The Gentle Barbarian (18 page)

Ah, but don't you see, the organisms of people who have a chronic disease like mine, seem to be stronger than ordinary people. The disease is taking a rest, letting nature do its best for the patient so as to be able to break out with greater force later on. I should not be surprised if I dropped dead suddenly to the astonishment of all my friends.

The actor was sticking to his part and returned to Russia to a round of dinners and to the drawing-room of the Countess Lambert to whom he had written from Paris reproaching her for “the tone” of her letters about Pauline Viardot and saying:

What has died in me is not my emotions, no, but the opportunity to satisfy them … The only thing left for a person like myself is to let himself be carried on the waves of life for the time being and think about port after he has found a sweet dear Comrade such as you, a Comrade in emotion, ideas and, the main thing, in attitude. (You and I expect very little for ourselves)—to hold his hand firmly and float along.

Not surprisingly she accused him of being a coquettish author. Pauline Viardot was writing in much the same terms as Turgenev to her confidant Jules Rietz.

Turgenev became declamatory: one seems to see him on a stage saying “I have now said Farewell to dreams of happiness for good.” He went back to Spasskoye but he was often in Petersburg, killing his boredom. If Pauline rarely wrote to him, he wrote often to her; there was a slight edge to his news:

I am in good health. I go out a lot, but only to one house, Countess Lambert's. She is charming, no longer young—

(She was thirty-eight, very little older than Pauline)

her hair is greyer than mine—but no one could have more heart or wit—but there's no one word one can describe wit and heart together—hers are very fine. She has become a great friend—I spend all my evenings with her.

And he went on to say he had started a novel and incidentally tells Pauline what she is missing:

I have already mentioned that I am writing a novel. How happy I would have been to show you my plan and the characters, the theme I have in my mind, etc., and how precious I would have found your
judgements on them. I have brooded a long time on my subject and I hope to avoid the crude mistakes and faults of impatience which you quite rightly once pointed out to me in the past. I am in vain, if the ardour of youth is now far away, but I write with a coolness and composure which astonishes me: I trust the book won't suffer from that.
Qui dit froid dit médiocre.

In the next six years during which the friendship with Pauline Viardot scarcely existed, Turgenev reached his highest powers as a novelist and worked hardest. He liked to pass himself off as a man without will and he had many of the distractions of a rich man who did not have to toil to earn his daily bread as Dostoevsky, Schedrin or Goncharov did; but the inner will of the artist was strong. The impatience caused by lack of self-confidence we detect in
Rudin
vanished in his next book,
A House of Gentlefolk
—or a “Nest” as it is sometimes called more appropriately, for the lack of a real “nest” of his own was the repeated complaint throughout his life. The novel is not the finest thing he did, but it was a favourite with his readers and the critics and established his reputation as the leading Russian writer. With
The Sportsman's Sketches
it is the only book for which he was not afterwards abused even in the most virulent Russian quarters. The Countess admired it and was flattered in seeing something of herself and her religious influence in the character of Lisa, the heroine. In the words of one critic, the novel brought “a truce of God” because it pleased the two factions: Westerners like himself and their opponents, the Slavophils. The burden of being Russian as it was felt by the educated Russian upper class of his generation—the class for whom he expressly wrote, for no other readers had yet appeared—was shared equally by his characters and he saw it with his usual detachment in individual lives. Despite his own strong commitments, equilibrium or balance is the essence of his work—that equilibrium which he saw at the heart of Nature.

Once more he set his novel in the country house in which the people had been established for generations. This was, as we have seen, the closed—or rather not quite closed scene—suited to the classical, play-like structure natural to him: each chapter is short and shapely—there is a pause and a light spring to the next scene, carrying the people and the theme forward with assurance and simplicity. The animation of the prose gives one the illusion of
actuality, and even something contemporary with ourselves to the tone, so that even old history seems as near as the morning in which we are reading it. All is movement as we pass in and out of a drawing-room into a garden, from a garden to a coach, from a coach to another house and another, from morning to afternoon, from day to evening. People reveal themselves and their conflicts—it seems to us—less by the author's direction than by the course of nature. Even in the debates about ideas or in his “biographical” passages Turgenev is not giving us the static, explanatory essays or summaries we find in older novelists like Scott or Balzac—in him past and present ripple along intermingled, action rises from the stream of conversation and flashes to the surface. Turgenev looks forward as he looks back. And although he is a portraitist who gives the surface of people, we feel also that they are organic creatures that Russia has been forming in its long restless sleep.

The important thing is that in his chief character, Lavretsky, Turgenev has at last found someone who approaches the positive hero. He is not master of his fate, but he has reserves of strength which enable him to outgrow a bad and confused education, to endure and to work; unlike Rudin he is not negative nor is he a vagrant. He is not brilliant but he does not give in. But let us first look at a lesser character, Lavretsky's rival, to see Turgenev's analytical manner at work. We see Panshin first as the latest type of young, up-to-the minute political and social climber from Petersburg. He has all the graces, is musical, can even paint and write a bit. What has formed this waterfly? We hear his father—whom we never see but are at once convinced we have seen him somewhere—we hear his father was

a retired cavalry officer and a notorious gambler, a man with insinuating eyes, a battered countenance and a nervous twitch about the mouth

who has shrewdly pushed his climbing son into Society:

He never lost an opportunity while shuffling cards between two rubbers or playing a successful trump, of dropping a hint about his Volodka to any personage of importance….

It is that simple act of “shuffling cards” and thinking of something else while he does it that makes him present for a moment—and then disposes of him. Turgenev makes his thumbnail sketches work for the novel: they are not there only to divert us.

So, in the first chapter, it will be a comic smirking gossip, one of the inevitable toadies of the country house, who will come slavering over a titbit of scandal, into Maria Dmitrievna's drawing-room, to show us where the centre of the drama will lie. The news is that Lavretsky, a neighbouring landowner, has had the nerve to come back from Paris without his wife and to be indifferent to pity and ridicule. How can he face public opinion when it is notorious that he has been cuckolded by his wife who has deserted him in Paris? A man who can't control his own wife is not only a fool: he is reproachable. He has let decent society down. With a playwright's skill, Turgenev delays Lavretsky's arrival in Marya Dmitrievna's drawing room for seven chapters. Turgenev's timing and touch are always perfect: Lavretsky drops in casually at Marya Dmitrievna's, on some farming business, and the first person he meets in the doorway is her daughter Lisa who is nineteen and who was no more than a child when he last saw her.

“You don't recognise me?” he said taking off his hat. “I'm Lavretsky. Is your mother at home?”

So the meeting of hero and future heroine is lightly accomplished.

And, in the classical manner—“we must ask the reader's permission to break off the thread of our story for a time”—the most important “biography,” the history of the Lavretsky family, is insinuated and suddenly the novel is deepened: it is no longer, as Turgenev called it, “our story.” It is a living slice of the passions, the accidents and the ideas that have created Lavretsky's forbears and himself. He is a man who will carry his generation on his shoulders. In many respects Fedya Lavretsky has the violent history of Turgenev's mother's family, the Lutovinovs in him—there is gypsy blood—and of Turgenev's father. Lavretsky's own father had in his youth been abroad and had come back a supercilious Frenchified dandy, disgusted by Russian life.
His
father, our Lavretsky's grandfather, roars into the present:

The puppy won't eat, he can't bear the heat and close smell of the room; the sight of folks drunk upsets him; one daren't flog anyone in front of him; he doesn't want to go into the government service, he's weakly as you see in health … And all because he's read Voltaire.

Not only Voltaire and Diderot but Rousseau too! All the “new” nonsense of the eighteenth century had been in his head; but Turgenev says:

It was there in him, but without mixing in his blood, not penetrating to his soul, nor shaping itself in any firm convictions. But indeed what could one expect from a young man of 50 years ago when, even at the present day we have not succeeded in attaining them.

One notices that like Stendhal, Turgenev is caustic in dating the minds of his people. It is a way of making time stereoscopic. This high-minded Voltairean soon seduced a serf girl: that was acceptable. What was unacceptable was that on enlightened principles he married her. And his father, in his dressing-gown trimmed with squirrel fur, literally chased him out of the house.

And slippers on his bare feet, flew at Ivan Petrovitch with his fists … all over the house, the kitchen garden, the pleasure grounds, across the road …

shouting “Stop you scoundrel! Stop or I'll curse you.”

The young man got to Petersburg, deserted his serf-wife, got a place in the Embassy in London. Years later when the father died he returned to Russia, a sour anglomaniac, with a wooden laugh—Turgenev could not bear the English laugh—speaking curtly through his teeth and his head stuffed with political economy. At home he found his wife has died and left him a son, Fedya—our Lavretsky—and he put him through a spartan Richard-Feverel-like moral training system which makes the boy grow up tough, self-conscious and halting with women. A natural development has been arrested. This Meredithian touch is interesting. Probably Turgenev never read him but he had read Thackeray and widely in the English novel and was very aware of the stern Victorian theories regarding the education of young gentlemen. There are many scenes that come straight from Turgenev's own childhood in these pages; and
the fanatic aunt Glafira is one more of Turgenev's portraits of his own terrifying mother, though Glafira lacks her moments of naive charm.

Fedya becomes just the young man who will easily be trapped by a sly and fortune-hunting girl, the daughter of a peculating and shabby General in whom

the good nature innate in all Russians was intensified by that special geniality which is peculiar to people who have done something disgraceful.

Fedya Lavretsky, the victim of a patched-up parody of Western ideas, exploited and deserted by a shrewd girl, is in his turn back from Paris. If he has strength it will be the submissive but lasting strength of the peasant mother he does not remember. He has to learn to be a Russian—but what is that?

Turgenev's mind—as we know—was apolitical. A Westerner by conviction, he had many friends among the leading Slavophils—the Aksakovs were close to him—and he watched the effect of their convictions upon them. Conviction is always a questioning word in his novels; like Stendhal, as I have said, he knows how to “place” the changes of conviction historically. In a remarkable scene with an old university friend called Mikhalevich, Lavretsky has a serious yet farcical friendly row all through one night. Mikhalevich is a man whose high hopes at the university have failed him—he has sunk to being clerk to a spirit-tax contractor—but he is out to wake up Lavretsky:

“I want above all to know what you are like, what are your views and convictions, what you have become, what life has taught you.”

Mikhalevich (Turgenev notes) still preserved the phraseology of 1830, and he is soon shouting that Lavretsky is a loafing Voltairean:

You know which leg the German limps on, you know what's amiss with the English and the French and your pitiful culture goes to make it worse, your shameful idleness, your abominable inactivity is justified by it.

That is an attack on the signs of the sleepy Slavophil he sees in Lavretsky, who, whether he has “convictions” or not, at any rate believes that if one is a landowner there is one thing one ought to know: how to farm one's land.

But if Lavretsky is a disillusioned Westerner he is not a fashionable and opportunist Westerner like Panshin. Lavretsky listens to Panshin speaking in Marya Dmitrievna's drawing-room where Panshin is trying to court her daughter Lisa. Panshin says:

We are sick from having only half become Europeans, we must take a hair of the dog that bit us … The best heads,
les meilleures têtes,
among us have long been convinced of it. All people are essentially alike; only introduce among them good institutions, the job is done. Of course there may be adaptations to the existing national life: that is our affair—the affair of the official (he almost said “governing” class) … Marya Dmitrievna most feelingly assented to all Panshin said. “What a clever man,” she thought, “is talking in my drawing room.” Lisa sat in silence leaning back against the window; Lavretsky too was silent. Marfa Timofyevna playing cards with her old friend in the corner, muttered something to herself.