The Gentle Barbarian (28 page)

It is obvious from his correspondence about money, with Louis Viardot, that he was one of those unworldly gentlemen who—like so many of the Russian gentry—had amateur notions about the management of money. To him it was a sort of fluid, capricious in its flow. When short of money owing to his extravagance or to some failure of crops—and he was often short enough to have to borrow his fare from a friend—he simply sold another farm or took to the landowner's common device of selling off more timber from his forests—and put the transfer of the funds to France into the hands of friends who were as amateur and forgetful as himself. He and they mistrusted banks. At home he was easily robbed by his agents. Perhaps he assuaged his guilt as a landowner by agreeing that it was right that he should be robbed and that he was, in any case, the victim of having a position he had not chosen. In his heart he did not and could not think of money as real. To Viardot, of course, it was very real.

Turgenev put off the meeting with his uncle until the June of ‘68. It was a terrible year of desolation in Russia. To his brother he wrote:

I spent two weeks in Spasskoye and, like Marius, can say that I have sat upon the ruins of Carthage. In the present year alone the “fetid elder”—that plunderer of money, cattle, carriages, furniture and other possessions—has fleeced me of 3,500 silver roubles. (I had to pay a 5,000 rouble debt of his.) I will not mention that he left the estate in a loathsome disorder and chaos, that he paid no one, tricked every one etc.… During my entire stay at Spasskoye I was like a hare on the run; I could not stick my head in the garden without serfs, muzchiks, small merchants, retired soldiers, sluts, peasant women, the blind, the lame, the neighbouring landowners of both sexes, priests and sextons—my own and other people's—rushing forward from behind trees, from behind bushes and almost out of the ground to assault me—all of them emaciated by hunger with their mouths agape like jackdaws, throwing themselves and shouting hoarsely “Dear master! Ivan Sergeivich, save us! Save us, we are dying.” I finally had to save myself by fleeing lest I be stripped of everything. Moreover a terrible year is on the way: the spring crops have perished; the rye is enormous on the stalk, but the ears contain not a kernel. What a picture Russia presents now—this land everyone contends is so rich. The roofs are all uncovered, the fences are down and not a single new building is to be seen except for the taverns. The horses and the cows are dead; the people are thin—three coachmen could hardly lift my trunk between them. Dust is everywhere, like a bank of clouds; around Petersburg everything is burning up—the forests, the houses, the very
land
… The picture is not a happy one, but it is very accurate.

Back in Petersburg he was depressed. The white nights got on his nerves. There was a nasty, sweetish, humid smell in the air. He stayed with his friend Annenknov and his wife and baby, in a dacha which shook at the slightest wind. They sat freezing before the fire, with rugs over their shoulders—it was June. He longed for Baden. He gazed sentimentally at the house on the Nevsky Prospect, opposite the theatre, where he had met Pauline on her first visit to Petersburg twenty-five years before.

One thing he did achieve: he sold a large amount of timber and the money was to go to a fund for Didie's dowry: “I adore that child.” Her birth in 1852 had killed all his hopes of a life with Pauline, but he worshipped this daughter. She was very much a dark
Spanish type like her mother and grew up to be a talented painter. When she was ten he said the little girl had an extraordinary power over him—“and she knows it.” And adds the words he always used to women he loved: “I kiss her hands.” He sent her a caricature of himself as Don Quixote and asked if she would want a Don Quixote like that for a husband when she grew up? There is—he told her mother—“only one Didie in the world… and she knows, without my telling her, that I belong to her utterly and she could put a collar round my neck like she does with Flambeau [one of the Viardot dogs], and the worst of it is I wouldn't be cross.” The desire to belong, to be a possession, was at the core of his affections.

In Baden, the little theatre he had built for Pauline in the garden of his house was opened and Pauline and her pupils gave performances of three little operas for which Turgenev had written the libretti: he also played minor parts himself; the Queen of Prussia and the Duke and Duchess of Weimar who were present raised their eyebrows at the sight of the great novelist and aristocrat lying on the floor in the part of a ridiculous pasha. The operas were not a success. At Pauline's musical matinées when she played the organ, at which she was remarkable, the Russians were not impressed by the sight of their great writer pumping away at the instrument. They saw him frittering his talents away as a clown.

Turgenev was restless. He went again to Paris to correct the French proofs of a collection of stories and he went to see his daughter and her in-laws. The girl was pregnant, the mother-in-law detested her, the marriage was having its troubles. He went on to see Flaubert who sat red in the face, dressed in red, in a red room. He called on Sainte-Beuve who was ill. The critic took a piece of paper and made a drawing of the cancer of the bowel of which he was dying: he offered drawings of the cancer to all his callers. In June of 1870, Turgenev was off again to Berlin on his way to Petersburg and sat opposite the ominous Moltke at a dinner and studied him. With his fair wig, his calm clean-shaven face and penetrating blue eyes, Moltke seemed the tranquil personification of power, intelligence and will, an enemy Napoleon III had underrated. In Petersburg Turgenev had one of his violent attacks of gout which had now become chronic, worked on the draft of one of his four finest stories,
A Lear of the Steppes
and bought 6,000 Russian railway shares for Didie's dowry, which brought the capital value up to 50,000 francs. The beautiful girl was now eighteen.

Unknown to them all, the “autumnal happiness” of Baden was coming to an end. While he was away the Franco-German war had broken out and Moltke's armies were on the move. Herzen had died too soon to see the justification of his belief that bourgeois Europe was a rotten organism.

Turgenev had said once or twice when the builders were slow in building his villa that the first tenant of the house would be a French General. It was soon clear that no French General would enter Baden with his troops. The Viardots were alarmed. They were French citizens. They fled from the town like the rest of the foreign residents. Turgenev returned from Russia in time to take Pauline Viardot and her daughters to Ostend and put them on the boat for England, then returned to Louis Viardot who stayed on for a short time. Turgenev remained. He still believed the French would arrive and knew they could do nothing to him. He, in fact, stayed on until the winter.

In 1848 he had been a spectator of revolution in Paris; now he was a spectator of war and wrote a number of commentaries for a Petersburg newspaper. The articles came to an end because the Russian editors were pro-French and he, from the double influence of the love of the romantic Germany of his youth and his hatred of Louis Napoleon, took the German side.

The German population were astonished by the early German victories. It had always been said that the Rhinelanders would not side with Prussia: now they were amazed to find themselves “befuddled by patriotic joy” in German unity. Turgenev heard the first sound of the German artillery from Yverg Castle, the highest point of the Black Forest from which one could see the whole valley of Alsace with its peaceful regiments of vines, its orchards and wide, hedgeless fields of maize stretching as far as Strasbourg. He saw the first black and red smoke of the explosions—forty to a minute. “It is impossible not to curse the war.” He took the German side, he said, because the salvation of civilisation and the free institutions in Europe depended on the donwfall of the monstrous Napoleonic system. He sincerely loved and respected the French people, he said, “but it was time to crush the immoral system that has ruled for 20
years.” It was their turn to learn the lesson that Prussians received at Jena, the Austrians at Sadowa and the Russians at Sebastopol. There is one characteristic literary aside in these letters: he had been reading Tolstoy's
War and Peace
as it slowly came out, sometimes admiring it, often sharply critical of its “petty” realism, most of all of its philosophisings and its military comments.

I can well understand why Tolstoy supports the French side. He finds French phrasemongering repulsive, but he hates sober-mindedness, system and science (in a word the Germans), even more. His novel is based on enmity towards intellect, knowledge and cognition.

Tolstoy thought (he said) that battles are lost and won in the rumblings of adjutants and generals, whereas they are won by plans carried out, as Moltke does, with mathematical precision.

As he wrote, his house shook with the sounds of the bombardment of Strasbourg which had already been half burned down. And by day the French prisoners streamed in. But he was no reporter. He stands apart, absorbed in historical and social meditations… “We are still barbarians! And we shall probably remain so until the end of our days.”

The war, the surrender and the Commune were ruinous for the Viardots. Their property in Baden was safe enough, but in the collapse of the Funds, their income was vanishing and although she gave concerts in England that year and took on pupils in London, Pauline Viardot could not command the fees she had earned from the rich and even royal pupils she had had in Baden. She and Louis took a house in Seymour Street, and soon after, in Devonshire Place. When Turgenev joined them he took a separate flat in Beaumont Street to avoid gossip, but was at Devonshire Place most of the day. He stayed in England for seven months, except for a month when he was off to Petersburg in the spring of 1871 to raise money to help his daughter whose husband had been ruined by the war and to find a publisher for another of Pauline Viardot's album of songs—they had had only a small success and, this time, secretly, he paid for the publication himself. His new agent at Spasskoye was turning out to be as incompetent and idle as his Uncle Nikolai had been. He had also the duty of seeing Pauline's eldest daughter, Louise, who had left her husband and child in France. She was teaching singing in
the Conservatoire in St. Petersburg. She hated her mother, her father, her husband and all society. She had cropped her hair short and seems to have inherited her mother's male, domineering traits, without having her mother's charm, and had always a submissive female “slave” in attendance. She repels, Turgenev wrote to the Viardots, but she aroused his pity. He went to Moscow which he loathed for its smell of “lamp oil and slavic blubber” and read the news of the Commune in the paper. Now he was pro-French:

It's a case of the insurrection of ‘48 but now triumphant. What will happen to France? Will France, the nation to which we owe so much, fall into the anarchic state of Poland and Mexico?

What would become of the Viardots' property, their investments, the farm at Courtavenel?

He had gone to Moscow because the cholera he dreaded had broken out in Petersburg, the plague he called “Him” or “the green devil.” The very word started bizarre imaginary pains in his body. In Moscow he received from Pauline one of the few letters we know of that display anxiety and even passion for him. She was frightened by the collapse of her career and her home.

Ah Dear friend, hurry back. Don't stop an hour longer than is absolutely necessary. I beg you if you have the slightest love for us. Don't go back to Petersburg. Promise me not to go back to that fatal city—please. Are you going on to Spasskoye? I hope you won't. Send us a picture of yourself as a young man. Oh, write every day and come back, dear friend, come back to be near those who cannot be happy unless you are here.

The cold was intense, the snow crackled under his feet and, he said, he would give anything for the fogs of London because she was there, and he came back.

Although they disliked London, the Viardots had excellent friends there, people who remembered her performances. They stayed in country houses. She gave her Saturday parties. Eventually when the situation in France calmed down, Louis Viardot returned to Baden, to sell the house and pack up their furniture—especially the valuable organ—and his considerable collection of pictures, all unharmed by the war.

The happy frontier people of that part of Germany had thrived on French visitors and Baden's small distinction, and no French man or woman, as Turgenev pointed out, had been molested. But the war had awoken French patriotism in Louis Viardot and although Pauline had been the victim of French insularity and intrigue in the operatic world in her youth, she loved the cosmopolitan life of Paris. The only member of the ménage who did not was Turgenev but, as he said, he would follow the Viordots even to Australia if she ordered it.

They got back their house in the rue de Douai and Turgenev discreetly asked if they would let him three rooms at the top of it. It was agreed.

In 1870 when he was fifty-two, Turgenev wrote to a correspondent that a “Russian writer who has settled in Baden by that very fact condemns his writing to an early end. I have no illusions on that score, but since everything else is impossible, there is no point in talking about it… But are you really so submerged in what is ‘contemporary' that you will not tolerate any non-contemporary characters?” Such people, he says, have lived and have a right to be portrayed. “I admit no other immortality: and this immortality of human life (in the eyes of art and history), is the basis of my whole world.”

What is one to think of his writing in the Baden period? The critics hated
Smoke
for political and patriotic reasons, but it is a very able novel. His visits to Russia were not lost: he had another long book in mind—
Virgin Soil
—but he was not ready for it and turned to the long short stories in which he rarely failed. He was simply, he said, “too full of subjects.” In his early fifties he wrote two reminiscent stories—the horrifying tale,
The Brigadier,
based on the incident we already know of in the life of his Lutovinov grandmother who had committed murder. An old and senile brigadier “of the age of Catherine” is seen fishing, accompanied by a bullying servant who ridicules him. The brigadier has become a ruined and childish simpleton,
reduced to poverty and ostracism because in middle years he had loved and lived with a terrifying young widow who, in a rage, had killed her page. Out of love and in a fit of honour the brigadier had assumed guilt for her crime and was tried for it but his sentence had been short. The widow and (after her death) her sister, bleed him of all his money until he is destitute. Yet once a week he visits the widow's grave with adoration. At last he knows he is going to die. He knows because of a dream.