The Pritchett Century (79 page)

From her exhausting tours and the applause of audiences in London, Germany and Austria, the singer and her husband returned at intervals to Courtavenel to rest. They had taken in the young Gounod and Turgenev was for a time a little jealous of Pauline’s interest in his work: there was some local gossip—George Sand indeed wrote to Pauline asking if he were “a good man”—but the friendship seems to have been strictly musical in its interests, though when Gounod suddenly married, his wife made trouble when Louis and Pauline sent her a bracelet.

On Sundays Turgenev would go off shooting with Louis or would go for charming walks with Pauline. They lay under the trees talking or reading books aloud or in the house he would go through the works she was studying. If there were parties Turgenev danced with her; he was an excellent dancer. On ordinary evenings, the family of aunts sat about reading, knitting and sewing, and an uncle taught Pauline’s rather spoiled little daughter Spanish, Gounod worked on a musical score, and Turgenev told stories.

Then Louis and Pauline were off again and every few days he was writing to her. The letters begin, Bonjour or Dear Madame Viardot, and there were friendly messages to Viardot. To hers, Viardot often added a postscript. Nothing could have been more correct; but by 1848, his letters often end in ardent phrases in German. She is his
“dearest Angel.” Again “Thank you a thousand, thousand times for … you know why … you the best and dearest of women … what happiness you gave me then …” And “Give me your kind and delicate hands so that I can press and kiss them a long time … Whatever a man can think, feel and say, I say it and feel it now.”

Her hands were beautiful and he worshipped them all his life. In a letter sent to her in 1849 he said in German:

In July ’49 at Courtavenel he went off to a village fête, studied the faces and watched the sweating dancers. He passed the next day alone and wrote to her in German:

There is a line in one letter in which, once only, he addresses her as
“du.”
From this and from the paragraphs in German some biographers have thought that Pauline and he had become physically lovers and that German was used to hide the fact from her husband who is said not to have known the language. This is most unlikely: Louis had been many times to Germany; as a capable translator in a bilingual family, he must at least have picked up some German in the course of his business and indeed from Pauline’s singing. German is more likely to be “a tender little language” between intimate friends and Turgenev, the polyglot, liked to spice his letters with foreign words for he could not use more than a word or two of Russian to her. Perhaps in using German he was simply using the romantic language of the sublime he had learned in Berlin when he was nineteen. Expressions of love are at once more extravagant and frequent in a foreign tongue and, for that reason, have the harmless sense of theatrical fantasy or flattery: platonic
love affairs live by words and not deeds. George Sand wrote with the same exaltation in her novels; and young women of the period would expect no less from a correspondent, especially from the Russian “openness.” There is no sign that Pauline ever replied to Turgenev in such terms.

It is impossible to say more about the nature of this love for the moment; but there is strong reason to suspect that Pauline, duty or no duty, “hot southern blood” (as she once or twice said) or not, was one of those gifted young women who do not feel physical passion until later in life and have something mannish in their nature. And what about the guilt Turgenev may have felt in being in love with the wife of a generous friend? This is also a mystery: there is only a slight sign of this embarrassment in his stories.

In their biographies, Yarmolinsky, Magarshack and April Fitzlyon differ considerably in their interpretation. Yarmolinsky is vivid, engaging and ironical in the disabused manner of the nineteen-twenties and regards the love affair as purely platonic on both sides, a deep
amitié amoureuse
, which would go a long way to explaining why Turgenev never gave it up and why Louis Viardot tolerated it. (Louis was to become the father of four children.) Magarshack asserts that Pauline did become Turgenev’s mistress and that the affair came quickly to an end because she gave him up for Ary Scheffer, the painter, who often came to Courtavenel and that when she and Turgenev were reconciled she was unfaithful to him and her husband again. He also accepts the common gossip that her second daughter, Didie, and her son Paul were probably Turgenev’s children. Neither of these writers has closely considered the character of Pauline and all the evidence as searchingly as April Fitzlyon has done. She believes that Pauline did fall seriously in love with Turgenev and indeed felt passion for the first time; that it is just possible they were briefly lovers, though to neither of them was physical love important—indeed Pauline may have been put off by a dislike of “conjugal duty”—and that, in any case, she put her art before personal relationships always and is well-known to have disapproved of the Bohemian morals of her profession. Far from having been her lover, Ary Scheffer—a man as old as her husband and a stern moralist—would be the counsellor who prevented her from
leaving her husband for Turgenev and made her control her heart by her will which was certainly very strong. She says it is indeed just possible in the case of the son that Turgenev was the father, but it is unlikely and there is no evidence. And that although Turgenev made bitter remarks in the vicissitudes of his attachment to her and in his masochistic way said that he lived under her heel as many of his incredulous friends thought, he endured what he did endure because he was in love with his own chivalrous love.

In this situation Louis Viardot behaved with dignity and concealed the pain he must have felt. He was passionately in love with his wife and was no cynic: he remained friends with Turgenev all his life, although some thought their attitude to each other formal.

The situation indeed changed, as we shall see.

Whatever went on at Courtavenel in those early years there is no doubt that Louis and his wife must have regarded Turgenev affectionately as an extraordinary and exotic case. Viardot himself, as a traveller and one who had felt the Spanish spell of his wife, must have felt the Russian spell of Turgenev. They must have been astounded by the story of his barbarous experience at Spasskoye, and have been amazed that the giant had grown to be grave and gentle, as well as gifted. And Louis must have recognised a wit and a mind far richer than his own. The Viardots felt concern for his talent and both pointed to the dangers of idleness to a man who was rich enough to do nothing. Pauline was no amateur: she was an artist and a professional and it can never have entered her head that Turgenev, who was incapable of managing money or any practical matter, could replace her husband. One can see by their kindness, and especially Louis Viardot’s, that although they saw his distinction and originality, their feeling must have been protective. Viardot had no small vanity in his own taste and exercised an almost fatherly right to give sound advice to the feckless aristocrat and was aware of having two artists on his hands whom he could keep in order. He was a rational man but quietly firm in requiring moral behaviour and decorum. There is a line in
A Month in the Country
, the play that Turgenev began to write before he left Courtavenel and which in many respects is drawn on his
situation as a lover. Rakitin, the lover, is made to say at the crisis of the play:

Consumptive? Or self-consuming? It strikes one that those words must have been actually spoken at Courtavenel not by Turgenev but by Viardot. They have his manner.

There comes a moment, in one of the last letters Turgenev was to write from Courtavenel, when he adds a sentence in German:

(1977)

Although friends of Chekhov had heard him say that he saw no difficulty in chasing two or even more hares at the same time, they were alarmed when, in 1890, the news leaked out that he was planning to travel across Russia and Asia to the Russian penal colony on the island of Sakhalin, Russia’s notorious Botany Bay in the Far East. The nomad had been reborn. When he asked Suvorin to back him, Suvorin refused. That hare, Suvorin said, had died more than a generation ago. Even the story of
Manon Lescaut
was dead. Chekhov’s duty was to literature, not to documentary investigation. And in any case, there was no trans-Siberian railway; the appalling land journey through barbarous country would kill him. Stirred by opposition and anxious to refute both his liberal and radical critics, who accused him of lacking “a general political idea,” Chekhov fought back.

When Mikhail Chekhov was asked what had put the idea into his brother’s head, he said it was an accident: Anton had happened to read a penal document lying about in an office. In Petersburg the gossip was that he wanted to go in order to recover from an unhappy love affair with a married woman, Lydia Avilova, a sentimental novelist. This is certainly untrue. After his death she wrote
Chekhov in My Life
, which has been shown to be a wishful illusion. More interestingly, when he had graduated as a doctor he had not written his dissertation, and the desire to make amends by writing a serious medical document that would qualify him was strong. Indeed on his return from Sakhalin he did submit a manuscript to the university, where it was at once rejected as unacademic.

There is no doubt that Chekhov felt he had the “duty of repaying my debt to medicine.” But it is very important also that ever since his boyhood he had been a passionate reader of the journeys of Przhevalsky, the greatest of Russian explorers, and had read Humboldt’s journey across the steppe and George Kennan’s famous expedition to Siberia. More intimately human are his words to a friend, the writer Ivan Shcheglov, who supposed, naturally, that Chekhov was going simply to observe and “get impressions.” Chekhov replied that he was going “simply to be able to live for half a year as I have not lived up to this time. Don’t expect anything from me.”

Suvorin gave in. Chekhov got his sister, his brother Alexander and friends to do exhaustive research for him in Petersburg. Among other responsibilities he had to see that his family had enough money to live on while he was away. He described his own state of excitement medically: “It’s a form of lunacy: Mania Sakhalinosa.”

He set off at last late in April 1890 on a four-thousand-mile journey that would last over three months. He had been spitting blood that winter. His sister and a few friends saw him off on the river steamer at
Yaroslavl. He was equipped with a heavy leather coat and a short one, top boots, a bottle of cognac, a knife “useful for cutting sausages and killing tigers” and a revolver for protection against brigands—he never had to use it.

His account of his land and river journey is told in vivid letters to his sister and his mother.

The rain poured down during the river trip to the ravines of Kineshma. After leaving the steamer he took to the road, jolted in an open public coach from one posting house to the next, though he hired private carriages when he could, and sat there freezing “like a goldfinch in a cage.”

He writes to his sister: