The Gentle Barbarian (4 page)

He got ashore safely in the company of a Mme. Tyutchev and her children—she was the wife of the poet—and somehow got them to Berlin by road and there he seems to have begun a long love affair with her.

Unluckily a few weeks after the fire, malicious gossip about his antics on the steamer spread to the drawing-rooms of Petersburg: the fat young giant with the shrill voice had pushed past all the women screaming, “Save me. I am the only son of my mother.” The anecdote got into the papers. Rather too pedantically Turgenev pointed out that since his mother had two sons he could not have said these words that had brought ridicule on him—but he did say it was natural for a green youth to be terrified of being burned alive or drowned. The story took on so thoroughly—Dostoevsky used it years later in the caricature of Turgenev that appears in
The Possessed,
a novel noteable for its pillorying of many literary figures—that it got to Varvara Petrovna, who wrote angrily that it was indeed not his fault that he was called
le gros monsieur,
but to have made such a spectacle of himself had marked him as a ridiculous coward. Hence, in old age, his attempt to tell “the true story” of his panic and the appearance of another possible
gros monsieur,
the tall general in the story. A reckless story teller himself, Turgenev invited malice in return for his witticisms. One possible witness is missing from the story: Porfiry, the half-brother and the serf-valet whom he took to Berlin—but perhaps he was not on the steamer and had been sent on by another route. But good came out of the disaster from Varvara Petrovna's point of view when later on her son told his mother of the affair with Mme Tyutchev. A passing love affair with an intelligent married woman years older than himself, she wrote, was—as the French had taught her—just the thing to form a young man.

In Berlin, Turgenev and Porfiry settled into a modest flat. Porfiry was a clever boy who had inherited the Turgenev habits of overeating and chasing girls. The two young men lived like school boys together rather than as master and servant. They sat about playing cards; they organised rat hunts and Turgenev wrote Porfiry's love letters for him. He was also determined to force his mother to set Porfiry free; he sent him to a medical school in Berlin and when he eventually returned to Spasskoye he became her house-doctor, expert in calming her with his chief remedy—laurel drops. But she refused to give him his freedom and Porfiry himself refused it while she was alive; like many of the serfs he suspected that emancipation was a doubtful advantage and he enjoyed his power over the old lady.

Young Russians who went to Berlin for a larger education than they could get in Russia—“that immense and sombre figure, motionless and masked like the Sphinx”—carried their Russia with them. They fell into two main groups: the politicals who thought of nothing but drastic social change, and the metaphysicals who were under the full influence of German idealism. In
My Past and Thoughts,
Herzen says both parties were endlessly trying to “get out of the Chinese shoes of German manufacture in which Russia had hobbled for 150 years and though they may have caused painful corns they have not crippled their bones.”

Turgenev was at an age for rushing into more “soul-in-soul” friendships, and he found them in two very different men: the aesthete philosopher Stankevich—a few years older than himself—and the young Bakunin. Herzen gives one of his terse, detailed portraits of Stankevich:

Stankevich, also one of the
idle
people who accomplish
nothing
… had made a profound study of German philosophy, which appealed to his aesthetic sense: endowed with exceptional abilities, he drew a large circle of friends into his favourite pursuit. This circle was extremely remarkable: from it came a regular legion of
savants,
writers and professors, among whom were Belinsky, Bakunin and Granovsky … Sickly in constitution and gentle in character, a poet and a dreamer, Stankevich was naturally bound to prefer contemplation and abstract thought to living and purely practical questions; his artistic idealism suited him; it was “the crown of victory” set on the pale, youthful brow that bore the imprint of death. The others had too much physical vigour and too little poetical feeling to remain long absorbed in speculative thought without passing on into life. An exclusively speculative tendency is utterly opposed to the Russian temperament, and we shall soon see how the
Russian spirit
transformed Hegel's teaching and how the vitality of our nature asserted itself …

And he goes on to say how the scholarly, scientific jargon of the Germans was unsuited to the leading characteristic of the Russian language which has extraordinary ease in expressing

… abstract ideas, the lyrical emotions of the heart, “life's mouse-like flittings,” the cry of indignation, sparkling mischief and shaking passion.

a sentence that conveys the kind of language that was forming in Turgenev's mind and enabled him to become eventually a master of Russian prose.

Bakunin, though deep in the same beliefs, was beginning to emerge and turn to politics.

What was it touched these men? … They had no thought, no care for their social position, for their personal advantage or for security; their whole life, all their efforts were bent on the public good, regardless of all personal profit … The interests of truth, the interests of learning, the interests of art,
humanitas,
swallowed up everything.

Turgenev himself evoked this period of his life when he came to write his first novel,
Rudin,
in which Stankevich—as Pokrovsky
and Bakunin (as Rudin), are drawn from life. Stankevich had, Turgenev says, the magnetism of the saint. Self-perfection was the business of life and he rejected all political commitment. He deplored Turgenev's frivolity and reproached him for telling lies.

Bakunin was four years older than Turgenev. In
Rudin,
Turgenev writes of his domineering and flamboyant character:

As we listened to Rudin [i.e., Bakunin], we felt for the first time as if we had grasped the general principle of the universe, as if a veil had been lifted at last. Even if admitting he was not uttering an original thought—what of that? Order and harmony seemed to be established in all we knew … he had a prodigious memory and what an effect he had on young people. (The young) must have generalisations, conclusions, incorrect if you like but still conclusions. A perfectly sincere man never suits them. Try and tell young people you cannot give them the whole truth and they will not listen to you.

The friendship of Bakunin and Turgenev was a friendship of blue-eyed Slavonic giants. The Berliners were amazed by the sight of the two dandies, Turgenev in his green swallow-tail coat and Bakunin in his-lavender one, as they sat in the cafés, went to concerts and theatres and appeared in the fashionable salons, united by the teachings of Hegel. Turgenev was under the spell of Bakunin's eloquence: on Bakunin's side there was the passion for domination and also—since he was forming a lifetime's genius for living at other people's expense—a lavish if disinterested enjoyment of Turgenev's money.

Bakunin's dominance, in these two years, had an additional grace: he was the ruler and protector of three sisters. Turgenev had fallen in love with the plainest one; Stankevich and the critic Be-linsky with the other two. The story is an odd one. Bakunin was the eldest of ten children born to a fairly wealthy landowner in the sleepy province of Tver and had organised his brothers and sisters into a kind of conspiracy of sensibility against the father he detested. He loved his sisters jealously and when they grew up he meddled in their love affairs or marriages, in order to keep his hold on them; indeed it is thought that failure in this was the private source of his turn to wild political conspiracy and to Anarchism. There is a strong suspicion that he was impotent and he was certainly
a stern supervisor of Turgenev's sexual morals. Herzen ironically reports Bakunin as saying to Turgenev in the proper language of the period:

“Let us go and plunge into the gulf of real life; let us fling ourselves on the waves and pick up a pretty actress.”

It sounds like a cry of exasperation at Turgenev's wandering thoughts. Unhappily for their friendship Turgenev had fallen in love in a philosophical way with the sister to whom Bakunin was most attached and there was another difficulty in this: Hegelians believed that ideal love reached its most delicate manifestations in the brotherly and sisterly affections, which in this case had a disturbingly incestuous, though innocent, significance for Bakunin. What Turgenev afterwards called Bakunin's “diplomatic habits” came at once into play. He concealed his violent jealousy by drawing Turgenev out, listening to his accounts of his feelings, analysing them, introducing doubts on the highest principles. He gave his sister the same analytical treatment. If Turgenev was an idealist at the time, he was also a hedonist and he began to find Tatyana's conversation, and his own, when they all spent a summer at Tver, too metaphysical. The first shock in his friendship with Bakunin came when he discovered that Bakunin had read his love letters, full of extravagant phrases in German and he had to listen to Bakunin's talking like a father to him. The second shock was the discovery that Tatyana had really fallen in love with him. Turgenev had been deluded by his bookish-ness and was dutifully reliving the painful story of
Eugene Onegin
in the compulsive fashion of his generation. He cooled. He remembered Stankevich's warning against “the lie in the soul,” and learned how difficult it is to get out of such a situation without cruelty and guilt. Tatyana became ill, he hesitated for a long time and then broke with her in exalted German—it sounded more heartfelt in a foreign language—and the letter contained a psychological insight into this kind of platonic love which could have been put with more tact:

It is for you alone that I wished to be a poet, for you with whom my soul is bound up in such an ineffably wonderful way that I almost do not feel the need to see you.

So Pushkin's
Eugene Onegin
was brought up to date. Tatyana's laugh was bitter. Turgenev's shame at his proneness to juvenile self-deception turned to anger with himself and her. A long time passed before the guilt—and the resentment of a feeling so uncalled for—worked its way out of him. Bakunin despised Turgenev, told him he himself had now stopped living in his imagination and was now living “in a more realistic manner,” and borrowed more money from him. The friendship was over. There is a double guilt—the one expressed in Turgenev's story,
A Correspondence,
written a few years after:

Falsehood walked hand in hand with us because it poisoned our best feelings, because everything in us was artificial and stained.

Worse. There was the Russian disease:

We Russians have set ourselves no other task but the cultivation of our own personality and habits of self consciousness distort the very striving for truth.

It is noticeable that even in such an intimate “confession” he enlarges it by invoking the ever shadowy figure of Russianness. To be a Russian is a fate.

From these happy, heady years in Berlin, these gifted young men who lazily despised the stolid Berliners as they drank up their philosophy eventually emerged and chose their different directions. Bakunin, the dynamo, never lost his habit of meddling and intrigue but now carried it flamboyantly into revolutionary politics and in a few years would be shackled to a wall in an Austrian prison, under sentence of death and, with a mixture of luck and cunning, would escape in middle age from Siberia. The petty destroyer of other people's love affairs became the anarchist and enthusiast for the destruction of society. The gentle Stankevich went off to Rome and died, very young, of tuberculosis. His death affected Turgenev deeply, for Stankevich's conversations, his contemplative idealism, had had a lasting influence on him. Turgenev was the slowest to find his way. Rich and lazy—lazy and hesitant in disposition, but not in
intellect—he had read enormously in English, French and German literature and in the Greek and Roman classics and was likely to become, and indeed did become, the most cultivated Russian in Europe; but he was lost in the Romantic dream, writing his lyrical poetry which was no better than anyone else's and was half-inclined to take to academic life. He knew he had brains enough to master that with his eyes closed. He was wavering, as he wavered when he listened to the Russian Hegelians who had moved towards politics in a theoretical way, believing that the hopes of the French Revolution were still alive; one day he would be carried away by them, the next day he was the sceptic. He was an apolitical young poet with one passionate political conviction: the son of the despotic owner of five thousand serfs was convinced that serfdom was a cruel and corrupting form of slavery and was at the root of Russian inertia and backwardness. The one gain from “the plunge into the German sea” was, he said, that he had become a Westerner for good. Peter the Great, who, in the eighteenth century, had forcibly introduced administrative reforms and the need for science, was Turgenev's hero; and he rejected for good the doctrines of the Slavophils, who held that the traditional religions and peasant culture of Russia and the Tsar who ruled it should stay withdrawn from the corrupting taint of Western ideas.

He had been home once or twice in the Berlin days. He had travelled for a year in France, Italy and Switzerland. He had marched over the Alps, alone, thinking of himself as Manfred. He had been comically drunk on German wines and had fallen briefly for girls in German inns. On his first return to Spasskoye in 1839 he ran into two domestic dramas. For one a superstitious serfwoman was responsible. She had been fumigating a sick cow in the stable by burning herbs on a shoe and burying the shoe under the floor. The place went up like tinder and Spasskoye caught fire. Most of the fine furniture went and, apart from the stone gallery corridor, there was only a wing left. Varvara Petrovna watched it all from an armchair on the lawn, surrounded by what could be rescued. One of her personal maids, a German girl called Anna, rescued a chest containing 20,000 roubles from a serf who was going off with it: the brother Nikolai courageously rescued the bedridden nurse who had
helped Varvara Petrovna escape from her stepfather when she was a girl. Nikolai was the hero and he and the strong-minded German maid presently became lovers and the secret was soon out. Unlike Ivan, Nikolai was a serious lover; that was intolerable to Varvara Petrovna who had no objections to her sons going to bed with servants—she would simply send their babies away—but she told Nikolai firmly to remember the duties of his rank and not to be carried away by the empty
“promesses des passions: elles évanouissent
…” The tortured Nikolai married Anna secretly. Varvara Petrovna raged when she eventually discovered this and cut him off. He had by this time become a civil servant and for years she left him to struggle on a poor clerk's income and refused to see him or his wife or their children. Ivan did all he could, as usual, for reconciliation, but the sixty-year-old mother was obdurate. Nikolai lived in misery on his pay for many years but when he was the father of three, she did at last put on one of her staged scenes. She agreed to go to Petersburg, to look at the three children—but in the street outside his house. She stared at them and went off asking for their pictures to be sent to Spasskoye. Reconciliation? No. When the pictures arrived she took them to her room and smashed them.