The Gentle Barbarian (30 page)

“You can't leave the words out of a song,” says Evlampia.

And then they see the boy, cry out and rush away in opposite directions.

The scene tells us all, even to the fierceness of an act of lust, and what hidden fantasies it releases in the mind.

A Lear of the Steppe
is, no doubt, a drama seen from the outside, but it shows Turgenev's mature power of
suggesting
the inside of his people and of concealing its documentation. The kind of documentation that obtrudes, say, in Zola's
La Terre,
or indeed in most stories of peasant life done by writers who are not peasants, is mercifully absent. In the manner of the greatest artists, he contrives to make us feel that people should be seen as self-justified themselves. The choice of a growing boy as the narrator, with some character of his own, makes this possible and evades the smoothing over of hearsay.

In defending the scene of hallucination in the story of Lieutenant Erguyvov, Turgenev wrote that he merely wanted to present the imperceptibility of the transition from reality to dream which “everyone has experienced for himself … I am completely indifferent to mysticism in all its forms,” although one or two of the stories in the Baden period venture into this unseizable world. Turgenev is not dabbling in spiritualism, which was a mid-nineteenth century fad;
he is indulging his own morbidity.
A Strange Story
does describe a visit to a peasant medium. The narrator fortifies himself with drink, and the maniacal old medium who, in a scene excellent for its atmosphere of suggestion, makes the former think the figure of his dead tutor has possibly been evoked. But the medium is not the disturbing figure, nor is the possible ghost: it's a young girl of the gentry whom the narrator has met at a dance, a childish creature with a face of stone. She disturbs us. She has run away from her family and is obsessed with the idea of self-abasement and self-sacrifice. The narrator meets her long after trudging the roads with the medium who turns out to be a classic Russian holy fool. Her childishness has gone. She is bold, resolute and exalted. She refuses to be rescued.

She seemed possessed by a sort of wrathful, vindictive excitement, without paying any attention to me, setting her teeth and breathing hard, she urged on the distracted vagrant in an undertone… To follow a half insane vagrant, to become his servant! She had lain down to be trampled underfoot.

The great talker seems to make a personal reflection in the end: “Her words were not opposed to her acts.”

This is not one of Turgenev's important stories: it suffers from being too much a discussion at times, but it has the interest of being on the prevalence of wandering “holy souls” in Russia and peasant superstition and one has the impression that when he returned to Russia, even for a month, he was at once in touch with a life where the edges were less certain than they were in Europe, a life in which loneliness can make a human being take the sudden leap into frenzy or extremes. There is the slide into frenzy in two other tales of this period:
The Dog,
written at Spasskoye in one spontaneous burst; and also in the
Knock, Knock, Knock,
where a man prone to “fatality” is comically haunted by sounds that soon turn out to be hauntings of conscience and delusion which drive him to suicide. There is too much explanation here. Another story,
The Watch,
is interesting only as an ironical account of a weak youth's fear of the eye of his hero.

The chief drawback of Turgenev's happy life in Baden was perhaps not being out of Russia but of living in too cosy a milieu. The Viardot ménage was too much given to little concerts, the exchange of literary conceits, parlour games and intellectual pastimes. There was no loneliness and he could work only with part of himself. It is noticeable that he began to work on
Torrents of Spring
after the end of the Baden period. (It is called
Spring Freshets
by one or two translators, thereby losing, in my opinion, the more forcible image.) As a love-story it is Turgenev's masterpiece although some Russian critics despised it because it was a love-story and also because it was set in Germany. It is in fact very Russian if we think of inconsequence in matters of feeling and honour being Russian, though of course what the story is really about is honour and has implications far beyond the love-story itself. Comedy can only be written by serious minds and this one brims with the spontaneous and unthinking delight of youth and youth's misreading of the future:

First love is like a revolution: the monotonous routine of life is smashed; youth takes its stand at the barricades.

Not only
first
love: the story can be felt to be true to the passion, especially to its passage from illusion to illusion, at any age. One knows that Sanin and Gemma are only twenty-two; but it is a surprise that the second implicated couple, Polozov the sleepy gourmet and Maria, the
femme fatale,
his wife, are only three years older, though the kind of young who are born old and without innocence. The story is a comedy in which the hours of the day smile at the characters as they pass over them, until passion moves them out of real time and into a state where time seems to stop. For Turgenev, love is an accident, contrived by Nature for its own purpose, and when love becomes sexual passion, honour is lost. There is something in Leonard Shapiro's suggestion—made in a valuable essay printed with his own translation—that Turgenev had been reading the fashionable and pessimistic Schopenhauer. (Tolstoy was affected by him too.) And of course there is something of Turgenev's mysterious attitude to sex in which love and sex are kept in separate compartments. Whatever conclusions we come to about this, they do not alter the fact that a story set in the 1840s in old-fashioned Frankfurt
and Wiesbaden but written from the point of view of the 1870s has the tone, the directness and, above all, the economy which bring it near to ourselves. The comedy is also a crystallisation of Turgenev's sense of his personal tragedy. We are discreetly made aware, by his detachment, of a double view: he has caught the evanescence of the surface of experience—as I have said of the hours flowing through the fond yet baffled people and the scene, and yet we are aware of the moral undertow which drags at the swimmers who are living from moment to moment, drawing them out of their depth. To Turgenev the inevitable passing of youth and of its freedom was agonising and one can see his pose of premature old age or a perpetual Goodbye as a device for preserving the sense of youth untouched. The very naïveté and child-like qualities that were hidden behind his perfect manners suggest that his feeling about lost youth was more than the common nostalgia but rather a wonder always awake in his battered, personal life. Youth was a work of art in itself. The double view of love we find in the story, of middle age looking back on a folly that turns into betrayal and shame, gives the comedy of
Torrents of Spring
its moral complexities.

As in several earlier stories, notably
A Correspondence
and
Acia,
the ghost of the Turgenev-Viardot situation stands in the shadow of
Torrents of Spring,
but the characters have no resemblance to them. Sanin, the impulsive young Russian nobleman, travelling in Germany, is a sort of Turgenev without his convictions or gifts; novelists find it useful to put a derogatory half-picture of themselves into a story in order to gain perspective and to free the story from the maudlin or from the blur of introspection. The tale is said to have started in his mind from the memory of meeting a beautiful Jewish girl in Frankfurt when he was twenty-two. She had, like Gemma the Italian girl in the story, rushed out of the confectioner's shop when he was passing to ask him to save her brother who was thought to be dying inside. The young Turgenev himself went on to Russia, but the image of the beautiful girl remained in his mind: the rest of the story is invention. Most important is its frame: it opens with Sanin-Turgenev at the age of fifty-two coming back at night from a party of brilliant people in which he himself had been a brilliant talker. He is exhausted physically and spiritually and is suddenly attacked by the
taedium vitae,
the disgust with life, as a man who talks too well may easily be.

He thought of the vanity, the uselessness, the vulgar falsity of all things human … Everywhere was the same everlasting futility, the same ineptitude, the same kind of half-genuine, half-conscious self-delusion … And then all of a sudden like a bolt from the blue, old age comes upon you and with it the ever-growing corroding and undermining fear of death.

And once more he sees the familiar nightmare image of death about which Turgenev had written in
Phantoms.
He is in a boat, looking down into the transparent water, and out of the slime below he sees huge hideous fishes; one of these monsters rises to the surface as if to overturn the boat, but sinks once more. He knows that “when the appointed hour comes” it will rise up again and sink him for good. This is the classic nightmare of Turgenev's pessimism. Sanin goes to his desk to rummage among old papers in order to drive the despair away and to his surprise comes upon a garnet cross. At once he is back in his youth in Frankfurt and sees the beautiful girl rushing out of the confectioner's who has now become the Italian Gemma. The spring of youth begins to flow, Sanin loses his fifty-two years and standing over his shoulder presents the ingenuous young Sanin. This world-weary, even sentimental conventional gambit is common enough in story-telling but there is something different in Turgenev's handling of it: that opening portrait is a dramatic shadow that will run with the narrative so that the past will be seen running towards an inescapable present. Turgenev is free to mock his youth and to watch the defeat of innocence without abusing it.

He worked for two years on this story. He wrote the fifty thousand words at least three times. His art is the pursuit of truth-telling and balance; he does not allow one character to obscure another; he lets every character do what it is his nature to do. And each one delights because of the gentle but firm manner in which he makes them add unsuspected traits to themselves. All is movement.

The story also owes much of its freshness to its division into forty-three short chapters, most of them only five or six pages long and reading like variations on a deepening melody. The Italian family is delightfully drawn. There are the fond, shrewd mother, Frau Leonora with her headaches and her tears; the dramatising Panteleone, who had once been on the operatic stage but is now sunk to the state of half-servant, half-family friend; the beautiful
Gemma who is charming but has a mind of her own; her fiancé Herr Kluber, the pompous rising shopkeeper; the rude blustering German officer, Baron von Donhof whom Sanin challenges to a duel; the handsome Italian son of the family who wants to be an artist and not a shopkeeper—they are all moved into action. Sanin and Gemma are bemused by each other, each is a wonder. In Sanin, Gemma sees an eloquent young hero, free of the pettiness of shop-keeping, a young man of honour, enchantingly free. Sanin sees Gemma as a goddess and his love begins when he is jealous of Herr Kluber and horrified to think of her becoming the wife of a stiff, obsequious shopkeeper. Kluber, as it turns out, is afraid to stand up to a rude German officer who shouts his drunken admiration of Gemma across the tables at a restaurant. Kluber takes his party away, but Sanin stays behind to challenge Von Donhof to a duel. Already the feet of Sanin and Gemma have left the earth. What accident will Nature trick them with to make them fall into each other's arms? As Sanin stands near her window he and Gemma are literally blown together.

Suddenly, amid the dead silence and in an entirely cloudless sky, there arose such a violent gust of wind that the ground seemed to tremble underfoot, the faint starlight to quiver and shimmer and the air began turning round in a whirlwind. The wind, not cold but warm, almost burning hot, struck the trees, the roof of the house, its walls, the street.

The din lasts only for a minute and in that time the two have grabbed each other for protection.

In no time the whole Italian family are in love with the lovers. Madness seizes them all. Sanin says he will sell his estates in Russia instantly, take a job in the diplomatic service: better still, turn confectioner. Even Frau Leonora starts innocently working out how she will enlarge the shop. They are all living unreal lives.

Sanin leaves the shop to find someone who will buy his estates. Idiotic luck is on his side: he meets a Russian friend Polozov, who had been at boarding school with him, and tells him what has happened. Polozov says that he cannot offer any money, but says that, very likely, if managed in the right way, his rich wife probably will. The Polozovs are staying in nearby Wiesbaden. This prospect
seems quite normal to Sanin. We now see one kind of illusion in love, turning to a darker one.

Sanin goes with Polozov to Wiesbaden to meet his rich wife. Love is not a miracle for the Polozovs: it is a sophisticated arrangement, a tolerated enslavement which takes the form of freedom. Polozov, an idle and impotent gourmet, is married to a sexually ravenous woman, half-gypsy and possibly of serf background, apt to be vulgar in speech, intelligent, a beautiful animal, who has married in order to be free to take on any lovers she wants. The chaste Gemma has inspired the idealist in Sanin: Maria Polozov is struck by him and settles to drawing out his sensuality, promising him the money but working on him until his love for Gemma is adroitly turned into sexual desire for herself. The scenes in which she negotiates this are wonderfully done and they end with an afternoon on which Sanin and Maria go riding into the mountains and the animal exhilaration of the ride ends in her victory.

This is one of the most sustained evocations of sensual love in Turgenev's writing and may be said to be unique, for in
First Love
one has only a brief perception from an outside observer. In
Torrents of Spring
one sees the whole of the experience, except the act itself, from the growth of the intrigue, those exchanges of personal history in the theatre, those impatient yet cunning insinuations on the woman's side, the cornering of Sanin's conscience and the dissembling of the imagination as desire takes him into bewitchment. The ride into the mountains is long, constantly distracting him with the excitement of canter and gallop and yet each distraction heightening the sexual impulse as Sanin follows Maria from the road, into the woods, across the sudden light of swampy field, into darker forest and paths which she knows but he does not, to the woodman's hut where they tie their tired and shuddering horses—this detail obliquely suggesting the exhaustion and will-lessness of the mind, helpless before the act can seize them and passion come out in its full strength. Turgenev obtrudes no overt symbolism (which usually mars such episodes in other writers); indeed as an account of a healthy ride in the country, passing from sun to shade through the trees, the whole thing has a kind of innocence. What is exceptional is the sense of two people in love in hostile ways, hers a determined gamble—she has in fact a bet with her husband that she will bring off the seduction—and Sanin's love, helpless and blind. It is as if,
as woman and man, they are fencing opponents yet united by intention. For both of them, despite the intention, the act of love will relieve them by seeming to come from the outside, overwhelming her fear of losing and his of succeeding. Turgenev is superior to most authors, especially of his period, in showing us this without giving us the fatal impression that he is vicariously satisfying his own erotic wishes. Above all he sees the man and the woman as separate people, as two different histories: and conveys nothing of what I have just written by his own analysis. The people exist for themselves, not for him, just as the groom whom they told to leave them half-way through the ride, exists only for himself on that day. In his way, and even like the horses, he has this day for its own sake. Turgenev, the nature lover, admired the equilibrium of nature; and this sense of balance gives the whole story a quality one can only call innocence that is a veil.