The Gentle Barbarian (21 page)

And the boy goes home thinking “That is love, that's passion … But how could one bear to be struck by any hand, however dear - and yet it seems one can if one is in love.”

My father flung away the crop and bounding quickly up the steps to the porch, broke into the house. Zinaida turned round, stretched out her arms, tossed her head back—and also moved away from the window.

That is the climax of a story which has passed through the comic antics of Zinaida's admirers. We have seen various kinds of love. We have seen feelings change into their opposite. The boy's startled jealousy of his father is violent, then absurd, then turns to admiration amounting to worship, and then is quietly dissolved in the events of ordinary life. What is sometimes called leisurely in Turgenev is not so much a sense of timelessness as one of space in which everything will eventually be accounted for or vanish. Life is affirmed not only in its intense moments but in its continuing: the fact that the boy cannot know all, that indeed no one knows all, gives Turgenev's realism its essential truth-telling quality. In this his realism is finer than Tolstoy's assertion of all knowledge. The story goes on:

Two months later I entered the University, and six months after that my father died (as the result of a stroke) in St. Petersburg, where he had only just moved with my mother and me. Several days before his death he had received a letter from Moscow which upset him greatly. He went to beg some sort of favour of my mother and, so they told me, actually broke down and wept—he, my father! On the morning of the very day on which he had the stroke he had begun a letter to me, written in French. “My son,” he wrote, “beware the love of women; beware of that ecstasy, that slow poison.” My mother, after his death, sent a considerable sum of money to Moscow.

But, for Turgenev, explanation is not an end. Life is not enclosed reminiscence:

During the past month I had suddenly grown much older, and my love, with all its violent excitements and its torments now seemed even to me so very puny and childish and pitiful beside that other unknown something which I could hardly begin to guess at, but which struck terror into me like an unfamiliar, beautiful, but awe-inspiring face whose features one strains in vain to discern in the gathering darkness.

And now the story becomes still more spacious than its observed drama. Years ripple on, “everything melts away like wax in the sun … like snow” and the writer hears of Zinaida's death in childbirth. “So that was the final goal to which this young life, all glitter and ardour and excitement went hurrying along.” What had he left now, in old age, fresher and dearer than his memory of “that brief storm that came and went so swiftly one morning in the spring?” Far more than this personal memory of love and death. He recalls that some days after he heard of Zinaida's death, obeying an irresistible impulse he was present at the death of a poor old woman who had known nothing but bitter struggle with daily want and had had no joy or happiness—wouldn't she be glad to die? No, she feared death and fought it and kept whispering “Lord forgive my sins.” We are brought back to Zinaida's, his father's and his own desire for life:

by the death-bed of that poor old woman, I grew afraid, afraid for Zinaida, and I wanted to say a prayer for her, my father—and for myself.

This is Louis Viardot's vulgar story of adultery! A story that begins as a comedy of intrigue and becomes a tragedy that disperses us into the common lot! We recall Turgenev's quotation from Pascal:

Le dernier acte est sanglant, quelque soit la comédie en tout le reste. On jette enfin de la terre sur la tête.

The quarrel with Goncharov opened a period of quarrels in Turgenev's life which became a storm when his next and finest novel,
Fathers and Sons,
was published. Before that, in 1860 and 1861, Turgenev was travelling in Europe. He was in Soden near Coblenz
with Tolstoy's brother Nikolai, a delightful companion. Turgenev remarked:

The humility Leo Tolstoy developed theoretically, his brother actually practised in real life. He always lived in the most impossible lodgings, almost hovels … and shared all he had with the poorest outcasts.

In Soden Nikolai was slowly dying of tuberculosis and wrote to Leo that Turgenev was with him

so well that he confesses that he is “quite well.” He has found some German girl and goes into ecstasies about her. We (this relates to our dearest Turgenev) play chess together but somehow it does not go as it should: he is thinking of his German girl and I of my cure.

The poor man died at Hyères in the autumn of 1860. The relations between Tolstoy and Turgenev continued to be in flux. Tolstoy admired
Faust,
thought
Acia
rubbish and, contrary to most critics, thought
On the Eve
was much better than
The House of Gentlefolk.
Tolstoy's judgment is erratic—he thought the awful painter Shabin “an excellent negative character.”

The rest are not types, even their conception, their position is not typical … The girl is hopelessly bad. “Ah how I love thee … her eyelashes were long” … It always surprises me that Turgenev with his mental powers and poetic sensibility should even in his methods not be able to refrain from banality. There is no humanity or sympathy for the characters, but the author exhibits monsters whom he scolds but does not pity. This jars painfully with the tone and intention of liberalism in everything else.

Turgenev wrote in a droll verse letter to their common friend Fet:

Indeed I know he bears me little love
And I love him as little. Too differently
Are mixed those elements of which we're formed.

After his brother's death, Tolstoy was in more sympathetic mood. He and Turgenev were fairly near neighbours in Russia, as Russian distances go, and Tolstoy came to Spasskoye on a visit with their friend Fet in 1862. The meeting was amiable. Turgenev had just
finished
Fathers and Sons
and gave it to Tolstoy to look at. He lay on Spasskoye's famous divan in the drawing-room, began to read and fell asleep over it. Ominous. Tolstoy woke up to see Turgenev's back impatiently disappearing through the doorway.

The two set off, nevertheless, to stay with Fet. Turgenev loved good food. Champagne flowed. After the meal, Tolstoy, Fet and Turgenev went for a walk and lay down in the grass talking with abandon. The next morning they came down to breakfast, with Mme. Fet seated before the samovar. Disaster. Kind Mme. Fet asked Turgenev whether he was satisfied with the English governess he had found for Paulinette. It seemed a comfortable question, even though it may have raised in Turgenev's mind the trouble the girl had been in the Viardot family, and the bother he had had in finding a flat for her and a governess in Paris. Turgenev took the question easily and said the governess was excellent, though she had of course the English mania for liking things to be clear and exact. She had asked Turgenev what precise sum the now eighteen-year-old girl ought to give to charity. Turgenev went on:

And now she requires my daughter to take in hand and mend the tattered clothes of the poor.

Tolstoy bristled at once: he saw an opportunity of attacking Turgenev's belief in a foreign education.

“And you consider that good?”

“Certainly it places the doer of charity in touch with every day needs.”

“And I consider,” Tolstoy exclaimed, “that a well-dressed girl with dirty rags on her lap is acting an insincere and theatrical farce.”

“I beg you not to say that,” said Turgenev. “Why should I not say what I am convinced is true,” replied Tolstoy.

Once more the idea of “conviction” haunts every Russian quarrel of the period; no one has opinions. They have absolute convictions.

“Then you consider I educate my daughter badly?” Tolstoy said he did. Turgenev jumped up from the table, white with rage, and exclaimed, “If you speak in that way I will punch your head,” and rushed into the next room. A second later he rushed back and said
to Mme. Fet: “Please excuse my improper conduct which I deeply regret,” and once more left the room.

Turgenev had the habit of pacing in and out of rooms when he was agitated. The gentle man's passions flared up though he would repent very quickly. The uncharacteristic thing was the threat of any physical violence: the champagne of the previous evening must have been too lavish, but of course Tolstoy—who had himself fathered an illegitimate child—had aimed precisely at Turgenev's guilt and his difficulties with the girl and also at his dignity and his virtue. Turgenev had been determined to turn Paulinette into a nice French girl, for he knew that in Russia she would be open to slights and unhappiness, even though his long absences from her showed him to be a negligent father.

The two men left the house in a temper and the quarrel became a farce. It was simple for Turgenev to stalk out because he had a carriage. Tolstoy had no carriage and Fet could not lend him the only carriage he had because he only had horses that had not yet been broken in. Tolstoy had to hire a conveyance at the nearest post station. At the first country house he reached, Tolstoy wrote to demand an apology from Turgenev and told him to send it to the post house at Boguslav where it would be picked up. The dust of the country roads blew up around the quarrel. Turgenev replied in the formal tones of an elder statesman raising a minor point in a Treaty. He said that manners had required him to apologise first to Mme. Fet but not to her guest. The point being made, he now proceeded to a majestic apology: he confessed to the insult—though in fact Tolstoy had insulted
him
—and even asked pardon.

What happened this morning proved clearly that attempts at intimacy between opposite natures as yours and mine can lead to no good results,

and had the honour to remain, Gracious Sir, your most humble servant. Alas, with typical incompetence, he forgot to send the document to Boguslav, but had it delivered by messenger to Fet's house so that the message arrived very late. Tolstoy was not satisfied. He went to Boguslav for pistols and issued a challenge, adding the sneer that he meant “a real fight and not the sort of formality with champagne to follow, usual in military circles.”

Turgenev answered that he did not see what more he could add and that he would willingly stand his fire in order to efface “My truly insane words.” Tolstoy, he said, had a perfect right to call him out. The comings and goings of carriages, messengers and horses enlivened the country roads. Fortunately the weather was good. The unhappy Fet tried to bring the two men together but Tolstoy now turned on Fet and said he would return any further letters from him unopened.

Then, of course, after four months Tolstoy made one of his familiar somersaults into repentance. He wrote to Turgenev saying:

I have insulted you: forgive. I find it unendurably hard to think I have an enemy.

But once more the natural inertia of Russian life spoiled the effect. More letters seemed to have miscarried than to have arrived. Turgenev went off to France and, not knowing his address, Tolstoy sent his own letter to a bookseller in Petersburg asking him to forward it and it took more than three months to get into Turgenev's hands.

This led to a new twist to a quarrel which was turning into a short novel, with Dostoevskian overtones. Passing through Petersburg, Turgenev wrote to Fet:

I learned from certain “reliable people”—oh those reliable people!—that copies of Tolstoy's last letter (the letter in which he says he despises me), are circulating in Moscow and are said to have been distributed by Tolstoy himself. That enraged me and I sent him a challenge to fight when I return to Russia. Tolstoy has answered that the circulation of the copies is pure invention and he enclosed another letter in which, recapitulating that and how I insulted him, he asks my forgiveness and declines my challenge.

When he at last received Tolstoy's letter through the bookseller, Turgenev wrote again to Fet that obviously the stars of Turgenev and Tolstoy were not in conjunction:

But you may write and tell him that I (without phrase or joke), love him very much from afar, respect him and watch his fate with sympathetic interest … we must live as though we inhabited different planets or different countries.

When he heard about it, Turgenev's genial friend Botkin's opinion was that Tolstoy, the younger man, wanted to love Turgenev ardently and unfortunately his impulsive feeling encountered merely mild good-natured indifference. His mind was in a chaos. Turgenev's was not.

The attacks on Turgenev by Goncharov and Tolstoy were personal attacks on his honour and dignity as a man; he was by nature excitable but his irony and judgment soon restored his balance. In the next few years he found himself in the middle of a quarrel with Russia itself, both with the educated élite of Right and Left and with young men of humbler class who had become vocal after the Crimean War. Confusion and extremism appeared on the scene and he was at once in the difficult position of the man of strong, committed liberal principles who has to meet the usual charges of being a waverer.

He was in Paris in 1861, because he was concerned about his daughter who wanted to get married but could not make up her mind about her suitors, when the Emancipation of the serfs was proclaimed and he went to the Thanksgiving Service at the Russian Church and, like many others, wept with joy. Herzen, the exile who could not return, told him that the author of
The Sportsman's Sketches
ought to be in Russia. Turgenev had, however, settled matters with his own peasants before the proclamation. He had given them a fifth of his land for nothing and at Spasskoye itself—the most intimate part of his estate and his home—he had given them the land on which their houses stood, and was soon building
a small hospital, a home for the aged and had started a school.

All over Russia the peasants were bewildered by their freedom and often suspicious of the new dispensation. Many preferred the old ways to which they were accustomed. At Spasskoye they continued their traditional sport of stealing wood and, knowing Turgenev was an easy man, they grazed their horses on his flower beds. Elsewhere there were rows about the size of individual holdings and the redemption money. There were family rows between husbands and wives, and between brothers. The peasants were illiterate and often refused to put their mark on legal papers. They found they had to pay taxes and many regarded Emancipation as a landlord's trick—and among the bad landlords so it became. Many peasants sold their strips and left the land and there were not enough hands left to get in the harvest. Presently in Petersburg there were outbreaks of fire which were thought to be the work of terrorists belonging to the Land and Liberty League who, without any clear idea of policy, were calling for Revolution. The new Tsar had begun as a liberal but was now in panic; Radicals were arrested and sent into exile.