The Gentle Barbarian (16 page)

Tout être étudié avec une sympathie sincère et ardent, peut dégager pour nous la vérité qui est la base de la vie. C'est en cela précisément que consiste ce qu'on appelle l'idéalisation artistique.

The part of confidante was consoling to both parties but it affected him less than it affected her. She was more than half in love with him and was unhappy when she saw she could neither make him give up his “paganism” or his destructive love of Pauline. The question of the passport was always there as an humiliation. Against all her arguments, he said he had as much of Don Quixote in himself as Hamlet. She had to get as much consolation as she could from a letter she wrote to him telling him not to see Pauline again—as all his friends did—not “to knock his head against a brick wall,” and drift back into his “gypsy life.” He agreed wryly that he was about to commit a folly, and made it worse by saying:

Don Quixote at least believed in the beauty of his Dulcinea but the Don Quixotes of our time realise that Dulcinea is an ugly hag and yet keep running after her … we have no ideal, that is the trouble.

The poor woman tried to make him jealous by taking up with Grigorovich, another writer, but although Turgenev had his vanity, jealousy affected him very little. He got his passport and he left for France. For a long time their correspondence went on and then fizzled out. Turgenev's objection to her was not so much that she was a spiritual Siren but that she had the reactionary opinions of Court society; and indeed she was deeply shocked later by the
political tendency of his writing and was, as he knew she would be, in the enemy camp. The high-minded lady wished devoutly that he would write “popular” work. The final blow must have come some years later when she found him at Ems, where she had gone for the cure in the company of a Ukrainian woman writer of short stories, Marko Vovtchok, another object of his platonic tenderness.

For an artist to whom the company of women was indispensable, the friendship with the Countess was more than an exchange of woes: it quickened the imagination of the storyteller, who was, as he said, “saturated with femininity.” One thing he saw in the Countess was a deep fear and misunderstanding of what was sacred to him: art and its perception of
“la vérité qui est la base de la vie.
” With Dostoevsky he believed that “art lives man's life with him.” Turgenev's talk with the Countess about Goethe had fertilised him. He sat down to write
Faust,
one of his most accomplished stories. It is the first of his ghost stories, a genre he did not approach again until his last years, and even were we to object—as Herzen did in his brusque rational way—to the suggestion of a ghostly presence, a psychologist would find no objection to it. The story has a double theme: the awakening of the imagination and the maturing and enlarging of our nature through immersion in works of art; and the deadening of the soul that occurs when an interior will imposed by others crushes the free imagination. Vera, the young girl in the story, has been trained by her mother to abjure novels and poetry and to read about useful subjects only. The mother's motive is not ignorant; it is even high-minded; but behind it are primitive influences of family history. Her mother, a delightful person, says:

“You tell me that reading poetry is
both
useful and pleasant. I consider one must make one's choice early in life; either the useful or the pleasant and abide by it once and for all. I tried at one time to unite the two. That's impossible and leads to ruin and vulgarity.”

The subject runs all the risks of being a trite moral story for the schoolroom, written to educate the Countess. With the incomparable delicacy and dramatic tact with which Turgenev can show the growth of love, he can also show the shadow of guilt, the terror of an alien overpowering will running alongside of ourselves like a shadow and a fate; it will blast Vera with the images that break the
nerve. He floats the tale out of the schoolroom into the clear air of real life. And, as always, a minor droll character—Vera's husband—brings the playwright's intervals of perspective and rest to a narrative that might otherwise be sententious and too high-flown. The special technical difficulty in this story is that he has to make a formal reading of
Faust
endurable to the reader; yet he manages this cleverly by bringing in the husband who cannot bear poetry-reading, and a comic German who keeps crying out “How wonderful! How sublime!” and even “How profound!” Turgenev was also a master of the tentative and of aside.

I touched on the old legend of Doctor Faust, the significance of Mephistopheles and Goethe himself and asked them to stop me if anything struck them as obscure. Then I cleared my throat—Priem-kov asked me if I wouldn't have some sugar water and one could perceive that he was very well satisfied with himself for having put this question to me. I refused.

From the biographer's point of view the statement at the end of the story indicates that there was a decisive and lasting change in Turgenev's mind at this critical period of his life:

One conviction I have gained from the experience of the last years—that life is not just an amusement: life is not even enjoyable … life is hard labour. Renunciation, continual renunciation—that is its secret meaning, its solution. Not the fulfilment of cherished dreams and aspirations, however lofty they may be—the fulfilment of duty, that is what must be the care of man … But in youth we think—the freer the better, the further one will get. Youth may be excused for thinking so … Now I would say try to live, it is not so easy as it seems.

The Countess might think she had convinced him but in fact his was not the Christian's renunciation: it was far bleaker—the stoicism of the atheist and pagan and not without its incurable fear of death that gave intensity to the living moment.

Pauline Viardot disliked the story when she eventually read it, perhaps because she had her jealousy of the new Muse. Incidentally, since she knew little Russian, Turgenev's claim that everything he wrote he submitted to her first must be modified: he would read it
aloud, translating into French as he went along—not a satisfying method for either party. Another suggestion, not mentioned by Turgenev's biographers, occurs to me. In its circumstances the situation of Vera in
Faust
and Pauline in life are alike: the happy young wife with three children and a doting, dull and anxious husband falls in love with a gifted young man. Vera declares her love and her passion is thwarted—by whom? Not the husband, not another lover; not by a family counsellor—but by the ghost or image of the mother who calls her daughter back to duty. Was it Mme. Garcia, with a family history as exotic as the history of Vera's mother, who imposed her will and made Pauline break? And was Priemkov, too, like Louis Viardot? Or was Turgenev describing the fatal influence of Varvara Petrovna on his own will and heart: ghosts are always the unconscious.

Early in 1856 before he left to knock his head against the brick wall of Courtavenel, Turgenev invited the new young writer Tolstoy to stay with him in his flat in Petersburg: “in Stepanov's house at the Arnicktov Bridge on the Fontanka.” Tolstoy was twenty-six, ten years younger than Turgenev and they knew each other only by correspondence in which Turgenev had enthused over Tolstoy's
Childhood
and the Sebastopol sketches which had made him an instant celebrity in Petersburg. The Tsar himself was so enthusiastic that he had ordered them to be translated into French at once. Balls and dinners were given for the fierce artillery officer who had come up to the capital straight from his battery in the Crimea. Self-conscious about the imagined defects in his appearance, Tolstoy had brushed up his stiff hair to give himself a high forehead, given a devilish twist to his frowning brows and had grown curving side-whiskers and a thick moustache to cover his heavy upper lip. He intensified the aggressive stare of his small eyes which appeared to some to be searching for the weakness of an opponent he could crush; he was suspicious of praise, quick to accuse of hypocrisy, ready to pick a quarrel; yet he could also be caressing. The Puritan had been the guest of the beautiful Mme. Panaev at a dinner given by Nekrassov, the editor of
The Contemporary;
Nekrassov and Panaev were known as the co-husbands, for Nekrassov had become her lover. Turgenev and others began to praise George Sand and Tolstoy
shouted angrily across the table that a woman of such loose sexual morality ought to be tied to a hangman's cart and dragged through the streets as a public example. An embarrassing dinner party. Yet while he was in Petersburg Tolstoy passed his nights in carousals with gypsies and gambling. Inside a week he had challenged someone to a duel. It is true he confessed his self-disgust in his diaries about his resort to brothels: “Horrible. But absolutely the last time. This is no longer temperament but habitual lechery.” And again, after going to some place of amusement: “Disgusting. Girls, stupid music, girls, an artificial nightingale, girls, heat, cigarette smoke, girls, vodka, cheese, wild shrieks, girls, girls, girls.”

Turgenev put up Tolstoy in his flat and was nearly driven out of his mind by a guest who was clearly jealous of Turgenev's own fame and his gifts—Tolstoy was at this time an awkward and slovenly writer—and one who declared all Turgenev's opinions were insincere. He found Turgenev's friendly and gentle manner patronising; he was even annoyed by the knowledge that Turgenev's estate was larger than his and accused him of hypocrisy in freeing his serfs and of coldness of heart. Turgenev himself was not Varvara Petrovna's son for nothing: he could scream with rage when provoked, but he was at once ashamed of his rage. A man with little consciousness of his own rank, he could not help thinking Tolstoy's pride in his title of Count, and his contempt for writers who, at that time, were more accomplished than he, were ridiculous. As with so many Puritan diarists, Tolstoy's fits of remorse were the expression of his own inordinate belief in his own virtue alone. He was the only good man because he exclusively knew what goodness was. At the time of his meeting with Turgenev he was no doubt under strain, for he had come straight from the battlefield, but the arrogance and the pride were endemic as we know from the famous Rules he made for himself. His pride was to last all his life until it destroyed him.

In August 1856 Turgenev left for France and he met Tolstoy several times in Paris. “Tolstoy speaks of Paris as Sodom and Gomorrah,” Turgenev wrote. “He is a blend of poet, Calvinist, fanatic and landowner's son—somewhat reminiscent of Rousseau—a highly moral and at the same time an uncongenial being.” If he saw into the division of Tolstoy's character, he loved the writer. To Botkin, a great friend, he said mildly:

Tolstoy is here and looks at everything with his eyes bulging. But he is ill at ease with himself and hence not quite comfortable with others. I rejoice in looking at him, to tell the truth he is the sole hope of our literature … a poet and a complete nature such as Tolstoy's will finish and clearly and completely what I have merely hinted at.

“I rejoice in looking at him”—their relationship was a curious battle of the eyes, for if Tolstoy stared aggressively, Turgenev scrutinised with detachment. Tolstoy could not bear these passive inspections from a man who was older and more famous, at this time, than himself.

Turgenev had only to say that Tolstoy “was the sole hope of literature,” for Tolstoy to become the reactionary Count and to say that he despised art and literary men.

Their comedy continued. There was some affable vanity in Turgenev's habit of self-disparagement when he told Tolstoy that he himself was “a writer of a transitional period. I am fit only for people in a transitional state.” He reflected on Tolstoy's reckless, extrovert life of action and remorse and concluded that the fault of his own generation was that “we have little contact with real life, i.e. with living people, we read too much and think abstractly.” On his part, Tolstoy found Turgenev's good manners and his quick, cultivated conversation superficial.

Not hearing anything from Pauline he wrote to her mother at Courtavenel that he was taking the boat at Stettin and travelling via Berlin, Brussels, Ostend and London and would be in Courtavenel in August. “I shall be putting on my grey coat, unhappily not the only greyness in my person.”

He was enchanted when he arrived to see the pointed towers and the drawbridge, the moat he had once drained, the pretty gardens. The misgivings of the journey vanished at once. The house, as usual, was crowded with guests; Pauline back from success in London charmed them and welcomed him as if the crisis in Moscow three years before had been forgotten. It was incredible: there was no brick wall at all. Louis Viardot, now sixty, was eager for the shooting and discussed the sins of French translators in the
Revue des Deux Mondes
who had mutilated Turgenov's work in translation; they
had added rhetorical flourishes and even an extra character or two to some things and cut
Mumu
to pieces. Whatever sadness he—or Pauline—felt about the past disappeared in the fun of that summer and that autumn. He was no longer the unknown writer. He was famous and an addition to the celebrities she was used to entertaining—Liszt, and Saint-Saëns, Ary Scheffer and Lord Leighton, the painters Doré and Renan were on her list. The famous actress, used to applause, imposed her spell. He had only to look about him to see she had made a success of a marriage that had been imposed on her.

He, too, forgot his morbidity. “The last flov ers of autumn,” he wrote, “are sweeter than the first blooms of spring.” If youth was over he was “as happy as a trout in a stream when sun shines on its limpid waters.” His upbringing at Spasskoye had split his nature, so that an artificial or adoptive family seemed to him the only desirable one; by a trick of the heart Louis and Pauline had taken the place of his father and mother.

The enchantment of that late summer and autumn at Courtavenel held. Turgenev loved children and played with Pauline's daughters—after Louise two had been born—and they played practical jokes on him. One morning he was woken up by a chicken they had put into the cupboard in his bedroom. The guests rowed round the moat of the grey mossy chateau: Pauline played the guitar on the lawns in the evenings. There were concerts. Pauline and her daughter played their way through Beethoven; in the little private theatre they acted Racine—Paulinette now fourteen, did well as Iphigenia. Turgenev clowned as he loved to do and told stories that amazed and made everyone laugh, and solid Louis Viardot read Victor Hugo aloud. Turgenev, who had a talent for drawing, did a rather disturbing comic drawing of a sportsman coming home, not with birds but with a bag of infants—a drawing that must have appealed to the children's taste for comic horrors. The talent for drawing was turned into an amusement of the adults. He invented what was to become a permanent game in the family: the Portrait Game. He drew portraits of grotesque people and it was the duty of the guests to analyse the characters suggested. A number of these have survived—see Marion Mainwaring's
The Portrait Game.
To take one example—Turgenev writes of one long-nosed, heavy-chinned, furry-browed man: