The Gentle Barbarian (32 page)

In the May of 1874 Turgenev was in Russia once more and stayed until July. In Petersburg he looked out of his window to see the moujiks, the Kaftans, the little carts, the pigeons flying about and the soldiers in their long coats, and felt he had never been away. Although it was spring and the sun was shining, there was no sign of leaves on the trees, there was an icy and stinging wind raising the eternal dust of Russian cities. He had a twitch of rheumatism in his
shoulders. He was seeing crowds of people and went to the courts to hear a case of rape: the victim did not shout and cry as a French girl would, but was as dumb as a sheep and the awful rapist was acquitted! He was a sponge, Turgenev said of himself, mopping up every possible impression of Petersburg life for future use; the making of a new novel,
Virgin Soil,
was in his head. Russian society, he said, had changed but it was difficult to know what was going on under the surface. The young men were no longer hostile to him. He noticed that his efforts on behalf of Flaubert's
Tentation de Saint Antoine
had been a failure. There are letters to the Viardots every few days. He went to the English Club where he wonders what they thought of him; he found them all terribly aged. He visited a reformed prison: no corporal punishment, no bread and water, a kind of open prison; the governor came of an English family who had settled in Petersburg—“perhaps that explains the success of the experiment.”

As always on his visits to Russia the gourmet indulges and is doubled up in a violent colic that lasts for days. He takes the train to Moscow which is ugly, dirty and stinking and stays in a palace of vast rooms and only one servant, a drunken old soldier. (His host has left for the Crimea.) Then he goes on the long drive via Mtsenk to Spasskoye and is at last under the roof of his wooden house. It has been re-painted, the ivy hangs from the verandah. He notices how sad the garden is; it seems to be filled with an ancient silence, perhaps because of the cawing of the rooks. He looks at the school he has built (the schoolmaster is a drunk but not a bad sort) and the little hospital with its old people. There is one who is ninety-one. The peasants come round begging. They embrace him and weep, not because they are pleased to see him or because they are grateful, but out of self-pity and their fear of death which brings “those little round tears to the faces of the old.” He gives them 1,000 hectares of wood and six roubles worth of eau de vie.

His gout makes one of its expected attacks, as the Viardots knew it would. It flies to his knee. This is the third time he has had it in June. The only known remedy was a Dr. Joseph's pills taken in sugared water, and a hot compress with oil of arnica put on the joint. Terrible nights of agony follow; he has to send to Mtsenk for crutches. And he is burning sugar, paper and sealing wax to drive away the appalling stench of his manservant's feet.
The past comes back in the form of a visit from his old valet Porfiry, his half-brother, who had been in Germany with him when they were young. Porfiry had become a doctor and brought a dreadful son with him.

Another visitor was far more important: the Baroness Vrevskaya whose husband had been killed in the Caucasus. (Pauline Viardot became jealous of her and called her drily the
“veuve de Malabar.”
) The baroness was Turgenev's neighbour and was kind enough to visit him a couple of times when she heard he was ill and spent some days with him. He had met her before in 1873 in Karlsbad where she was taking the cure and, in his way, had fallen in love with her. Baroness Vrevskaya provoked one more
épanouissement.
She was something of a beauty, she was intelligent, she was thirty-three, and her subsequent history—four years later when the Russo-Turkish war broke out she went to the Front as a nurse and died of typhus—shows she was no torpid provincial lady, but one who needed to dedicate herself to a life of action. After the neat cynicism and phrases of French society and the egotistical young Russians who came to him with their revolutionary rages and intrigues, the Baroness was a thoughtful young Russian woman well planted in her own soil, saddened but not defeated by the death of her husband. Although he protected himself by charm and self-irony, it does seem that she roused Turgenev out of the boredom of his accepted rôle at the Viardots where he had become inured to the lack of that spirit of expectation which was necessary to him as an artist. He was in the doldrums of resignation. She awakened his wavering imagination and they evidently became frank and intimate friends, not it seems in the melancholy manner of his friendship with the pious Countess Lambert and—though little is known about this—we do not hear any talk of “other bonds.” Indeed, lamely as usual, saying an ever lingering Goodbye, as the friendship deepened, he wrote her in a letter which all his biographers quote, that he loved her as a friend; he “had had the desire to possess her, but it was not so uncontrollable as to make me ask you to marry me; on the other hand, you would never consent to what the French call a
passade.
” One mysterious sentence is all that we are told of her reply “But some time ago, if you had wanted …” The fact is he had intended only a short stay in Russia and in his letters to the Viardots he explained the delay in returning by his attacks of gout and his researches, but his pleasure in the company of the Baroness seems likely to be part of the explanation. He wrote a fervent
Prose-Poem
about her when he heard of her death

in the dirty, stinking straw under the shelter of a tumbledown barn turned in haste into a camp hospital in a ruined Bulgarian village … A soft tender woman and such a force, such eagerness for sacrifice … May her dear shade pardon this belated blossom upon which I make bold to lay upon her grave!

In Spasskoye the memories of his mother's tyranny over her serfs became vivid once more, and he wrote the long story of the two droll friends, Punin and Barburin, who were in the household when he was a boy, but the story leaps forward to the sixties and the change in the lives of a poor but intelligent man and the flighty girl who marries him. Punin, the unworldly story-teller and poet, is dead but Barburin and his wife, the man who has stood for justice and who has even been sent in his time to Siberia, are now seen enduring everything but educating themselves and the peasants. Barburin's strength never slackens. Turgenev is showing that the courage of one determined humble man who put his principles into practice can count.

The story shows him putting aside the disillusion that followed the Emancipation and turning to the hope that may lie in the influence of one man who bears all and keeps his faith in justice, outside of politics. It is a sleepy tale because he has thrown rambling reminiscence over it, but it is a preparation for the mood of the long political novel,
Virgin Soil,
where the scene is the Russia of the late seventies and the Populist movement. Solomin, the practical factory manager of that book, is another sober Barburin of a more able kind and of a new generation.

Virgin Soil
is Turgenev's longest and most complex novel and it is very much written to show that he had not lost contact with the younger generation in Russia. He set out to portray the various types of educated young men and women who had thrown up the life of their class “to go to the people,” live among them, dress in the clothes of workers and peasants and to work with them and even to
conspire with them. A quotation from the
Notebook of a Farmer
on the title page indicates that the novel will be a piece of practical social criticism: “Virgin soil should be turned up not by a harrow skimming over the surfaces, but by a plough biting deep into the earth.” The Populists were skimmers, but there were many extremists among them. To Stassyulevich, his publisher, he wrote that he expected the novel would be as violently abused in Russia as
Fathers and Sons
had been.

Hitherto the younger generation has been presented in our literature either as a crew of crooks and scoundrels … or as much as possible idealised … I decided to chose the middle course and to get closer to the truth—to take the young people who are, for the most part, good and honest and show that despite their honesty their very course is so false and impractical that it cannot fail to lead them to complete fiasco.

Whether he succeeded or not, he said, the young would at any rate sense his sympathy if not for their aims, then for their personalities.

Turgenev feared the censor and indeed reluctantly suppressed things that might too obviously offend. The novel was published in two parts and having passed the first, the censor's Committee were in a difficulty about the more disturbing second part. One faction wanted to burn it and insist on the “correction” of the first part. The Chairman gave an embarrassed casting vote in its favour, but said if he had known the whole book in the first place he would have banned it. In the end, as Turgenev expected, the novel was damned by both sides who were swayed by party feeling. The Conservatives, the official classes, said Turgenev was a dangerous Radical who himself was personally involved with conspiracy—and indeed he did give money to the paper of the Populist leader, Lavrov, but simply because he hoped it would take the place of Herzen's
The Bell
as a forum for political discussion. He knew enough about political opinion to know that its phases do not last long. The Populists were a moral replacement of the Nihilists whose policy of rejection had soon spent itself. The Conservatives, especially, derided the idea that one of his characters, a girl called Marianna of the gentry class, would involve herself with the movement. No young woman would join it. The Radical critics ranged from those who said he was an
old man libelling the young to those who said he knew nothing about the genuine revolutionaries and that, in any case, his absence from Russia made him out of date. Turgenev proved to be more accurate than either party in his diagnosis, as he had been in the case of Bazarov in
Fathers and Sons:
almost immediately after the publication of his novel 18 women out of 52 conspirators were arrested and put on trial. The world's press reported the sensation and
Virgin Soil
was translated into many languages and became a bestseller in France, Great Britain and the United States.

Turgenev was easily affected by hostile criticism. Once more he said he was finished and, once more, that he would never write again. But “presently he recovered and stood by what he had written and, like many gentle men who are bullied, he had his malice and a sharp, firm pride. Indeed, the novel itself has a satirical harshness which is exceptional in his works. He repeated one or two stinging epigrammatic judgments, one particularly on the notorious Oriental love of lying which so many Westerners have complained of in Russians:

A truthful man … that was the great thing! that was what touched her! It is a well known fact, though by no means easy to understand, that Russians are the greatest liars on the face of the earth and yet there is nothing they respect like the truth—nothing attracts them so much.

In its opening pages, we are pushed abruptly into a dirty attic and see a slovenly young man and a woman with coarse lips and teeth. Both are smoking and paying no attention to each other; nevertheless, we note their air of honesty, stoicism and serious commitment. From this moment we see how Turgenev's familiar world and manner has changed. The style is harder, more photographic; the grace has been replaced by the instant, the summary and the laconic. He is now attempting a larger number of characters from a wider canvas of life and is about to involve them in an elaborate plot and to grip us with a long story of imposed suspense which he had said earlier was outside his instinct and competence. We remember that Tolstoy and Dostoevsky have overtaken him, in this sense, and have given the Russian novel a density where before it had only surface and extent. We remember that what he admired in Dickens was the
variety of mood—indeed he wondered, after the book was done, if he had not taken too much of the caricaturist from him. We have certainly an impression of cartoon and in that the book has something in common with, say, Dostoevsky's
The Devils.

Both Turgenev's conspirators and his innocents who “go to the people,” strike one as living in a vacuum. Conspiracy is an urban matter and Turgenev is not by nature an urban novelist, although for once he does give us a picture of a Russian town, probably Orel, for its own sake. It is well photographed:

It was Saturday night; there were no people on the street, but the taverns were still crowded. Hoarse voices broke from them, drunken songs and the nasal notes of the concertina; from doors suddenly opened streamed the filthy warmth, the acrid smell of alcohol, the red glare of lights. Before almost every tavern were standing little peasant carts, harnessed to shaggy, pot-bellied nags; they stood with their unkempt heads hanging down submissively, and seemed asleep.

Or:

The coach crossed a wide market place, positively stinking of rush mats and cabbages, passed the governor's house with striped sentry boxes at the gates, a private house with a turret, a promenade set with trees recently planted and already dying, a bazaar filled with the barking of dogs and the clinking of chains, and gradually reaching the boundaries of the town overtook a long long train of wagons, which had set off late for the sake of the cool of the night.

An un-Turgenevean scene, brutally observed, but it must be said, well-placed. For Nezhdanov, the young poet and idealist and, so to say, political guinea-pig of the novel, is getting a first sight of the Russia he has vowed to “go to,” live with and understand. But what one suspects already is, as Richard Freeborn says in his study of Turgenev, that
Virgin Soil
is going to be a forerunner of the crude, black and white, schematic works of the Socialist Realists of our time and that:

The distinctions Turgenev makes between the aims of the Populists and their persons was artificial, especially for a writer who had been used to accepting both the man and his ideas.