The Gentle Barbarian (19 page)

Lavretsky argues back in semi-Slavophil fashion for

“a recognition of the true spirit of the people and submission to it without which a courageous combat against error is impossible.

Turgenev is leaning a little towards Slavophils and for the purpose of irony has set the novel in a remote part of Russia where the old traditions are unchanged. One would expect Marya Dmitrievna's daughter to be either a worldly or rebellious girl; but she is simple and in fact she has been deeply influenced by her personal maid who is religious to a state of exaltation. Lisa holds to the old Orthodox beliefs and although she is drawn to Lavretsky she is shocked when he says he refuses to be reconciled to his wife and will not forgive her in his own mind. Marriage, she says, is forever, whatever wrongs are done. She sees—as Countess Lambert saw in Turgenev—a soul to be saved, an atheist to be redeemed, but the more she says this the more her heart is drawn to him.

Lavretsky is helped towards his love for Lisa by his sympathy for her lonely and homesick old German music master, a petulant old
man, who is maddened because his talents have been almost extinguished by having to earn a miserable living among the gentry and outside his own country. Lavretsky listens to the old German and in his own loneliness visits him in his little house in the nearby town. The old man is sure that he had genius once and longs for one brief outburst in which what has been forgotten will reappear. One night when Lavretsky is there, the German suddenly plays superbly: what has inspired him is his discernment of the love Lavretsky tries to conceal: his genius has been awakened and, as he listens, Lavretsky understands his own love. This scene is unquestionably one of the sublest revelationary things Turgenev wrote about love and music. He is always excellent in his portraits of musicians, in their struggles with their art (again) but this scene also goes to the heart of Turgenev's feeling for art as the supreme resource of the human spirit: art lives our life with us. Lavretsky the dogged farmer is transformed.

A newspaper reports that Lavretsky's wife has died in Paris. Lavretsky is free to declare himself to Lisa, who now begs him to go to church and pray for his dead wife's soul, and indeed herself prays for her and for Lavretsky. Even so, Lisa's religious conscience is troubled. She loves passionately but while she is in a trance of hesitation she hears the news of the wife's death is false. Indeed the wife turns up dramatically at Lavretsky's house with a child she says is his. That is the tragic end of the love affair which, as in so many of Turgenev's stories, is on the brink of a happiness that is swept away.

The reappearance of Lavretsky's wife is a violent shock to the reader. Lavretsky detects an unpleasant smell of patchouli at once as he comes back into his little manor farm. The wife is standing with her luggage and her child; the bad romantic plays of the period have led her to see herself as
La Dame aux Camélias
—now having a popular run in Paris—but without the tuberculosis of the heroine. She falls on her knees before her husband and vulgarly acts out the part of contrition. Lavretsky's dream of happiness is wrecked: she is his wife, clearly after a large allowance, the big house he has closed, and for rehabilitation in Russian society, and she uses her child—which may or may not be his—as an emotional blackmail. It is part of the cruel irony that Lisa herself persuades Lavretsky, on religious grounds, to give in to her: innocently Lisa and he have done wrong and must accept God's punishment, a God Lavretsky does not believe in. Lavretsky puts his wife into the
big house; she soon takes up with Panshin, then leaves him and goes off again to Paris, the corrupt West, and to resume her love affairs there.

This part of the novel breaks with the spirit of the whole and there is an uncomfortable element of “strong” plot which, for Turgenev, is unnatural. There is a particularly artificial scene in which Marya Dmitrievna tries to persuade Lavretsky to acknowledge the child while the wife hides behind a screen and comes out at the critical moment: sentimental melodrama. In the end, Lisa goes into a convent and Lavretsky has to live out his life without happiness, but it is made plain that Lisa and Lavretsky are not destroyed by submitting to suffering and fate: they survive as best they can by acts of will.

Eight years later, when he has become a sound middle-aged farmer, Lavretsky makes one more visit to the house. The older generation have died off. As on his first visit, a young girl runs into him as he comes into the drawing-room; once more he says “I am Lavretsky.” All the laughing young people who are playing a game are almost strangers to him: he simply knows that time has gone on. He looks at the bench in the garden where he and Lisa sat, and at the piano:

He touched one of the keys; it gave out a faint clear sound; on that note had begun the inspired melody with which long ago on that same happy night the dead Lemm had thrown him into such transports.

This last chapter recalls those scenes in Chekhov's plays where passing cries of happiness are unbearable and make us weep.

“Welcome lonely old age, burn out useless life,” Lavretsky thinks as he goes off, and the joyous cries sound more loudly in the garden.

We dab our eyes and then it strikes us again that Turgenev himself is moved by the rise and fall of love and not by the fullness of love realised. Hail and farewell. Spring and autumn. No high summer of fulfilment. Therefore no tragedy, only sadness. The pessimism of Turgenev is absolute.

What is most lasting in our minds when we put the book down is the natural ease with which Turgenev evokes the essential solitariness of Lavretsky's mind and his life as he travels across the steppe:

and as he watched the furrowed fields open like a fan before him, the willow bushes as they slowly came into sight and the dull ravens and rooks who looked sidelong with stupid suspicion at the approaching carriage … as he watched the fresh fertile wilderness and solitude of this steppe country, the greenness, the long slopes, and valleys with stunted oaks, the grey villages and the birch trees—the whole Russian landscape, so long unseen by him, stirred emotion at once pleasant, sweet and almost painful in his heart and he felt weighed down by a kind of pleasant oppression.

He nods off to sleep and when he opens his eyes again:

… the same fields, the stame steppe scenery; the polished shoes of the trace horse flashed alternately through the driving dust, the coachman's shirt, yellow with red gussets, puffed out by the wind

until the arrival at the house:

“So here I am at home, here I am back again,” thought Lavretsky as he walked the diminutive passages while one after another the shutters were being opened with much creaking and knocking and the light of day poured into the deserted rooms.

And when at last he went to bed that night

It seemed to him that the darkness surrounding him on all sides could not be accustomed to the new inhabitant, the very walls of the house seemed amazed.

It was about this novel that Countess Lambert said it was written by a pagan who had “not yet renounced the cult of Venus, but already understands the sterner call of duty towards which his sick soul is drawn, rather against his will.”

He went up to Petersburg that winter to enjoy the fame and social success his novel had given him. The railway from Moscow to Petersburg was not yet finished and the journey was as bad as ever. He gave a few readings in the capital, caught laryngitis in that damp cold climate, heard through the papers that Pauline was giving something like fifty concerts in England. He went off to Vichy for
one of his cures and thought the place ugly compared with the pretty German spas; it was half-empty. The Germans would never have allowed a horrible barrel-organ to play under his window. The rain fell. The river was sickly yellow. So he turned to reading Pascal and wrote to Pauline—for he kept up his side of the correspondence—that Pascal treads down all that is most dear to man, pushes you down in the mud and offers for consolation a religion that is bitter and violent
“qui vous abêtit, c'est son mot”
—which even repels Pascal himself but which he says it is one's duty to accept in order to crush the cravings of the heart. Turgenev goes on:

I venture to say the humane view of character is the opposite of the Christian, if one reduces it to the cowardly and narrow doctrine of personal salvation and egoism. But no one has ever written with the force of Pascal; his anguish, his imprecations are terrible. Byron is a pure stream compared with him. And how lucid and profound Pascal is. What grandeur he has. “Nous sommes incapables de savoir certainement et d'ignorer absolument. Nous voguons sur un milieu vaste, toujours incertains et flottants, poussés d'un bout vers l'autre. Quelque terme où nous pensions nous attacher et nous affermir—il branle et nous quitte; et sinous le suivons, il échappe à nos prises, nous glisse et fuit d'une
fuite éternelle.

And what crushing blows Pascal gives us. The heart of man is full of filth. And

Le dernier acte est sanglant, quelque belle qui soit la comédie en tout le reste. On jette enfin de la terre
sur la tête
et en voilà pour jamais.

The waters of Vichy and Pascal between them had made Turgenev bitter. He added a note for Louis Viardot as he often did to his letters, and said he hoped to find him at Courtavenel.

From Pascal he turned to the humanity of Cervantes and Shakespeare who were closer to him. The novelist who read too much had been working on a brilliant pair of character studies of Hamlet and Don Quixote and he had given a public reading of this in Petersburg; and it was, by transference, a study of his own character. Louis Viardot had translated
Don Quixote
as we have seen and it strikes one that another bond of the long family friendship with the Viardots was language: the sounds of French, English,
German and Russian, melting into the language or music.

The influence of Don Quixote on Russian literature had been powerful in Gogol and was to be so in Dostoevsky's
The Idiot,
but Turgenev believed that in his time there had been more Hamlets than Quixotes in Russia. They are, he says, two ways of conceiving the ideal: one is inside human nature, the other is outside. In one the individual will predominates; in the other something outside the “I” which the individual prefers to the “I.” In his person Don Quixote expresses above all the faith in something eternal and unchangeable, faith in truth, the truth that is outside. He is saturated with the love of the ideal. Life gives the opportunity to pursue the ideal, to establish the triumph of truth and the reign of justice on earth. He is without egoism, his thought never dwells on himself, he is all devotion and self-sacrifice. But, it must be observed, he is slow to feel compassion and finds it difficult to move his mind from one thing to another. He is free to change his opinions. Indeed he is something of a casuist: in love, when he notices his mistress is squalid, he blames this on the magicians. His dreams are chaste; at heart he knows there is no hope of possessing the loved person, indeed he rather dreads that. He is hurt by the world.

“But who hurts Hamlet but Hamlet himself?” Turgenev quotes the Russian proverb: “Those who mock me today will do me a good turn tomorrow.” Hamlet is all egotism, analysis, he is scepticism in person. As an egoist he can have no faith in himself but he clings to the “I” in which he has no faith. He is absorbed in his own personality: he thinks of himself strategically, not of his duties. He has no pity for himself, for his spirit is too elaborately critical to allow him to be content with what he finds inside himself. He delights in self-flagellation, is fascinated by his faults, studies himself night and day. His self-awareness is itself a force. One cannot love him, for he loves no one, but one can't help admiring him because his outer man, his melancholy, his pallor are attractive. One also rather likes him because he has a tendency to be plump. He never makes Don Quixote's wild mistakes: windmills will never be giants for him and he won't take up arms and fight.

The Hamlets of this world are of no use to the masses—they offer nothing, are going nowhere, for they have no end in view. Love they
can only simulate; yet his scepticism is not the scepticism of indifference: hence its significance and power and he will indeed fight against injustice … The most important service of Hamlet is that he will develop such men as Horatio.

In Vichy he had begun writing his next novel,
On the Eve—
the title meant “on the eve of the emancipation of the serfs.” He knew that the Crimean War had changed the climate of intellectual opinion, especially among men younger than himself who had already politely suggested that up till now his novels, long or short, had been simply sensitive love stories: “the wanderings of Odysseus always ends in Calypso's isle.” They were demanding direct political commitment to social reform and in an incoherent way to revolution: the emancipation of the serfs, if it ever came, would merely be a beginning and itself would not go far in solving Russia's problem. They were, in effect, asking Turgenev to reverse his method: to proceed from idea—the radical idea—to character and not (as he did) to build on character first and to watch ideas at work in it. More than this, they required a Radical hero.

The story opens on an idyllic summer day in the country with a philosophical discussion between two young men, a feckless painter and a minor academic. Shabin is the painter, Bersenyev the scholar:

“Is there nothing higher than happiness?” Bersenyev says.

“And what, for instance?” asked Shabin.

“Why, for instance, you and I are, as you say young; we are good men, let us suppose, each of us desires happiness for himself… But is that word, happiness, one that could unite us, set us both on fire and make us clasp each other's hands? Isn't that an egoistic one; I mean, isn't it a source of disunion?”

“Do you know words, then, that unite men?”