personal freedom. The only outlet lay in private conversation in small gatherings and even then conversation was restrained. Turgenev gives an account of an evening at Pletnyov's flat—most people lived in flats in Petersburg—and gives one or two exact thumbnail sketches of the forgotten writers who gathered there.

To begin with, the notorious Skobelev, author of Kremnev, afterwards commandant of the St Petersburg fortress… with some of his fingers missing, with a clever, somewhat crumpled, wrinkled, typical soldier's face and a soldier's far from naive mannerisms—a man who had knocked about the world in short.

There was an editor, “an equerry in the uniform of a gendarme,” and Guber, translator of
Faust,
an officer in the Transport Department, with tousled side-whiskers which were, in those days, taken to be a mild assertion of liberal tendencies; and a shy, listening poet, dressed in a long-skirted, double-breasted frock coat, a short waistcoat with a watch chain of blue glass beads and a necktie with a bow, whose very ordinary Russian face suggested the self-educated artisan or house-serf.

At nineteen, Turgenev, with his handful of unpublished poems, was the shy listener and so conventional in his tastes that he saw nothing beyond a crude joke in Gogol's
The Government Inspector
which had been put on because it gave the Tsar himself a chance for one of his loud guffaws at lines like: “You're taking bribes not according to your rank.”

In his years at Petersburg Turgenev read widely and showed more signs of turning to academic life than of distinction as a poet. His mind was set on enlightenment in Berlin, and where he had no difficulty in persuading his mother to let him go.

The day of departure came. The whole family went to Kazan cathedral to pray for him. With him went his valet Porfiry, a serf of his own age who was in fact his half-brother, the son of Turgenev's father by a maid at Spasskoye. There were tears at the parting. The mother made him swear not to gamble, and as she was carried back to her carriage she fainted. His brother saw him on to the steamer for Lübeck. “I plunged,” Turgenev wrote in famous words, “into the German sea which was to purify me and when I emerged from the waves I discovered myself a Westerner.” The first venture towards expatriation had begun.

And there was a literal plunge into the sea. Not long after the steamer left harbour and was still close to land it caught fire. It carried 280 passengers and 28 carriages, for before the railway age well-off Russians always took their carriages with them on the European tour. Turgenev had already forgotten his promise to his mother and was winning at cards when the cry of “Fire” went up and the ship listed, throwing the tables and his money across the saloon. Like most of the passengers, with the exception of the Danish sailors, the women and children and a Russian ambassador, the young man lost
his head. In old age Turgenev gave his version of the affair and he turned it all into a frightening farce. There was a general who shouted, “We must send a courier to the Emperor.” Another gentleman, who was travelling with an easel and a portrait in oils, jabbed it through the eyes, ears and nose and mouth with his umbrella; a German brewer was in tears and called out to a sailor “Captain! Captain,” who replied, “I am the Captain. What do you want?” Seeing the water reddened by the flames, Ivan writes: “I said to myself, ‘So that's where I shall die and at the age of 19.'” He says he rushed to the ship's side, pretending that he was going to commit suicide, for he could not swim. From what one knows of him this may be true, for he was given to half-comic theatrical fits of extravagance. The story is confusing. One moment he is bravely clambering across the roofs of the burning carriages on the deck, the next he is hanging by a rope over the ship's side and a fat woman jumps on top of him and they both tumble into a life-boat. He mentions a tall man, another general, who pushes a woman aside and jumps onto a boat which has capsized. There is really far too much detail in the report: it is written to settle the gossip about his absurd and cowardly behaviour that dogged him all his life.