The Gentle Barbarian (5 page)

For years no one could persuade her to receive her eldest son or his wife. Even when, in a terrible year, the three children died, she was unmoved. But with Ivan her relationship took an exalted, passionate and curious turn. In her letters to him when he was in Berlin or Petersburg, and in her diary, strange words have been found. She wrote in the disconnected, sentimental way of a naïve school girl who is in love, or in the flirtatious manner of a worldly old woman. Mme. Zhitova says she once sat down before Ivan's picture and wrote in her diary:

To my son Jean…. Jean is the very sun of my life. I see only him and when his image fades, I am blind and don't know where I am. A mother's heart is never deceived, my instinct, Jean, is stronger than reason in me.

In her letters, Yarmolinsky tells us in his biography, there are strange phrases where she addresses him as “
ma chère fille, ma Jeannette … vous êtes ma favourite
… ssh, for heaven's sake, let nobody hear it!” She even calls herself his “most tender father and friend … I
alone conceived you, all that I am you are.” And she writes of a Queen Bee being dried by the drones: “She stretched her legs with an air of dignity, played the coquette, feigned extreme fatigue. Oh woman, you are the same in all creation, living to please and to be admired.” And then, sternly, to her son—“You are an egoist of egoists. I know your character better than you know yourself … I prophesy that you will not be loved by your wife. You will not love the woman but only your own pleasure.” Slyly she wheedled the story of his love affairs from him.

But these intimacies, after he had finished with Berlin, were uneasy. She had sent dozens of letters to him while he was away: he had replied to very few of them. Indeed Nikolai had said “Ivan only writes when he wants money.” (This was true: he had run through 20,000 roubles in these student years and when she sent him money to buy her gloves or hats, he had pocketed it and forgotten to send them.) When she heard he was writing poetry she was scornful. There was worse. In Petersburg he had written one or two critical articles for a review. This was nothing short of a descent into “clerking” as she called it and not an occupation for a gentleman. It was like becoming one of the serf-clerks on her estate or some cheap foreign tutor. She despised Russian writers and when he persuaded her to read Gogol's
Dead Souls
she had to agree it was “frightfully amusing,” but very improper: the impropriety lay in making fun of the gentry. She wanted Ivan to marry a woman of his own class and either to become important as a State official or to be a
comme-il-faut
man about town, doing nothing. She did not mind which. She thought his opinions about serfdom were puerile. In the meantime she flirted and quarrelled with him by turns. She despised his tender heart and if he annoyed her she could always threaten to beat or humiliate one of the serf boys or girls, so as to get even with him. If he did not bow to her she announced, with frank sadism, that she would take it out on others.

Turgenev now returned to the idea that his philosophical studies might equip him for a professorship. The mother gave in, for the time being. He went back to Petersburg and sat for his exams and passed easily. He had only now to write a dissertation. And here he gave up. It was too simple to become a professor: one had merely to memorise the acceptable ideas of other people, and the end of the love affair with Tatyana had turned him against German idealism.
He seems to have celebrated that apostasy by coming down to Spasskoye and getting a child by one of the seamstresses there. Varvara Petrovna was afraid that Ivan would follow the example of Nikolai and to stop that she agreed to have the child in the house, for Ivan soon went back to the capital and the child, called Pelagea—her name was later changed to Paulinette—was a useful item of emotional blackmail. When Ivan seemed to be obedient the little girl was brought from the servants' quarters into the drawing-room; when he was not, she was sent back to the servants and he was thereby punished.

The only means Varvara Petrovna now had of ruling her sons was to keep them short of money. Nikolai had been totally cut out; now Ivan was taught a lesson, if not as severely. To placate his mother he took a job in the Ministry of the Interior. His chief—who may have had more influence on him than has been noticed—was Vladimir Dahl, a schoolmasterly writer of Danish origin who had written a standard work,
A Reasoned Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language
in four volumes, but he was also a writer of anecdotes or sketches in the “natural” or documentary style. Ivan had entered the office to appease his mother, but really in order to spend his time writing long narrative poems of his own. His official task was to write a report on the needs of Russian agriculture. He knew that his report would lead to nothing: it was an exercise and would simply be filed away with dozens of others and be forgotten. He made the safe conventional criticisms of serfdom as other officials had done: one had to be careful not to say serfdom should be
abolished.
One simply lost the subject by going into speculations about reform. It was obvious to Dahl that the young dilettante was a useless civil servant whose work could not be relied on and that he was using the office for doing his own writing and, when he was not doing that, going off into Society to play the dandified drawing-room poet. Yet, from the point of view of the artist, no experience is lost. Writing the report was a help in due time when he came to writing the views of Lavretsky in
A Nest of Gentlefolk,
many, many years later. There is a passage from the report (quoted by David Magarshack in his
Life)
which makes the dangerous comparison of the genuine aristocracy of the free Norman Knights of England with the Russian nobility who were mere servants of the Tsar.

It was 1843. He was twenty-five, and it was a decisive year for
Turgenev. At his own expense he published the narrative poem
Parasha
he had been writing in office hours, and he came under a lasting influence: he met the great critic Belinsky.

In a very few years, when he became famous, Turgenev grew to detest his poetry and did his best to keep it from the public eye and raged when anyone mentioned it. It was, he said, second-rate and like “dirty tepid water.” Yet
Parasha
marks a turning point: Belinsky wrote a long article praising the poem.
Parasha
is a closed book to those of us who cannot read Russian; nearly 100 years later Prince Mirsky in his
History of Russian Literature
says it is not contemptible. Belinsky was older than Turgenev but, like him, had passed through the same phase of German idealism and had become the father of “commitment” in Russian literature, which, for better or worse, has lasted with intervals until the present day, and one can understand what had pleased the critic. It was a long narrative story placed firmly in Russian life. Instead of Italianising his people, Turgenev has taken his pair of young lovers from Pushkin's
Eugene Onegin
and has turned them into simple, puzzled young Russians of his generation. The hero is a scornful, careless young gentleman—another Lensky, or Turgenev himself; the heroine Tatyana is a simple, natural, devoted girl. They marry happily and are lost in the dullness of provincial life. The tone is now lyrical, now bantering and ironical. Gracefully Turgenev seems to be mocking his own disconcerting feelings about Tatyana Bakunin, particularly—as David Magarshack says, in the line:

“I do not like ecstatic young ladies… I dislike their pale round faces”

and also his own weakness for aristocratic society. Even Varvara Petrovna, who was proud of the copy he sent her and even more proud that like a gentleman, he had paid for its publication and was therefore not a scribbler, enjoyed its light conversational tone and especially its descriptions of country life.

“We country folk,” she said, “love everything real. Your Parasha poem or story smells of wild strawberries.”

She also picked up a social hint from the line:
“Kvas
was never served in the best houses” and banned the vulgar drink from Spasskoye—a pretty compliment. In her happy moments she was an engaging child and one can guess, in this respect, what Turgenev's talents owed to her.

The next step in Turgenev's liberation came that summer when Belinsky became his friend and father-figure. There is a long and brilliant picture of him in Turgenev's
Literary Reminiscences
, one of the best portraits which the master portrait painter ever wrote. Belinsky was already famous as a harassed and pugnacious journalist. He was the son of a doctor, his grandfather a priest—a class despised by the gentry—and since he came from Moscow he was a figure of ridicule in official Petersburg where he seemed as grotesque in his almost childish way as Gogol was. A shock of fair hair fell over his face, his nose was flattened, one of his shoulder blades stood out strangely, he was hollow-chested and he had a terrible consumptive cough and he had the habit of walking with a downcast head close to the walls of the street so that someone once said they had seen wolves like that in the forest, but only when they were chased by dogs. But he could be an enchanting talker, though when there were Slavophils present in a diplomatic or in a fashionable salon, he would break into roaring taunts and temper. Turgenev was captivated by his blue eyes which had golden sparks in them when he was excited.

Belinsky was a poor man and earned his living by reviewing books and there was always a rush for his paper. He was obliged to review everything that was published, piles of stuff from cookery books upwards; but the attraction of his hurried writing lay in the sly way he had of slipping in his serious opinions on the state of Russia in the repressive reign of the Emperor Nicholas, in his cunning at getting round the severe censorship. His political commitment did not blunt his perceptions of the values of art—as happened ten years later among the didactic critics of the next generation. In speaking of Belinsky as a “committed” artist, Turgenev is also giving us the views he himself stuck to all his life:

he was much too intelligent, he had too much common sense to deny art, to fail to understand not only its great significance, but also its very naturalness, its physiological necessity. Belinsky recognised in art one of the fundamental manifestations of the human personality, one
of the laws of our nature, a law whose validity was proved by our daily experience. He did not admit of life only for life's sake; it was not for nothing that he was an idealist. Everything had to serve one principle, art as well as science, but in its own special way. The truly childish and, besides, not new but “warmed-up” explanation of art as an imitation of nature he would have deemed worthy of neither a reply nor of his attention … Art, I repeat, was for Belinsky as much a legitimate sphere of human activity, as science, as society, as the State … From art he demanded truth, vital, living truth.

Turgenev had published
Parasha
at a bad time for writers; the censorship quibbled over every opinion and took a sadistic pleasure in annoying writers about their prose style. One of the censors was jovial. He used to say he did not “want to cross out a single letter in an article; all he wanted to do “was to destroy its spirit.”

The censor said to me one day, looking with feeling into my eyes: “You don't want me to cross anything out. But just think: if I don't cross anything out I may lose 3000 roubles a year and if I do—who cares?”

There was bribery everywhere; serfdom; the army in the saddle; no courts of justice; the number of admissions to the universities had been reduced to three hundred; serious books could not be brought in from abroad; denunciations on all sides. What could be done?

“Well,” said Turgenev, “you went to see Belinsky.”

The friendship was long and there is no doubt Turgenev and his friends helped Belinsky with money. The fact that Belinsky thought nothing of the rest of his poetry, and when the first of the
Sportsman's Sketches
appeared he was only a little more tolerant, did not affect the affection of the two men. Turgenev went to Salzbrunn and Paris with him but like many ardent Westerners, Belinsky was bored by Europe when he saw it, had not the slightest interest in European history and could speak no foreign language. Paris revolted him as it was to revolt Tolstoy. Belinsky used to call Turgenev “the gamin,” but what impressed him about “the gamin” was that he was an educated man.

Belinsky's friendship is a sign that there was a change in Turgenev's character. He had come from Berlin snobbish, scornful and foppish and he was beginning to find by self-effacement his real powers.

What Turgenev needed in order to outgrow the dilettante self was not only a change of mind but, above all, a deepening of his power to feel. He had not yet known the force of passion.

In November of 1843 Pauline Viardot-Garcia, the Spanish singer, came from Paris to Petersburg to sing the part of Rosina in
Il Barbiere di Seviglia
at the magnificent opera house which had been remodelled and which could hold an audience of three thousand people. Italian opera had not been heard there for a generation and the season aroused wild enthusiasm. It was a triumph for the young singer and for her middle-aged husband who was her impresario. She had succeeded in London but had been edged out of the Paris opera by the established prima donnas.

The event was not one that a poet and young man of fashion could miss but Turgenev was in a bad way for money because his mother now refused to pay off his heavy debts and kept him to a very small allowance. She had been amused by
Parasha
as a personal present but she was not going to do anything for a common scribbler who dragged the family name into the papers. He could earn very little by his occasional writing, but he somehow got a cheap seat at the opera and saw on the stage a slight young married woman of twenty-two, three years younger than himself, with no figure and almost ugly
to look at. She had black hair, a wide mouth, a heavy underlip that seemed continuous with her chin and a very long neck. The effect was of sullenness in a strong, gypsyish way, the hooded eyes were large and black, the pupils lifting in one of those asserting Spanish stares of mockery and pride; yet the stare would break into sudden vivacity, warmth and enticing smiles. And then the voice!