The Gentle Barbarian (36 page)

Little by little she tells her story. Kind people look after he, she says, she eats nothing, she can reach for a mug of water. She has learned to be patient. The blind and the dumb are worse off. She can hear everything—a mole digging under the ground, smell the smell of the first buckwheat and the limes or the flowers, watch the birds fly in. The priest tells her she has no sins, not even sins of the mind. She can sing to herself a little, but that brings tears, but “where could so many tears come from? For surely a woman's tears cost her nothing.” She sleeps badly, but when she does she has extraordinary dreams. Death comes to her in the form of a woman and says “I am sorry I can't take you now.” In another her dead father and mother appear, bow to her, because she “has lifted a great weight from their souls: she has done with her own sins and is now conquering theirs.” In another, she is bitten by a dog and is whirled off to heaven and the dog has to let go. Another dream shows that, somehow, the legend of Jeanne d'Arc has travelled to Russia.

A story which might be pious, sentimental and weepy is alight with the strangeness of life and told with delicacy, sense and compassion. And one or two details—a reference, for example, to the fact that the man she was going to marry “got his passport,” is enough to show the easy acceptance of serfdom. It is clear that in this story Turgenev is
giving
us an account of a real woman whom he certainly must have met in the circumstances he describes, for they are most clearly observed; but he has fulfilled the needs of an empathy which is at the core of his art. It is the task of the artist, as he said, to speak for a character and not simply of them. It was his belief that beauty in art seizes on that which is immortal—a matter of deep importance
to a writer who himself feared death because he could rationally see no life beyond it. We are made to have a double response to this woman: the first is that, as he describes her, so exactly she was: but, also, since he cannot use her exact words when she is speaking of herself, he is so filled with her voice that he can speak
for
her and offer her as she feels her inexpressible self to be. Humility is her nature.

In 1881 when he was in Russia, he had an attack of neuralgia and a touch of rheumatism in his shoulder. It passed off but, always fascinated by his illnesses, he went to See the great doctor Charcot when he got back to Paris. Charcot diagnosed a mild angina and Turgenev saw himself tolerating this for many more years. He was put on a milk diet which seemed to' relieve him until, after a few months, he found that he could not stand up and was henceforth completely bedridden. He had to endure a small operation for a cyst—which he called Feoktistov, the chief censor—without anaesthetic and he described to Alphonse Daudet his sensations as the surgeon's knife cut him. He said he felt as if he were a fruit being peeled; then the knife cut as if it were slicing a soft banana.

“I studied this,” he said, “so that I could tell you about it at one of our dinners.”

The realists liked this kind of thing.

For Pauline Viardot the situation was terrible. Louis Viardot lay in another room, suffering from a stroke. She had to nurse the two men who were the most important in her life. It was too much for her and they had to move Turgenev to Les Frênes. Viardot and Turgenev shook hands and, soon after, Viardot died. The shock to Turgenev had to be borne and with it the agonising pain of what now turned out to be cancer of the spine. His dreams were monstrous. The gross fish images came to his mind, but in between spasms he noted down his symptoms in what he called
Journal of My Death
—for example, that he no longer had erections.

He wrote fragments of
Clara Milich
between bouts of pain. Pauline nursed him and Didie set up her easel in his room and sometimes she and her sister brought their children. There were
occasional recoveries—in one he remembers the fire on the ship when he had left Russia as a youth and dictated the long and remarkable piece which appears in his
Reminiscences
and busied himself with his publisher. He even dictated a little story called
The Quail
for Countless Tolstoy's children and wrote the famous letter to Tolstoy begging him to return to his art. But frightful pain seized him; he was given morphia and he screamed in his delirium. Once he shouted that Pauline was Lady Macbeth: he was remembering her triumph in one of her greatest parts. Another time, in his madness, he threw an inkpot at her and asked her to throw him out of the window. When he came to himself, he begged her to see if she could take down a story in Russian or a mixture of languages and indeed, though it took days, she did it and put it into French for him. It is called
An End
and is obviously a violent attack on the gentry: it is about a landowner who has become a horsestealer and is lynched by his peasants. He was so pleased by achieving this that he started planning to write a long novel with Pauline's help. But he was too far gone. The huge body had wasted to nothing and by the beginning of September in 1883 he could only fitfully recognise his adoptive family. As he was dying he said of Pauline “Here's the Queen of Queens” and then went on rambling in Russian. He imagined he was a Russian peasant and is believed to have said “Goodbye my dear ones, my whitish ones.”

After a funeral oration at the Gare de l'Est, the body was taken to St. Petersburg by Pauline's two sons-in-law. The Tsarist government had done what they could to prevent political demonstrations, but thousands attended the funeral in the remote Volkov cemetery where close to Gogol, he was buried.

Turgenev: The Man, His Art and His Age.
Avrahm Yarmolinsky. London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1926, 1959.

Turgenev: A Life.
David Magarshack. London, Faber & Faber, 1954.

The Price of Genius: The Life of Pauline Viardot.
April Fitzlyon. London, Calder, 1964; New York, Appleton-Century, 1964.

The Turgenev Family.
V. Zhitova. Trans. A. S. Mills. London, Harvill, 1948.

La Vie Douleureuse d'lvan Tourguéneff.
E. K. Semenov. Paris, 1930.

Turgenev in England and America.
R. A. Gettman. Urbana, 111., 1941.

Ivan Turgenev.
The Portrait Game.
Trans, and ed. Marion Mainwaring. London, Chatto & Windus, 1973; New York, Horizon Press, 1973.

Ivan Tourgéneff et les courants politiques et sociaux de son temps.
Henri Granjard. Paris, 1954.

Lettres inédites à Pauline Viardot et sa famille.
Trans. Henri Granjard and Alexandre Zviguilsky. Editions L'Age de l'homme. Lausanne, 1971.

Tourgenueff. Nouvelle correspondance inédite.
Trans. Alexandre Zviguilsky. Librairie des Cinq Continents, Paris, 1972.

Tourgenueff, la Comtesse Lambert et le Nid des Seigneurs.
Henri Granjard. Paris, 1960.

Letters to an Actress.
Nora Gottlieb and Raymond Chapman. London, Allison & Busby, 1973; Ohio University Press, 1974.

Turgenev's Letters: A Selection.
Edgar H. Lehrman. New York, Knopf, 1960.

Lettres à Madame Viardot.
E. Halpérine-Kaminsky. Paris, 1907.

Ivan Tourguéneff d'après sa correspondance avec ses amis français.
E. Halperine-Kaminsky. Paris, 1901.

Souvenirs sur Tourguéneff.
Isaac Pavlovsky. Paris, 1887.

Mémoires de la vie littéraire.
Edmond and Jules de Goncourt. Paris, 1887.

La Russie en 1839.
Marquis de Custine. Paris, 1843.

The Marquis de Custine and His Russia in 1839.
George F. Kennan. Princeton, N.J., 1971; London, Hutchinson, 1972.

My Past and Thoughts: The Memoirs of Alexander Herzen.
New ed. Chatto & Windus and Knopf, 1968. One vol. ed. Chatto & Windus and Knopf, 1974.

The Romantic Exiles.
E. H. Carr. London, Gollancz, 1933.

Michael Bakunin.
E. H. Carr. New York, Macmillan, 1937.

The Life of Tolstoy.
Aylmer Maude. Oxford University Press, 1930.

George Sand.
Curtis Cate. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1975; London, Hamish Hamilton, 1975.

Oblomov and His Creator: The Life and Art of Ivan Goncharov.
Milton Ehre. Princeton, N.J., 1974.

Dostoevsky: Reminiscences.
Anna Dostoevsky. Ed. and trans. Beatrice Stillman. New York, Liveright, 1975.

Dostoevsky.
Konstantin Mochulsky. Princeton, N.J., 1967.

Pushkin: A Comparative Commentary.
John Bayley. London and New York, Cambridge University Press, 1971.

Letters of Anton Chekhov.
Ed. and trans. Michael Henry Heim and Simon Karlinsky. New York, Harper & Row, London, Bodley Head, 1973.

Letters of Anton Chekhov.
Selected and ed. Avrahm Yarmolinsky. New York, Viking, 1974; London, Cape, 1974.

History of Russian Literature.
D. S. A. Mirsky. Rev. ed. London, Routledge, 1949.

Manuscrits Parisiens d'lvan Tourguénoff.
André Mazon. Paris, 1930.

Turgenev. A Study.
Richard Freeborn. London and New York, Oxford University Press, 1960.

The Art of Fiction and Other Essays.
Henry James. New York, Oxford University Press, 1948.

Turgenev.
W. R. S. Ralston. New York, Athenaeum, 1883.

The Captain's Death Bed.
Virginia Woolf. London, The Hogarth Press, 1950.

Consuelo.
George Sand. Paris, 1869.

Spring Torrents.
Trans. Leonard Schapiro. London, Eyre Methuen, 1972.

Fort comme la mort.
Guy de Maupassant. Paris, 1889.

Fathers and Sons.
Trans. Rosemary Edmonds. London, Penguin, 1965. Reissued with the
Romanes Lectures,
“Fathers and Children,” by Isaiah Berlin, 1975.

First Love
trans, by Isaiah Berlin. London, Hamish Hamilton, 1950 (with
Rudin),
and Panther Books, 1965.

THERE has not yet been a definitive biography of Turgenev in any language. Much is mysterious and changeable in the life of a novelist who dazzled his friends by his conversation and his thousands of engaging letters. My own book is a portrait and, having no Russian, I have relied entirely on sources in English and French translation. I owe a considerable debt to Avrahm Yarmolinsky's brilliant
Turgenev: The Man, His Art and His Age,
to David Magarshack's capable
Life,
and for the crucial matter of Turgenev's relations with Pauline Viardot, to April Fitzlyon's
The Price of Genius.
These scholars and Henri Granjard and Alexandre Zviguilsky and their recent editions of Turgenev's correspondence with the Viardots have been invaluable and I thank them. My chief concern has been to enlarge the understanding of his superb short stories and novels and to explore the interplay of what is know about his life with his art. He was a deeply autobiographical writer.

I must thank the following translators on whom I have freely drawn, for enabling me to make my purpose clear: Constance Garnett; David Magarshack; Natalie Duddington; Rosemary Edmonds; Richard Freeborn; George Reavey; Leonard Schapiro; Robert Nichols; M. S. Mendel; and Isaiah Berlin both for his translation of
First Love
and his illuminating Romanes Lectures.

Tourguéneff le doux géant, l'aimable barbare … nous charmey nous enguirlande—

The Goncourt
Journals

For My Wife

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ISBN: 9781448200627
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