The Gentle Barbarian (12 page)

Love, whether happy or unhappy is a real calamity if you give yourself up wholly to it. You wait! I don't suppose you know yet how those delicate hands can torture you, with what tender solicitude they can tear your heart to pieces. You will find out how much blazing hatred is hidden beneath the most ardent of love … You will find out what it means to belong to a petticoat, what it means to be enslaved, to be infected and how shameful and weary such slavery is.

The play was not performed in Russia until the seventies—thirty years on—perhaps because of the novelising longueurs of the original version—and it charmed an audience who looked back upon the graces of the forties with nostalgia. The success was also due to the brilliant young actress Savina, who when she read it felt the part of the young girl Vera was far more important than the part of Natalya and, by this insight, brought the play to life. She was at that time unaware of any autobiographical sources there might be. We can agree that in Rakitin, Turgenev was mocking himself. From the point of view of Turgenev's novels it is interesting that he has found his future setting: the Russian country house, the future classic scene of the Russian novel; and that the comedy is as ordered as a dance and sparkles like a poem. It foreshadows the mastery of poetic realism in the love stories to which he was about to turn.

The Russian Sphinx looked stonily at his success. The revolution of ‘48 had made the police and censors watchful. They were watching for Turgenev to make the small careless error. Their chance came the following year in 1852: the great Gogol died suddenly at the age of forty-three. The censor had not forgotten that the Tsar, in a moment of levity, had allowed
The Government Inspector
and
Dead Souls
to ridicule the official classes; Gogol himself had recanted and had come to regard his great works as scandalous. Just
as Tolstoy was to denounce his own work after his conversion, so Gogol repudiated everything he had written except a huge and wearisome volume of moralising letters he had written to a pious aristocratic lady. Gogol had even attacked the readers and critics who praised him and left Russia for years of travel in Europe and the Holy Land. His feeble health had been ruined by gluttony which he abandoned for diets that starved him. His morbid secretiveness had become religious mania and eccentricity was verging on madness, and just before his death he burned the second part of
Dead Souls:
he had gone out of his mind in trying to kill his own fantastic comic spirit.

The censors were now determined to have their revenge and to suppress eulogies of the early Gogol. Turgenev had been to see the sick man a few months before his death and wrote a portrait of him in his
Literary Reminiscences.
He noted the famous comic nose which gave Gogol his cunning fox-like look, the puffy lips, the bad teeth; but he said the tired eyes of the great artist and poet sparkled. It was tragic to hear the old fox now praising the censorship and saying it developed the acumen or patience of authors! In his account of Gogol's reading of
The Government Inspector
there is a passage which reveals as much of Gogol as of Turgenev the raconteur:

With what puzzled and astonished expression did Gogol utter the phrase of the Mayor about the two rats (at the very beginning of the play)—“They came, they sniffed and they went away.” He even looked up at us slowly, as though asking for an explanation of such an astonishing performance.

Different as the two men were, they were masters of timing and were united in their habit of marvelling at the sight of small things.

Indignant at the silence of the Press at Gogol's death, Turgenev sent an ardent, personal eulogy to a Petersburg paper: this was brave in the climate of the time. His letter contained one very dangerous thought, “Only thoughtless and short-sighted people do not feel the presence of a living flame in everything uttered by him.” Officials do not like being called short-sighted. The Petersburg censor banned the letter. The last thing the censor wanted to see fanned was “a living flame.” At this, and counting on the traditional jealousy between
the Petersburg and Moscow censors, Turgenev easily got the Moscow censor to pass the letter. When the Tsar heard, he sacked the Moscow man and ordered the author of
The Sportsman's Sketches
to be arrested for “manifest disobedience,” the fundamental, everlasting Russian sin. When a time-serving University Chancellor called Gogol “a servile writer,” Turgenev wrote a letter to a friend: “Sitting up to their necks in shit these people have undertaken to eat it to the full.” The police intercepted the letter. Turgenev was sent to jail for a month and then to exile on his estate and remained under police supervision until 1856—although
The Sportsman ‘s Sketches
slipped by in the meantime without hindrance in volume form! One more censor was sacked.

From prison he got a letter out secretly to the Viardots and said he was treated decently. He walked up and down for exercise 416 times a day and reckoned that he covered two kilometers. It wasn't exactly cheerful, but his room was large, he had books. He could write and indeed he wrote one of his most famous reminiscent tales,
Mumu,
“a true story,” the account of his mother's cruel treatment of a dumb servant whose only love was for his dog. She ordered him to get rid of it because she could not stand its barking; the servants conspire to help him, but when this fails, he is forced to go off and drown it. For Turgenev,
Mumu
is dumb Russia. The servant leaves the house for good and walks twenty miles to his own village, but with “an invincible purpose, a desperate and yet joyous determination … his eyes fixed greedily straight before him.” Passion has been born: the passion for his own freedom.

Crowds came to visit Turgenev in jail on the first day. That was soon stopped but the ladies hung about outside to catch sight of him. Excellent food was sent in. He made the governor drunk and got him to join in a toast to Robespierre and amused himself by looking over the dossiers of suspects or arrested men which were left lying about in the governor's office. But his smuggled letter to Pauline became less light-hearted:

The saddest thing of it all is that it is a final Goodbye to all hope of travelling abroad: it is true that I had never deluded myself on that score. I knew well that when I left you it would be for a long time, perhaps forever. I am left with only one desire: that I shall be allowed to travel where I like in Russia.

There was another reason for his despair. He had heard that Pauline was again pregnant. If he had had any mad dream that he and she would be united, this marked the fortifying of her marriage. The child was a daughter, Didie, and in time Pauline had a third daughter called Marianne and a son Paul. If the friendship continued, he would always be, as he put it, on the edge of another man's nest. The letters that passed between them had always been formally addressed, but now the private ecstasies in German are dropped.

His arrest, the short imprisonment and the two years of exile on his estate to which he was sentenced, and subsequent police supervision, were a lasting shock to a man who put his freedom first. It was a shock of disgust and it certainly put an end to a plan he had to travel across Russia. He was not allowed to go more than forty miles from Spasskoye. It is true that the arrest added to his fame as the author of
A Sportsman's Sketches:
he became the most promising writer in Russia, for Tolstoy had not yet appeared and Dostoevsky had written only
Poor Folk
and
The Double
and in two years would be silenced by his long exile in Siberia.

The separation from the Viardots was excellent for the writer if it was wretched for the man. Turgenev realised in Spasskoye that in the nine years since he had first met Pauline he had become a different man and that the house had changed. He still had his room with its screens by the bedside—they were decorated with a mosaic in wood crudely copied by Varvara Petrovna's orders by a serf-workman from an album she had brought back from Sorrento—there was a large ikon in one corner and a leather armchair, relics of his mother's life and his writing tables by the window looking out on his avenue of limes. Everything had aged. The housekeeper, who used to lavish raspberry jam on him, had shrivelled. The high-heeled and ribboned goat-skin slippers of the butler still creaked, but his legs were like sticks inside his yellow breeches and his face had shrunk into a sort of little fist. All the man's teeth had gone. The boys on the estate had suddenly become men. In the garden he gazed with wonder at the birches, the maples and an oak sapling he had planted. How tall they were; how fine his avenues of limes. The birds—birds appear in nearly all his stories—the orioles, the nightingales, the
doves, the woodpecker and the cuckoo filled him with tenderness, but the house smelled musty although he was fond of the ancestral furniture, the old chests and their brass plates, the fly-blown glass lustres, the white armchairs with oval backs. He had simple homemade stuff in the room where he worked. The green blinds had turned yellow and threw off a soft light on the ceiling.

Memories of childhood flooding back upon me—wherever I went, whatever I looked at, they surged on all sides, distinct, to the smallest detail, and, as it were, immovable in their clearly defined outlines … then I gradually turned away from the past and all that was left was a sort of drowsy heaviness in my heart.

He looked at his books. There was his
Candide
of 1770, newspapers and periodicals of that year: his Mirabeau—
The Triumphant Chameleon
—and his great-grandmother's French grammar and books he had bought abroad.
Faust,
for example, which he knew once by heart, a poor edition of 1828.

At Spasskoye he passed as a clever, lazy man who played chess and draughts and games of Preference. He entertained his neighbours and was bored. The only diversions were days of shooting. People tried to marry him off as we can guess from his story
The Two Friends,
for he was a catch. Letters from Pauline became rarer. He writes to her: no music, no friends—not even neighbours. The Tyutchevs are excellent people but we do not live in the same world. What have I left? Work and memories but if the former is to become possible and the latter less bitter I must have letters from you with news of your happiness and the breath of sunshine and poetry that they bring. My life is dripping away like a tap.

Music was what he missed most. Mme. Tyutchev could be pushed to the piano but her husband had no music in him. The daughter could only thump. He went to the houses of his neighbours but these parties turned into sing-songs and charades. In his story
The Two Friends
there is a comic account of a young lady who is urged by her father to sing “that Italian piece where you go patter-patter like peas.” The girl's shrill voice breaks into howls and “from certain nasal sounds it could be surmised that she was singing in Italian.” The charades led to clowning and Turgenev, always an actor in his mad moods, could easily act a hare sniffing and munching, passing
its paws over its face, pricking up its ears and bounding off. (He had clowned at the Herzens, one remembers, when he was under stress in Paris in 1848.)

The stream of letters that had crawled across Europe from the Viardots in the early days of his absence had begun to dry up. He complained that Pauline told him less and less about herself: he and she, he felt, were only in touch by their fingertips. “The affections wilt when the chances of meeting again are almost nil.” He himself had little to tell her. He told her about his shooting and tempted Viardot with the numbers of birds shot. There were messages from her, not altogether assuring, about Paulinette.

Despite the dangers of seeing autobiography even in novelists in whom the autobiographical strain is strong, one can see a likely fragment of it in his short story in letters,
A Correspondence,
which he had begun to write far earlier. The end looks as if it had been tacked on. It is in many ways, biographically speaking, an addition to his self-accusation about the jilting of Tatyana Bakunin and may go back further to one of those love-affairs in Berlin which Herzen taunted him about. There appears to be an oblique reference to Pauline who appears here as a ballet dancer:

One could not even call the girl a beauty: I have only to close my eyes and at once the theatre is before me, the almost empty stage, representing the heart of a forest … and she running in from one wing on the right… and from that fatal moment I belonged to her like a dog…

And:

I never anticipated that I should come to hanging about rehearsals, bored and frozen, behind the scenes, breathing in the smut and grime of the theatre, making friends with all sorts of unexpected persons. Making friends did I say?—cringing slavishly upon them. I never anticipated that I should carry a ballet-dancer's shawl, buy her new gloves, clean her old ones with breadcrumbs…

But when he says that love is not a free union of souls as the German professors had somehow taught him, but a state in which one person is slave and the other master—“Ah, we're great hands, we Russians, at making such a finish”—the bitterness he felt at Spasskoye is plain.

In the April of 1853 Turgenev read in the newspapers and heard from friends that the Viardots were again in Petersburg. He was pained that she had not written to tell him of this journey. A bad omen. Then he heard that Louis Viardot had taken seriously ill and had been sent back to France. She was on her own and was coming to give performances in Moscow. His hopes blazed up. He was in exile and was forbidden to travel but he took a gamble and travelled there secretly on a false passport. It is known that either she had a cold or feigned one, cancelled her performances for a few days, and that they met. What happened between them or what was said is unknown. April Fitzlyon suggests that there was a struggle between duty and love in Pauline's mind and that duty probably won. In
The Price of Genius,
she quotes a confession to the German conductor, Julius Rietz, written at a later date: