The Gentle Barbarian (9 page)

This first sketch which was published in
The Contemporary
was a success. In the next one,
Yermolai and the Miller's Wife,
Turgenev grows into the artist's power of secreting himself in the scene and among the people, so that while he stands waiting for the snipe to come down to the dark edge of the forest we get fragments of Yermolai's vagabond life in the woods. He was required by his owner to bring two brace of grouse and partridge once a month. He was out all day and night and could always do a good fifty miles without realising it, sleeping in trees, roofs, bridges and barns. He often lost his gun, his dog or his clothes; was often threatened for one thing or another. Odd in an expert hunter, he had not the patience to train a dog but he was superb in catching crayfish in his hands, in scenting game, snaring quails, training hawks, in capturing the nightingales by imitating their notes. After an evening's shooting the sportsman and Yermolai camp by a fire near a mill and the miller's wife comes out to see them, bringing tea, potatoes, bread and eggs.

A mist had risen from the river; there was no wind at all; from all round came the cry of the corncrake and faint sounds from the mill wheels of drops that dripped from the paddles and water gurgling through the bars of the lock.

And Turgenev eavesdrops on a desultory conversation between Yermolai and the miller's wife. We have grasped Turgenev's mastery of the miniature portrait, now we see his mastery of natural dialogue:

“And how are your pigs doing?” asked Yermolai.

“They're alive.”

“You ought to make me a present of a sucking pig.”

The miller's wife was silent for a while and then she sighed.

“Who is it you're with?” she asked.

“A gentleman from Kostomarovo.”

Yermolai threw a few pine twigs on the fire, they all caught at once and a thick white smoke came puffing into his face.

“Why didn't your husband let us into the cottage?”

“He's afraid.”

“Afraid! The fat old tub. Arina Timofeyevna, my darling, bring me a little glass of spirits.”

The miller's wife rose and vanished into the darkness.

Yermolai began to sing in an undertone

“When I went to see my sweetheart

I wore out all my shoes.”

Arina returned with a small flask and a glass.

Yermolai got up, crossed himself, and drank it off at a draught.

“Good” was his comment.

The miller's wife sat down again on the tub.

“Well, Arina Timofeyevna, are you still ill?”

“Yes.”

“What is it?”

“My cough troubles me at night.”

“The gentleman's asleep, it seems,” said Yermolai.

“Don't go to a doctor, Arina, it will be worse if you do.”

“Well, I'm not going.”

“But come and pay me a visit.”

Arina hung down her head dejectedly.

“I will drive my wife out for the occasion,” continued Yermolai.

“Upon my word I will.”

“You had better wake the gentleman, Yermolai Petrovitch—you see the potatoes are done.”

“Oh, let him snore,” said Yermolai.

One can guess from this dialogue that Turgenev has been trying to write plays. Two generations later Cheklov will learn the lesson from him.

And now, untroubled by the formal unity required by a story, Turgenev goes off at a tangent and “explains” that he knows the miller's wife was once lady's maid to the wife of a landowner called
Zvyerkoff and a terrible story is revealed. It is in fact—though he does not say so here—very close to the awful story of Varvara Petrovna's savage behaviour when her own lady's maid and favourite got married and was pregnant. The miller's wife had been carrying on with Zvyerkoff's footman. Zvyerkoff dramatises himself in the Russian way:

My indignation broke out then. I am like that. I don't like half measures! Petrushka was not to blame. We might flog him, but in my opinion he was not to blame. Arina … well, well, well, what more's to be said? I gave orders, of course, that the girl's hair should be cut off; she should be dressed in sackcloth and sent into the country. My wife was deprived of an excellent lady's maid … There, there, now you can judge the thing for yourself—you know what my wife is … yes, yes, yes, indeed! … an angel. She had grown attached to Arina and Arina knew it and had the face to … Eh? no, tell me … Oh? And what's the use of talking about it? … I, indeed—I—in particular felt hurt, wounded for a long time by the ingratitude of the girl … You may feed the wolf as you will, he has always a hankering for the woods …

And what happened to Petrushka? He was not flogged but he was sent into the army—the serf's chief dread.

The wild ducks fly over. Yermolai and the sportsman Turgenev fall asleep in the hay.

In
The Bailiff
and
Bir Yurk
the violence and corruption of serfdom are outspokenly the subjects: but in
Lgov
serfdom has its farcical aspects. The enormous impression which the sketches made as they came out over the years springs from Turgenev's art in portraying the peasants as feeling people, making even the humblest of them to appear to have a sort of self-preserving genius; they are incurably human and are so known to us in voice and habit that it is a shock when we remember “These are slaves.” The silent power of Turgenev's sketches comes from the fact that his art is liberating the people he describes; each one is more alive and human than his “situation” as part of the problem of serfdom. To call them a “problem” dehumanises them. Turgenev reveals people living in their natures.

When we get to
The Singers
and
Byezhin Prairie
which were written later there is a sudden swell of feeling and power as the
writer becomes assured and extends the skills of his art. He is writing now of the peasants alone—the landowners are dropped—and particularly of the two pastimes they excel in—their singing matches and their story-telling—“they really are musical in our part of the country: the village of Sergievskoe on the Orel highroad is deservedly noted throughout Russia for its harmonious chorus singing.”

In the dirty little inn at the top of the ravine two rival singers draw lots and the booth-keeper begins.

Half-shutting his eyes, he began singing in a high falsetto. He had a fairly sweet and pleasant voice though rather hoarse: he played with his voice like a woodlark, twisting and turning it in incessant roulades and trills up and down the scale, continually returning to the highest notes, which he held prolonged with special care … he was a Russian
tenore di grazia, ténor léger

finishing up in a whirl of flourishes and trills. He is followed by Yakov called the Turk, a ladler in a paper factory, an artist in every sense of the word: he covered his face with his hand and when he uncovered it and began to sing his face was as pale as a dead man's:

The first sound of his voice was faint and unequal and seemed not to come from his chest, but to be wafted from somewhere afar off, as though it had been floated by chance into the room. A strange effect was produced on all of us by this trembling resonant note; we glanced at one another, and Nikolas Ivanitch's wife seemed to draw herself up. The first note was followed by another, bolder and prolonged, but still obviously quivering, like a harp string when suddenly struck by a stray finger it throbs in a last swiftly dying tremble; the second was followed by a third and gradually gaining fire and breadth the strain swelled into a pathetic melody. “Not one little path ran into the field” … I have seldom, I must confess, heard a voice like it; it was slightly hoarse and not perfectly true; there was something morbid about it at first …

Yet a spirit of truth and fire, a Russian spirit was in it and it went straight to the heart. Tears came to the eyes of the drinkers in the inn. Turgenev continues:

in every sound of his voice one seemed to feel something dear and akin to us, something of the breadth and space, as though the familiar steppes were unfolding before our eyes into an endless distance.

(One can see how in the drawing-room of Courtavenel when she perhaps had sung
cante hondo
to him, Pauline Viardot would bring an echo of Russia back to him, not only as a cultivated grace but as, something primitive. Music was their bond.)

The singers sit down to get rotten drunk and the sportsman goes home in the evening and here Turgenev shows he can create dramatic emotion and then return to the ordinary voices of everyday life. He walks off down the hill from Kolotovka in the evening haze:

When all at once from somewhere far away in the plain came a boy's clear voice:

“Antropka! Antropka—a—a!” he shouted in obstinate and tearful desperation, with long, long drawing out of the last syllable.

Thirty times at least he repeated that shout when suddenly:

from the farthest end of the plain, as though from another world, there floated a scarcely audible reply “Wha—a—at?”

The boy's voice shouted back at once with gleeful exasperation:

“Come here, devil, wood imp.”

“What fo—or?” replied the other after a long interval.

“Because dad wants to thrash you.”

The second voice did not call back again and the boy fell to shouting “Antropka” once more. His cries, fainter and less and less frequent still floated to my ears, when it had grown completely dark and I had turned the corner of the wood which skirts my village and lies over three miles from Kolotovka … “Antropka—a—a” was still audible in the air, filled with the shadows of the night.

That note about the distance of Kolotovka, in its careful way, places a day of powerful feeling in its common locality—the master's touch.

In
Byezhin Prairie
the writer is seen once more enlarging his art and deepening his feeling. The sportsman has lost his way home and as the summer night comes on he stumbles into a group of peasant boys who are sitting round a fire in the ravine. At this hot time of the year they have the job of galloping horses out to graze because
in the daytime the flies drive the animals mad. They are shy of the sportsman and his dog but let him sit with them. He says nothing. He simply watches and listens. The night darkens and between the sudden, quickly fading blazes of light from the fire he sees a head of one of the horses for a second or two.

It stared with intent blank eyes upon us, nipped hastily at the long grass and drawing back again vanished instantly … The dark unclouded sky stood inconceivable, immense, triumphant above us in all its mysterious majesty. One felt a sweet oppression at one's heart.

The boys had stopped talking, but began again when they had forgotten the sportsman was there. They started talking of ghosts, the
domovoy
who came at night and made the mill-wheels turn in the paper factory and who scared them by giving a cough; or the
russalka,
the witch who had a voice as shrill as a toad's and who wanted to be tickled; of a man who drowned in the river; of Trishka, the marvel, whom no one can catch. If he is in prison he asks for a bowl of water and dives into it and vanishes; put chains on him—he claps his hands and they fall off. There is talk of the water pit where some thieves drowned a forester who cries out still from the water. Pavel, one of the boys, goes off to draw water from the river and comes back saying he has heard the water spirit calling him from under the stream. So the boys go on frightening themselves and trying to brazen it out until one by one they fall asleep. Once more, Turgenev plays with his skill to catch the moments as they drop by.

The moon at last had risen: I did not notice it at first: it was such a tiny crescent.

How naturally he catches the moment between noticing and not noticing. This, one says, is where his art lies; not simply in seeing, but in the waywardness and the timelessness of seeing. Seeing is like light and shadow, playing over what is seen. Things seen are exact yet they flow away or are retrieved: the past and the present mingle in a clear stream. There are two masters of seeing in Russian literature: Tolstoy and Turgenev. Tolstoy sees exactly as if he were an animal or a bird: and what he sees is still and settled for good. He has the pride of the eye. Turgenev is also exact but without that
decisive pride: what he sees is already changing. In one of his letters he quotes with admiration an image of Byron's “the music of the face”—the movement from note to note, the disappearance of the thing seen in time as it passes.

The brief tales told by the boys in their natural, half-scared language are not simply a collection of peasant superstitions, they are part of their boyhood on that particular night—on another night, in another place, the boys would be different. On another night they would not have been stopped (as they were once or twice on
this
night) by the cry of a heron or by their dog getting up and suddenly barking and rushing into the woods with Pavel after him to catch a frightened horse. This was after Pavel went to fetch water from the river and came back saying he had heard his name called by the drowned boy from the water. An omen? Yes, an omen. The sportsman left the boys just before daybreak. All were asleep except Pavel who half rose and gazed intently at him. He nodded and the sportsman walked homeward along the bank of the river, shrouded with smoky mist and then came

torrents of young hot sunlight, crimson at first and later brilliantly red, brilliantly golden. Everything began quivering into life, awakening, singing, resounding, chattering

and after he had gone a mile or two, the horses rushed by, chased by the boys.

I have, unfortunately, to add that in that same year Pavlusha died. He did not drown; he was killed in falling from a horse. A pity, for he was a fine lad!

The last sentence is a mistake, but the casual note of Pavel's death is not perfunctory: it recalls the omen, it restores the story to the chances in the life of every day, the sense of the acceptance of life and of death. In an account of the death of a woodcutter, Turgenev writes: