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YARMOLINSKY
TURGENEV
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TURGENEV
THE MAN-HIS ART-AND HIS AGE

UNIL
OF
TURGENEV HUNTING
Remarque:
PAULINE VIARDOT
From a hitherto un-
published engraving
MICH
TURGENEV
THE MAN-HIS ART-AND HIS AGE
AVRAHM YARMOLINSKY
This Games
BY
ILLUSTRATED

******
PUBLISHED BY THE CENTURY CO.
NEW YORK
AND LONDON
Copyright, 1926, by
THE CENTURY Co.
PRINTED IN U. 8. A.
140
Pues see non
!
War
3-6-38
355
PREFACE
As the statements of fact in this narrative derive chiefly from
sources which, being in Russian, are inaccessible to Western readers,
and as the works drawn upon run into the hundreds, the author
deemed it unnecessary to burden the book with references. His
researches, begun in the New York Public Library, took him to
the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin, the Bibliothèque Nationale, and the
British Museum, as well as to the great libraries of Leningrad
(Petersburg) and Moscow. He recalls with special pleasure the
long hours spent during the winter of 1923-24 in the cold reading-
room of the Pushkin House, not far from the ice-blocked Neva, and
in the Leningrad Public Library, whose more clement atmosphere
allowed him to shed his overcoat while he worked. To the ad-
ministration of these two institutions, as also to that of the Library
of the Russian Academy of Sciences and of the Historical Museum
in Moscow, he is obligated for access to much manuscript material
which yielded data presented here for the first time.
He wishes to thank the following: Professor Nikolai Leon-
tyevich Brodsky, of Moscow, for the use of his private library and
for permission to read the manuscript of a volume of the novelist's
unpublished correspondence; Mr. Mikhail Veniaminovich Portu-
galov, curator of the Turgenev Museum at Oryol, for help in pro-
curing unpublished pictorial material; Mr. Ivan Ivanovich
Lebedev, an archivist of the same city, for unpublished information
relating to Turgenev's forebears; Mr. Modest Hoffmann, of Paris,
for permission to read his transcripts of unpublished documents
from the collection of the late A. F. Onyegin, a friend of the
novelist's; Mr. Anatoly Fiodorovich Koni, of the Russian Academy,
one of the few surviving acquaintances of Turgenev's, for his in-
terest; and Professor André Mazon, of the Collège de France,
chiefly for intelligence concerning Turgenev's literary remains con-
tained in the papers of the Viardot family, upon which he has
▼
vi
PREFACE
been at work since 1914. His catalogue of this material has been
completed but not yet published. Some of the documents have
however already appeared in print. They furnish evidence that
the gestation of Turgenev's major compositions covered a longer
period than has been believed, and that the plots were elaborated
years before the novels were actually executed, a circumstance which
allowed him to keep several works on the stocks at the same time.
They further emphasize the novelist's reliance upon living models.
The published catalogue, as Professor Mazon has been good enough
to indicate in a letter received as this book goes to press, will contain
a reprint of a hitherto unknown plan for an unwritten novel. The
kindness of the late Henry Holt, in permitting him to read a per-
sonal letter addressed to the publisher by Turgenev, is gratefully
remembered by the author. Above all, he is heavily indebted to Miss
Babette Deutsch for her persistent encouragement, for the stimulus
of many fertile suggestions, and for guidance in the treacherous
ways of a language to which he was not born.
Dates of events occurring in Russia are reckoned by the Julian
calendar (Old Style); events outside of Russia are dated according
to the commonly accepted calendar (New Style), which, for the
nineteenth century, is twelve days in advance of the other.
August 31, 1926
;
CHAPTER
I
CONTENTS
Part I
YOUTH
IN WHICH A RUSSIAN IS SCRATCHED
"SHADES OF THE PRISON-HOUSE"
THE AMERICAN
II
III
IV THE METAPHYSIC AGE.
V THE IMMACULATELY CONCEIVED
VI THE LAY SECTARIANS
VII SALAD DAYS
VIII LOVE, CARNAL AND Spiritual
IX THE POET
X WESTWARD HO!
XI NOVEMBER FIRST, EIGHTEEN FORTY-THREE
XII THE DARK LADY.
•
XIII "A SPORTSMAN'S SKETCHES"
XIV "BONNE NUIT, MAMAN"
Part II
XXII THE NIHILISTS
XXIII
XXIV
MIDDLE YEARS
XV THE CROWN OF MARTYRDOM
XVI A MAN OF LETTERS
XVII "THE ONLY WOMAN"
XVIII THE SLOUGH OF DESPOND
SAVORED MELANCHOLY
XIX
XX HAMLET AND DON QUIXOTE
XXI FREEDOM
•
•
"FATHERS AND CHILDREN"
DIFFERENT CLAY.
XXV "I AM A EUROPEAN"
XXVI AN UNOFFICIAL MARRIAGE
•
•
•
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3
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41
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48
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63
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. 107
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126
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• 136
146
155
. 161
170
• 179
189
198
209
219
vii
·
#
ན
viii
CHAPTER
CONTENTS
XXVII THE BADEN NEST
XXVIII THE EXPATRIATE
•
Part III
PHOENIX LOVE
XL "I AM TIRED"
EPITAPH
INDEX
AGE
XXIX THE CLIMACTERIC
XXX MEEK PAGAN AND VICIOUS CHRISTIAN
XXXI THIRTY DEVONSHIRE PLACE
XXXII "WHEN YOU'RE OLD"
XXXIII
The Last Work .
XXXIV A MARRIAGE OF SOULS
XXXV
PARIS: FRIENDS AND STRANGERS
XXXVI "AU REVOIR IN AMERICA !"
XXXVII THE RETURN OF THE NAtive
XXXVIII
RECONCILIATION
XXXIX
•
•
•
€ 239
•
•
PAGE
229
•
251
262
273
284
294
305
· 314
· 326
336
•
· 348
•
· 358
· 369
· 379
381
*
ILLUSTRATIONS
TURGENEV HUNTING, WITH A SKETCH OF PAULINE VIARDOT
AS remarque
From a hitherto unpublished engraving by Pozhalostin
VARVARA PETROVNA TURGENEV IN 1816
From a hitherto unpublished portrait, a photograph of which is
in the Turgenev Museum at Oryol
SERGEY NIKOLAYEVICH TURGENEV
TURGENEV AS A CHILD
From a hitherto unpublished portrait painted about 1824, a
copy of which is in the Turgenev Museum at Oryol.
16
TURGENEV AS A STUDENT
From a water-color made in Berlin in 1838 or 1839.
NIKOLAY STANKEVICH .
VISSARION BELINSKY
PAULINE VIARDOT IN 1843
From an engraving by Achille Martinet after the painting by
Ary Scheffer .
88
·
PAULINE VIARDOT IN 1844
From a sketch made during her Petersburg engagement; found
among Turgenev's papers.
TURGENEV AND LITERARY FRIENDS, ABOUT 1858
PAULINE VIARDOT IN 1859
From a self-portrait
FIODOR DOSTOYEVSKY
From a portrait by Perov.
TURGENEV IN 1871
Frontispiece
FACING
PAGE
From a drawing by Ludwig Pietsch .
TURGENEV IN 1872
From a portrait by Perov.
4
13
•
•
36
45
80
97
132
224
268
280
320
ix
X
ILLUSTRATIONS
-
J
1
*
LEO TOLSTOY
From a portrait by Kramskoy.
TURGENEV IN 1879
From a photograph given by him to Mme. Savin
FACING
PAGE
•
352
368
PART I
YOUTH: 1818-50
Life went a-maying
With Nature, Hope, and Poesy,
When I was young!
COLERIDGE
·
TURGENEV: THE MAN, HIS
ART AND HIS AGE
tegikoatle
N Monday, October 28th, 1818,
son Ivan-21 inches Tall was
Born at Oryol in my own house,
at twelve of the clock in the
Morning." When Turgenev's
mother made this quaint entry in
her tiny memorandum-book she
was a woman of thirty, yet with-
out the mature charm gener-
ally conceded to that age. Her
figure was small and neat, but
stooping; her fine eyes were set
in a sallow, coarse-skinned, pock-
marked face, above a broad nose
which was to grow blue with time, and a determined chin. It was
her tragedy to be passionate without being lovable. Even her son
failed to value in her the vigor of personality which sometimes com-
pensates for a lack of physical attractiveness. He was too much
oppressed by her domineering complacency to appreciate that shrewd,
graceful apprehension of experience which she bequeathed to him.
She wore her ego as women of another period wore their hoop-skirts,
taking it for granted that people would get out of her way. In her
meager person she combined a grande dame and a barbaric matriarch.
One sees her, during her rare placid moments, moving about her
"}}
IN WHICH A RUSSIAN IS SCRATCHED
CHAPTER I

alle
Umw
MUTY
Baldos
3
4
TURGENEV
drawing-room, her delicate hands hovering over her Sèvres, her
bibelots, her flowers, and alighting upon her Imitation de Jésus Christ
-herself carefully bonneted and ruched, as she always was to every
one but her maid.
Varvara Petrovna, to refer to Madame Turgenev familiarly in the
Russian manner, always named her forebears with unction. Her
family pride was part of the small, rigid set of traditions to which
she was born. Not that she could have traced her ancestry back
further than the beginnings of the eighteenth century, when these
Lutovinovs began to accumulate their lands and their wealth. They
did not distinguish themselves either as soldiers, as scholars, or as
gentlemen. What they possessed was a violent energy, a gross
self-will, rooted in generations of insolent authority. Their lettered
descendant took pleasure in privately villifying these homespun
Borgias. He once remarked that they were as ugly as goats and
stank like monkeys. Some of the bones of the family skeletons
are to be found in his stories.
An intimate of Turgenev's has; for example, identified the villains
in the tale "Three Portraits" as the novelist's maternal great-
grandfather, Ivan Lutovinov, and one of his sons.
In the story
the young gentleman seduces his sister by adoption and, finding
her with child, lays the blame to her betrothed and kills that honest
simpleton in a framed-up duel. In reality the crime was complicated
by incest, since Lutovinov's victim was his own sister. Another
well-authenticated story presents this gay deceiver as stealing the
bride from her husband's bed on the night of the wedding, at which
he was an invited guest. In this adventure he was assisted by his
valet, Boursier, who also figures in "Three Portraits." The harsh,
embittered old man in "Three Portraits," who cherishes his money-
bags with a miser's affection, reappears in the story "Freeholder
Ovsyanikov." He boldly possesses himself of the land of a peasant
freeholder, and when the wronged man complains to the courts, he
has him flogged into submission. The fly-blown, gilt-framed oil
paintings of the old man, the young rascal, and his pale, black-haired
sister, all hung in the dining-room at Spasskoye, the family estate.
The first Lutovinov on record had five daughters and three sons,
the oldest of whom, Piotr, was Turgenev's maternal grandfather.

VARVARA PETROVNA TURGENEV IN 1816
From a hitherto unpublished portrait
UNIL
OF
IN WHICH A RUSSIAN IS SCRATCHED
5
Piotr Ivanovich was remembered for having taught his peasants to
graft sprigs of orchard trees upon the wild apple- and pear-trees
growing in the forest which encroached upon his fields. A little
peasant boy, owned and picked for schooling by Varvara Petrovna,
wrote in later life of having munched these forest fruits. The story
that attaches itself to the novelist's maternal grandmother is less gra-
cious. He passed on the tale that in a fit of temper the vicious old
paralytic worked up sufficient energy to suffocate her young attendant
with a pillow. Varvara Petrovna, however, filially remembered the
virtues of the old lady, who was so far ahead of her age as to hold
opinions on politics, business, and books. "My old mother," Mme.
Turgenev wrote to her son Ivan, "was infinitely more entertaining
than your father's mother is."
Piotr Ivanovich died before his daughter Varvara was born.
With her mother's second marriage the girl's unhappiness began.
She grew up a homely, gawky creature, the ugly duckling among
her pretty stepsisters, and warped by her mother's odd dislike. The
story goes that her stepfather made up for her mother's coldness by
an unmistakable ardor, even if he beat her when he was drunk.
Many years after, Varvara Petrovna took her little adopted daughter
to visit the old mansion which had been the scene of her own bitter
girlhood. The house was deserted and the door leading to her step-
father's room was boarded over. "No sooner did I run up to it
[the door]," writes this daughter in her Memoirs, "and put my
hand to the ancient copper padlock which stuck through the boards,
than Varvara Petrovna seized my arm: 'Don't touch it! You
must n't! There is a curse on these rooms!' Never shall I forget
her voice and the way her face looked at that moment. They ex-
pressed so much fear and hatred and viciousness.
""
It is told that upon her mother's death Varvara Petrovna was
forced to flee her stepfather's importunities. She walked some sixty
versts to seek refuge at Spasskoye, the estate of her uncle, Ivan
Lutovinov, to whom the family possessions had finally fallen. The
relations between uncle and niece are a matter of conjecture. In
spite of his hold on the purse-strings, he liked to keep open house,
and there was no scarcity of entertainment for man and beast. It
may have been in the rough male society which his hospitality
2
6
TURGENEV
provided that the girl developed her masculine tastes. She pre-
ferred horseback-riding, hunting, and target-shooting to knitting
bead bags and embroidering on canvas. In later years she could beat
her sons at billiards. Obviously she was no dainty goose. To judge
by her letters, her uncle must have offered her the advantages of the
female education of the day. At any rate, she attended a boarding-
school for a time. It is certain that the old man made her his heir-
ess.
According to one account, this uncle died of grief at the news
that Moscow had succumbed to the French. His great-uncle's
patriotism was to be held up as a reproach to Turgenev, who ulti-
mately settled in France, and indeed, expended his last breath there.
It is a matter of record, however, that the old man died in 1813,
the year after Napoleon's invasion. Ivan Lutovinov's estate com-
prised about twenty villages scattered through three provinces, and
a vast amount of personal property. His silverware alone is said to
have weighed two thousand pounds. Turgenev's mother inherited
all this wealth, as she had inherited the eccentricities and savageries
of her race.
Now that she could do as she pleased, the heiress spent part of the
year at Spasskoye and part in the neighboring city of Oryol. Like
many younger and better-favored women, she was anxious to find
a husband. It was in keeping with her virile character that she
should make no bones about it. One young man whom she wooed
too vigorously was literally forced to flee her importunities. Ac-
cording to his own story, she had lured him from town to her
estate, where she provided him with lavish entertainment, and on the
occasion of his name-day presented him with the deed to one of her
properties to which were attached five hundred souls. But Varvara
Petrovna had to see her deed torn up by the very hands into which
she gave it, and that night the young man secretly left Spasskoye.
It was in Oryol that she may have met the handsome young
officer of the Cuirassiers who was to become the father of the
novelist. He owned about one hundred souls and an unprofitable
little property in the neighborhood of the Lutovinov estate. The
mistress of Spasskoye was plain-looking, albeit possessed of spirit
and of a vivid intelligence. Moreover, she was of a ripe age, being
IN WHICH A RUSSIAN IS SCRATCHED
7
indeed six years older than her suitor. But she owned five thousand
souls and many thousand acres. It is reported, plausibly enough,
that the lady made the advances and the lieutenant's father had to
interfere to bring the young man into line. A more theatrical and
less credible tale runs thus: Lieutenant Turgenev visited Varvara
Petrovna to negotiate the purchase of some horses for the army;
the young woman liked the fascinating officer, and with the free
hospitality of those days invited him to join her in a game of cards,
the winner to claim whatever he chose; the cavalier won, and de-
manded the loser's hand in marriage. He followed up his victory
with another the next day which enabled him to name the date of the
wedding.
Under the portrait of the novelist's father at Spasskoye hung a
picture of his family tree. Its branches reach into four centuries of
Russian history. The Turgenevs derive from a Tartar mirza named
Turga, who left the Golden Horde, accepted baptism, and entered
the service of Prince Vasily the Blind in the fifteenth century.
Thus the maxim ascribed to Napoleon fits Turgenev literally. The
golden star on the azure field and the silver crescent above it in the
family's coat of arms refer to the Tartar origin and the Mohamme-
dan faith of their ancestors. The Turgenevs served their princes
faithfully and not without honor. One Turgenev was beheaded
by Pseudo-Demetrius for his devotion to the lawful dynasty and is
revered by the church as a martyr. Two Turgenevs perished in
the jacquerie headed by Stenka Razin in the seventeenth century,
and are vaguely remembered in their descendant's story "Phantoms.'
Several of them were among the gentry whom Peter the Great forced
to learn the business of war from the bottom up, and one was
killed in his service. Another held an important military post under
Empress Anna. A branch of the house boasts a minor poet, a states-
man who was also a historian, and a political writer, all sons of the
rector of the University of Moscow. Romance enters the family
chronicle with the novelist's great-grandfather, who was taken pris-
oner in one of the Turkish wars and became a slave in the sultan's
harem. There, the tradition goes, a sultana was charmed by his
looks and helped him to escape. An obscure legend makes this man
the lover of Empress Elizabeth.
""
8
TURGENEV
In the novelist's father the heritage of beauty was stamped with
a strange femininity. A portrait of him which hung at Spasskoye
has been described thus:
In spite of astonishing dark eyes, daring and manly, it seems that this
is not a man, but a woman, or better still, a demi-mondaine, arrayed in
the white uniform of the Guards, and wearing a neckerchief which
without a knot or a bow, is twisted about her white, swanlike throat.
The glance is a mermaid's, calm and enigmatic, the lips are sensuous
and curved with a scarcely perceptible smile.
Lieutenant Turgenev's grace went with an athletic build: he was
a tall, broad-shouldered man; and his distinguished son contended
that he inherited the giant frame of his father and the vitals of his
lean, sickly mother. In his middle years his wife found in the mer-
maid's features a resemblance to Voltaire.
On Friday, January 14, 1816, Varvara Petrovna Lutovinov, at the
age of twenty-nine, was joined in matrimony to Sergey Nikolayevich
Turgenev, who was twenty-three, in the name of the Father, the
Son, and the Holy Ghost. In after years she warned her young
friends not to marry on Friday, because the day was fatal to married
happiness.
I }
HE newly married pair remained
in the city of Oryol for some
time, and there the eldest child,
Nicholas, and the second son,
Ivan, were born. The third and
last child, Sergey, who arrived
when its parents were married
five years, was an epileptic, who
died young. It was just before
his birth that the father retired
with the rank of colonel, and it
was then that the family settled
definitely in the country, at Spass-
koye, a village on the fringe of
the province of Oryol, lying about two hundred miles southwest of
Moscow, in the heart of central Russia. They made, however, ex-
tensive and frequent trips abroad-in the early years for pleasure,
and later for the sake of the colonel's impaired health. The journey
was sometimes made, at least in part, in a huge lumbering dormeuse
of Viennese make, which had dining and sleeping-compartments, and
which was drawn by ten horses. As a boy of four Ivan saw Ger-
many, France, and Switzerland, on a trip made in the company of the
entire family, and also of a young Russian doctor. At Bern the
boy's career nearly came to an abrupt end when he all but tumbled
into the famous bear-pit.
HUM
CHAPTER II
} [
"SHADES OF THE PRISON-HOUSE”

mu
His early recollections fasten like lichens to the oaken walls of the
wooden manor-house at Spasskoye, to the wayside chapel, and to
the cemetery that lured and scared him. Every part of the great
gardens was as familiar to him as the inhabitants of his green
9
10
TURGENEV
•
bird-cage or the nurse who had him in charge. The boy could
wander from the big house, past the rookeries in the birches, into
the depths of the park, down the shelving slope to the pond where
the fish rose to feed from his hand, and where the children had a
little boat to themselves, or over to the orchard where the trees stood
heavy with cherries or plums or apples. In the autumn he might
startle the snipe that flocked toward the reddening rowans, or watch
the partridge and wild duck that were later to prove his game.
Squirrels, kestrels, orioles, and hedge-sparrows, violets and goose-
berries-these will make a noise and a fragrance in his pages. “Oh,
my garden!" exclaims, in a mood of reminiscence, the hero of one
of his early stories. "Oh, the overgrown paths by the shallow pond!
Oh, the little sandy spot below the tumble-down dike where I used
to catch gudgeons!" And he proceeds to evoke such sights and
sounds and smells as must continually have flowed in upon the senses
of the young Ivan: the dark track of the wind as it moved over
the golden meadow grass; the forlorn song of a peasant broken by
the jolting of his cart; the humble chime of the cracked church
bell; the pungent bitterness of wormwood; the sweetness of freshly
mown buckwheat on the summer air.
Naturally, most of the crowded frescos of this outdoor world that
were painted on the walls of his young mind, flaked off with time.
These few endured until death erased them forever: the patch from
which he used to steal sun-warmed strawberries; the tree from whose
bough he shot his first crow; the spot where he found a mushroom
of prodigious size; above all, the place where he watched, spellbound,
the duel between an adder and a toad. This last horrid spectacle
made the child doubt for the first time the goodness of Providence.
And no amount of Hegelian philosophy from his professors later,
nor earnest arguments from his devout friends, could do more
than film over that subversive picture.
The boy lived in the country until he was nine years old; and
found there plenty of nourishment for his growing curiosity. He
had a particular fondness for pulling off the petals of a rosebud and
trying to discover the core of it. It always irritated him to find
that the innermost sheaths were so thin and delicate that he could not
tear them off. Perhaps this practice taught the novelist to content
"SHADES OF THE PRISON-HOUSE"
II
himself with the exquisite epidermis of reality, to draw, as George
Moore said of him, only the skin from his subject.
When winter came, and the snow weighted the branches of the
pines, humped itself over the low hills, and blunted the edges of the
ravines, there remained a house of forty rooms in which to lose
oneself. It seemed as big as a town to Ivan. He would walk
around heavy oak tables, vast settees upholstered in yellow leather,
cabinets filled with foreign bric-à-brac, and arm-chairs whose ebony
backs were decorated with bronze cupids leading lions on lashes of
flowers. And from the corner of every room he would be regarded
gravely by icons dark with age, before which dim lamps were kept
steadily burning. In some such setting one pictures him playing
lotto with Nicholas, on a checker-board whereof the central square
was "The Temple of Happiness," or, as the boy grew older, com-
posing the geography and history of the imaginary island kingdoms
over which he and his brothers ruled.
The spacious, rather homely manor was connected by galleries
with two wings, one of which comprised the offices, the other being
reserved for guests. If Ivan might explore the house and grounds,
always under the eye of some servant, it was probably a much rarer
thing for him to find the way to what one might describe as the back
door of the estate. Here were the ice-houses and the smoke-house,
the dairies and the wine-cellar, the pigs and chickens, the barns and
stables, and at a little distance the quarters of the house serfs
which hummed and clanged with the work of milling and tanning,
churning and weaving. Spasskoye was virtually a self-sufficient
economic unit, not unlike a medieval domain, producing all that the
family ate and drank, most of its clothes, and some of its furniture.
It is curious to note that another of the Turgenevs' estates housed a
paper-factory which supplied the young author with the foolscap on
which his first stories were written.
The Turgenevs lived hospitably, commanding a hierarchy of
domestic serfs as well as the hangers-on that were to be found in
every manor-house, and providing for relays of guests the pleasures
of both the country and the town. The day that began with a fox-
hunt might end with a masquerade, with private theatricals, or with
a grand ball for which Mme. Turgenev would gown herself in some
12
TURGENEV
imported confection of tulle illusion in which she had danced in
Paris. The tendency to ape court etiquette which gives an anecdotic
touch to her widowhood, must have shown itself in an earlier de-
votion to pomp and circumstance.
Colonel Turgenev had no hand in the affairs of his wife's house-
hold, but he seems to have had his way in affairs of the heart.
If he was attractive, his own appreciation of feminine beauty, even in
his wife's serfs, led him to break his marital vows with a fine con-
tempt for class differences. We have it on his son's authority that
he had a knowledge of women which made him irresistible, and it
was as a tribute to this quality that the novelist called his father "a
mighty hunter before the Lord."
In the story "First Love" Turgenev, if we choose to believe him,
drew upon his reminiscences of the family life of his parents. The
self-contained, elegantly groomed gentleman of the tale, with his
spasmodically affectionate manner toward his family, his excellent
horsemanship, and his Epicurean tastes, was modeled upon the
author's father. Certain episodes, such as a domestic scene over
his interest in a beautiful girl, and his ungallant reference to his
wife's age, serve to corroborate Turgenev's assertion.
Varvara Petrovna's attachment to her husband, although deep
and sincere, was another expression of her egotism. As for him, he
was dependent on his homely, eccentric wife for the money he spent
on his pleasures. He treated her, one must suppose, except in times
of an open breach, with the consideration which his position re-
quired, and she interpreted his attitude to suit herself. Both, being
sticklers for the proprieties, were interested in having their children,
whom they loved, believe the decorous myth of their conjugal
felicity—a myth which Varvara Petrovna elaborated when she be-
came a widow. But one's children are less easily deceived than
oneself.
To the bitterness of a dissatisfied wife, the mistress of Spasskoye
added the slave-owner's habits of mind, and an inherited disposition
toward cruelty. The combination was not likely to contribute to
the happiness of her inferiors-her serfs or her sons. They lived
in an atmosphere of feudalism not tempered by the chivalric ideal
of the West. It is true that her paternalistic attitude toward the

UNIV
OF
SERGEY NIKOLAYEVICH TURGENEV
MICH
"SHADES OF THE PRISON-HOUSE”
13
"souls" she owned, coupled with a managerial ability, assured the
peasants a good living. At the same time she felt herself authorized
to inflict anything on them, from a flogging to a forced marriage.
The walls of Spasskoye witnessed not infrequent acts of despotism.
At least one such scene so impressed itself upon the memory
of a small boy that half a century later he incorporated it into one
of his stories. Two young peasants who were working in the park
neglected to bow to Varvara Petrovna as she passed them-an of-
fense for which she at once ordered them deported to Siberia. "Here
is the window at which my mother sat," Turgenev once remarked
to a visitor at Spasskoye. "It was summer, and the window was
open, and I was a witness to how the two men, on the eve of their
deportation, approached the window with bared bowed heads to take
leave of her."
Looking back at his childhood from the height of his nineteen
years, Ivan wrote: "About my childish years I know that I was
a spoiled darling, but very homely, and that at the age of four I
nearly died, and that I was then brought to life by old Hungarian
wine-perhaps that's why I like wine," adding, "although I don't
drink much," and then crossing it out. Unlike the average man,
Turgenev was not given to romancing about his early years-the
period which a popular fallacy holds to be the happiest in our lives.
As an old man he spoke of having been flogged nearly every day.
Sitting at dinner with friends in Paris, Turgenev is thrown back into
the complex of his childhood by a remark of Flaubert's to the effect
that in a youthful drama of his, the latter made the people complain
to Louis XI that they were forced to season their vegetables with
the salt of their tears. Turgenev recalled how because of some
slight misdeed he would be first lectured by his tutor, then whipped,
then deprived of his dinner, finally wandering out, hungry and sore,
into the park, and "drinking with a kind of bitter pleasure the salt
water which streamed from his eyes down his cheeks into his
mouth." He was given to exaggeration, but it is certain that his
mother believed in the rod, and used it readily. Once when giving
her eldest son ten strokes, she nearly fainted, and she liked to relate
afterward how he stood before her with bare little buttocks, shout-
ing, "Water, water for Mummy!"
A
MONTANA TĀM”
14
TURGENEV
Ivan, outraged by unjust punishments, on one occasion decided
to run away from home. His German tutor discovered him stealing
out of the house in the dead of night, persuaded him to return, and
managed to heal the sprained filial bond. The hatred of injustice
which warms certain pages of his novels must have been kindled
again and again in the heart of a tormented and furious boy, who
not only suffered himself, but constantly saw his brothers and his
playmates, the familiar house serfs, sometimes a bastard of his fa-
ther's, undergoing disproportionate punishments for trivial misde-
meanors. In retrospection Varvara Petrovna flattered herself that
she had treated her sons fairly. "When you were children," she
wrote to Ivan years later, "you were flogged, but not oppressed.
You entered the room noisily, without fear." It would seem that
the mother deceived herself. The whole course of her second son's
life was to bear witness to the crushing effect of her overbearing
manner. It sapped his initiative in the conduct of his affairs, and
his dislike of her self-assertiveness made him incapable of standing
up for his own rights.
Such anecdotes as have come down to us about the active little
boy with the large brow seem to show that he kept a child's fresh
point of view and on occasion wagged a child's free tongue. Upon
being presented by an awed mother to an aged princess, the child, in-
specting her soberly, observed with penetration: "You look just like
a monkey!" This early aptness of simile was of course rewarded
with a flogging. At another time the boy was made to recite a fable
of Dmitriev's before the author himself, a venerable old man and
a third-rate writer, who was visiting the house. Not content with
the rôle of performer, Ivan assumed that of critic, and remarked
to Dmitriev point-blank: "Your fables are good, but Krylov's are
much better." In recounting the story later Turgenev said: "My
mother got so angry that she flogged me, and thereby fixed in my
mind the memory of my first meeting with a Russian writer."
Dmitriev, like not a few of his mother's friends, belonged to the
age of the great Catherine. Indeed, representatives of that formally
courteous, suavely cynical period were not infrequently to be seen
at Spasskoye, and Ivan was also being reminded of it by the ladies
and gentlemen whose portraits stared at him from the walls of home.
"SHADES OF THE PRISON-HOUSE”
15
The exquisites and the skeptics of the eighteenth century were as
irrelevant to the Russian scene as a paste buckle to a bast shoe, and
they themselves must have known it. This picturesque incongruity
of crinolines, powdered wigs, patches, and quizzical eyebrows with
coarse native rusticity, impressed itself on the boy indelibly.
The flabbiness of will which afflicted Turgenev to the end of his
life must have been in part due to the cramping atmosphere of arbi-
trary authority which prevailed in the household, quite aside from
the treatment he received at his mother's hands. So strong was her
passion for regulating and labeling that her house was run with
the strictness of a military establishment. She insisted upon certain
formalities of speech and gesture in the children's relation to their
parents and their Deity. In later years, apparently feeling that the
Lord would prefer to be addressed in a civilized tongue, she made
the little girl whom she had adopted start the day by reciting the
following prayer: "Seigneur, donnez-moi la force pour résister,
la patience pour souffrir, et la constance pour persévérer." In
addition there was the matutinal duty of reading a chapter from
L'Imitation de Jésus Christ. Mme. Turgenev could hardly have
been less exacting in the religious education of her own children.
A Spartan discipline was the educational vogue of the time, and
Turgenev later asserted that his parents were influenced by the
fashion in this matter. Coupled with the authoritarian spirit was
the corollary sense of caste. The little masters played with the
children of the serfs, but the latter were not allowed to presume upon
their privileges. Turgenev tells the story of a pillow-fight with a
serf-boy during which the latter was caught by Varvara Petrovna
in the act of throwing a pillow at her son. The little serf, who was
Ivan's best friend, was immediately sent to be flogged. Ivan's pro-
tests availed nothing. The succession of Fräuleins and Messieurs
who were hired to instruct the children were treated with scarcely
more civility than were the servants.
Varvara Petrovna herself had a hand in her sons' education. Her
note-book for 1823 contains an outline, in the form of questions
and answers, of lessons for the eldest boy. The temperamental lady
had the intelligence to relate some of the questions to the child's ex-
perience on their trip abroad: "What did you see in Bern? Live
16
TURGENEV
reindeer, wild goats, and four bears. Where did you live in Paris?
Rue de la Paix." The answer she made up for one of her ques-
tions suggests from whom her literary son inherited his sensitive eye:
"What is the color of the Rhine? The color of green grapes.'
""
French was in common use in the household, and the main subject
of instruction, but as the boys grew older Russian received a
measure of attention. Colonel Turgenev in ill-spelled letters en-
joined upon his sons the desirability of improving their knowledge
of the native tongue. He also urged them to write their diaries in
Russian at least twice a week, alternating with French and German;
and it was he who asked Ivan's opinion about the correctness of a
Russian phrase "because," he said, "you [children] know the gram-
mar better than we do." Like Pushkin, and so many other masters
of Russian, Turgenev owed his knowledge of the vernacular chiefly
to contact with the serfs. It was probably a domestic who taught
him to read and write the language. He certainly had one of the
servants to thank for his introduction to the native poetry. He was
about eight years old when one night, in collusion with this young
serf, who had an unschooled passion for verse and was himself some-
thing of a rhymester, Ivan broke open one of the heavy old black
bookcases in the nursery, and standing on the shoulders of his ac-
complice, drew out two enormous eighteenth century tomes, smelling
of dust and rats. One of them, entitled "Symbols and Emblems,"
contained puzzling pictures, accompanied by equally puzzling ex-
planations of their significance in five languages, including English.
The impressionable child, having spent the next day over this curious
volume, which had been adapted from the Dutch by order of Peter
the Great, went to bed half-delirious: "Unicorns, negroes, kings,
suns, pyramids, swords, snakes," he recalled later, "whirled through
my poor head; I was an emblem myself. I 'signified,' I was lighted
by the sun, I was hurled into darkness, I sat upon a tree, I sat in a
pit, I sat on clouds, I sat on a belfry. . . ."
The other stolen volume, which Ivan's friend appropriated, was
that grandiloquent, lumbering epic, the "Rossiade," Kheraskov's un-
happy attempt at a Russian Iliad. The two naïve readers found this
book a well-spring of pure delight. The fascination of those sum-
mer hours, when in some green and secret place the child listened

TURGENEV AS A CHILD
From a hitherto unpublished portrait painted about 1824
UNI
OF
MICH
"SHADES OF THE PRISON-HOUSE"
17
to the man thundering out these lapidary dactyls, is written down in
one of Turgenev's late stories, "Punin and Baburin." The narrator
is clearly Turgenev himself, and Punin has some of the lineaments of
the serf who initiated him into his native literature:
It is impossible to convey an idea of the feeling I experienced, when,
seizing upon a convenient moment, suddenly, like a hermit out of a
fairy-tale or a benevolent spirit, he [Punin] would appear before me,
with a ponderous book under his arm, and stealthily beckoning with his
long crooked finger, and winking mysteriously, he would point with
his hand, his eyebrows, his shoulders, his whole body to the deepest
thickets of the park, whither no one could force his way in search
of us and where it was impossible to find us. And now we have suc-
ceeded in getting away unnoticed, now we have safely reached one of
our secret nooks, now we are sitting side by side and the book is being
slowly opened, emitting a pungent odor, then inexpressibly sweet to me,
of mildew and age. With what a thrill, with what an agitated and
mute expectancy I gaze at the face, at the lips of Punin,-the lips from
which in a moment a stream of delicious words is to flow! At last, the
first sounds of the reading ring out. Everything round about vanishes.
... No one knows where we are, what we are about, while with us is
poetry, we saturate, intoxicate ourselves with it; a weighty, grand,
mysterious matter is in progress with us. . . Punin preferred sonor-
ous, thunderous verse; he was ready to lay down his life for it! He
did not read, he shouted the verses out solemnly, in a flowing, rolling
outpour, through his nose, like a man intoxicated, like one beside him-
self with ecstasy, like a Pythian priestess.
- G
{
!
100 DE 6.30 ANYS C
CHAPTER III
HEN Ivan was nine years old the
family moved to Moscow, where
they bought a house and settled
down to the usual life of the
gentry who wintered in town.
It was customary to come into
the city for the Christmas fes-
tivities, preceded by a string of
carts loaded with domestics and
with the carcases of pigs, geese,
and ducks which were to pro-
vide the household with provi-
sions until the third week in Lent.
It was then time to be thinking
about a return to the country, before the spring thaws had erased the
roads. Ivan was placed in a boarding-school run by one Weyden-
hammer. In those days the government schools were held in con-
tempt by the nobility, and a gentleman's son was either tutored at
home or attended a private academy. On one occasion the author-
ities were actually forced to close a public high school for want of
pupils. That the private schools left much to be desired may be
inferred from the fact that the Government, alarmed by the low
standard of instruction there, opened, in connection with the high
schools, special classes for the nobility, and in 1833 forbade the
establishment of new boarding-schools.
SE
THE AMERICAN

COOLD
DOC
The shades of Weydenhammer and his assistants dwell in the
limbo of unremembered schoolmasters. Virtually the only recol-
lection of this period which Turgenev set down is of one of those
puerile savageries inevitable among children. He imagined that his
18
THE AMERICAN
19
brain was covered only with skin and hair, and when he was tapped
on the head, he came near fainting—a weakness which his school-
mates were not slow to discover. He always believed that his fon-
tanelles failed to close, and joked, in later years, about bequeathing
his freakish skull to the Academy. One guesses that the two years
which Turgenev spent under Weydenhammer's tutelage were made
up of a regimen of French irregular verbs and German vocables, a
little mild fagging, and probably several violent friendships.
He seems to have recorded one such boyish attachment of his
in "Yakov Pasynkov," substituting suggestively Winterkeller's
boarding-school for Weydenhammer's. The narrator, palpably Tur-
genev himself drawing upon memories of his school-days, is a mix-
ture of youthful snobbishness and romantic affections which rise
above considerations of caste. The object of his passion is an older
boy, an abandoned orphan who was kept at school out of charity and
was passed over at dessert on week-days. Poetry drew the two to-
gether. Schiller's facile raptures fell from the lips of the elder into
the open heart of the younger. They would desert their beds for a
spring lilac-bush, and, in its fragrant shadow, talk till dawn. It is
possible that in this story we have reminiscences of a somewhat later
period projected upon a background of boarding-school years.
When the boy was within Weydenhammer's walls, he was too young
to show the vague idealism, the sensitiveness to verse, and the ro-
mantic wistfulness of an adolescent artist.
In the late summer of 1829, Ivan, together with his brother
Nicholas, was transferred to the so-called Armenian Boarding-
School, one of the best private schools in the city, which later be-
came the Lazarev Institute of Oriental Languages. He stayed there
only about two months. It was during this period that he started
the study of English, and laid the foundation for his later enjoyment
of Shakspere, Shelley, Keats, Byron, Bulwer-Lytton, and Dickens.
It was also here perhaps that Turgenev thrilled to Zagoskin's novel,
"Yuri Miloslavsky," which was read aloud by an instructor. The
book is a historical romance of ancient Russia, in the style of a third-
rate Walter Scott. The boy was so fascinated by "this miracle of
perfection," as he described it later, that he hit out at a school fellow
who dared to interrupt the story. It was his misfortune, a year or
20
TURGENEV
:
two afterward, to meet Zagoskin as a daily visitor at his father's
house: a little gargoyle of a man, with a head like a squashed pud-
ding, bulging bespectacled eyes, and a cleft chin-prodigal of gro-
tesque gestures and mangled French, and cherishing the delusion
that he was a Samson in strength and a Don Juan in love. Thus
early Turgenev discovered that an author may be the least heroic
of the characters whose lives he has to live.
The three years following Ivan's unexplained withdrawal from
the Armenian Boarding-School were spent at home, preparing under
private tutors for entrance to the university. Some rough sketches
of these gentlemen have come down to us in their pupil's hand.
There was the instructor in literature with his purple nose, who was
always, as the French say, "between two wines." He held the boys
to a strict classic diet, having a thorough dislike of that flighty young
recreant, Pushkin, "that snake with a nightingale's voice," whom
Ivan, with the rest of Russian youth, already idolized. There was
the German tutor, a lachrymose fellow, who could not read Schil-
ler without crying, and who kept a common crow in a cage, as his
pet. He was discovered to be an uneducated saddle-maker and was
forthwith dismissed. Finally, there was the teacher of history, who
combined a reputation for wit with a penchant for German meta-
physics which was then just beginning to be in vogue.
Before Ivan left the hands of these pedagogues for the arms of
his alma mater, he passed through an obscure crisis, such as is not
uncommon in early adolescence. His own account of it years after-
ward, as set down by a friend who had caught him in a reminiscen-
tial mood, appears to be an unequal mixture of truth and fictive
memory. "Until the age of fourteen," Turgenev recalled, “I was
of small stature, obstinate, morose, evil-tempered, and fond of
mathematics. At the age of fourteen I fell dangerously ill, was in
bed for several months, and when I got up I was almost as tall as
you see me now. The doctors asserted that I was ill because of too
rapid growth. At that time I underwent a complete change: I be-
came soft, weak-willed, fond of verses, literature, and inclined to
dreaminess."
When Ivan matriculated at the University of Moscow, he was a
stout, slightly stooping boy, within a month of his fifteenth birthday.
1.
THE AMERICAN
21
It was no sign of precocity that he entered so young, for in those
days the university in its non-professional departments was really
little more than a secondary school. The entrance requirements re-
call the recipes in an old-fashioned cook-book. They stipulate "a
sufficient knowledge of one or two foreign languages in common
use," added to a "grounding in history, geography, arithmetic and
geometry," as well as the knowledge of the native tongue. The re-
quirements had been raised, however, two years before Ivan's
matriculation.
Having satisfied the faculty as to his eligibility, he was duly en-
tered, and nothing remained to endure except certain formalities.
A friend of the family gave his bond that Ivan would always ap-
pear in the proper uniform while in the university and that he
would conduct himself fittingly, and Ivan himself signed a paper
stating that he did not belong to, nor would he join, any Masonic
lodge or secret society. The year that he entered there were twenty-
two students and auditors in the medical faculty and thirty-six in the
ethico-political faculty. Ivan was in the faculty of history and
philosophy. His class consisted of thirteen students and auditors,
less than half of whom were to be promoted.
The boy was good at his lessons. Diligently he parsed his Livy,
read his manuals, and attended his lectures. Such mental stimula-
tion as he received seems to have come from the one teacher who
was less interested in cramming the memories of his hearers than in
stirring their minds. Nominally professor of physics, he taught
the young men under him Schelling's Natur-philosophie. For the
rest, the instruction Ivan received here had to a rare degree the
quality of dignified stagnation common to seats of learning the world
over. The Russian university aimed, however feebly, to pattern
itself on the German model, but lacked altogether the latter's free-
dom of teaching. It was dominated by the officialism of an estab-
lishment created essentially for the purpose of training bureaucrats.
And yet the University of Moscow was one of the few democratic
institutions in a country of caste and privilege, admission at that
time being open to all comers, serfs excepted.
Looking back on this period, Turgenev recalled that his own pro-
fessed democratic sympathies and his enthusiasm for the United
!
22
TURGENEV
States had won for him the nickname of "the American." In the
semi-autobiographical tale "Punin and Baburin" he declares that as
an undergraduate he was a good republican, and hung lithographed
portraits of Fouquier-Tinville and Chalier over his desk. His
fellow-students at Moscow, especially the seniors, lived in an atmos-
phere of intellectual excitement. Ivan must have been influenced by
it, although there is no evidence that he made contacts with the upper
classmen, among whom were men who were to leave their impress
on Russian culture. A few years later, when he found himself in
their company in the lecture rooms of the University of Berlin, some
of them became his close friends.
The boy was to get no more than a taste of the academic life of
Moscow. And yet the flavor of it lingered with him and is to be
sensed in his writings. When he had passed his examinations at
the end of the first year he was temporarily transferred to his third
boarding-school. His brother Nicholas was then in Petersburg.
His mother was preparing to visit Germany to take the waters, and
his father, who was ill, was getting ready to leave Moscow for the
capital. In their comings and goings and scatterings, the Turgenevs
were then leading the life of a twentieth-century family, and Ivan
had an opportunity early to acquire the habit of travel which he
never lost.
In the autumn of 1834 Ivan also went to Petersburg, and en-
tered the university there. The young man, coming from Moscow,
must have felt-whether contributing to his refreshment or his dis-
turbance the ascendancy of a new genius loci. The contrast be-
tween the two cities was even then a stock theme for wits and wise-
acres. Peter's city, in its beginnings a murky dockyard on a
Finnish swamp, within a hundred and thirty years had outdone in
growth the seven-century-old Muscovite capital. If Moscow was
idealistic, slovenly, old-fashioned, Petersburg was practical, trim,
fresh as paint. It was kept stiffly aware of the proximity of the
monarch, like a roomful of school-boys next to the principal's office.
The very promenaders whom Ivan passed on the Nevsky, which was
then still lined with linden-trees, marched in such regular formation
that a sharp-tongued critic said that they could be mistaken for de-
tachments of police. There was a severe angularity about the geo-
THE AMERICAN
23
metrically patterned streets, about the stern buildings, the very color
of whose fronts was prescribed, about the thin chilly gardens and the
massive palaces.
The stamp of officialdom was heavy upon the barrack-like build-
ings of the University of Petersburg, where Ivan spent three rather
ineffectual years. Painted the dull red of most of the palaces and
public buildings of the capital, it looks out on the Neva with a
façade like a narrow face on a lanky prostrate body. The corridor
above the arcade where the students loaf during recesses, is so long
that to stand at one end is literally to lose the other in the haze of
distance. Intellectually, the place did not differ much from the
Moscow institution of learning. There were the same academic
fossils, who read off their lectures from manuals which they pru-
dently concealed from their students; there was the same learning
by rote. Some of the foreign instructors were better equipped, but,
not knowing Russian, were forced to deliver their lectures in Latin-
a language which, though it had once linked the intelligences of the
Western world, was now only a cracked bucket at the well of
knowledge.
The last year of Turgenev's attendance saw new blood being in-
fused into the instruction. Courses were offered by several young
Russians fresh from the hands of professors in Berlin or Göttingen
to whom their government had entrusted them. One of these men,
a teacher of political economy who didn't last long, was so bold as
to appear in the auditorium wearing a turn-over collar and a knotted
tie with flapping ends. Such a sartorial vagary must have raised the
hair upon the scalp of the rector, who was given to scrutinizing the
students' uniforms with the eye of a sergeant inspecting his men.
He is said to have been Robespierre's secretary. He had fled from
the guillotine only to pursue carelessly accoutered boys and personally
to escort them out of the portals of the university building. In
every respect discipline was stricter here than in Moscow.
Socially speaking, the student body was a mixed company.
Sons of princes came to the class rooms attended by their governors,
who sometimes interrupted the lecturer with a snore. They rubbed
elbows with impecunious attic-dwellers. A classmate of Ivan's tells
the story of how one such student became the talk of the town. Un-
24
TURGENEV
·
able to pay his rent, and evicted by his landlady, he took his books
and his poor sticks of furniture, and piled them in the middle of the
Semenov Square, attaching a placard which read: "A Student's
Apartment." In spite of the severity of academic regulations, here,
as in Moscow, Ivan breathed a democratic air, but these young
men's interest was in pleasure rather than in philosophy. He tasted
something suggestive of the German Burschenschaft in the esca-
pades, the lady-killing, and the drinking-parties enlivened by "Gaude-
amus igitur" and "Edite, bibite, collegiales" sung with a strong
Russian accent.
C
LOSE upon Ivan's arrival in
Petersburg his father died, after
Morn-
years of invalidism.
ing and evening Ivan and his
elder brother, Nicholas, had been
obliged to come to his bedside to
kiss his limp hand. A summons
to the sick-chamber at any other
hour filled the boys with fear.
When the end finally came, Var-
vara Petrovna was in Italy, tak-
ing a cure, and the children be-
came the charge of their father's
brother, Nikolai Nikolayevich,
of whom Ivan was very fond, and who was in later years to become
his majordomo and despoiler.
PADIOL
mom
22
|\/
CHAPTER IV
THE METAPHYSIC AGE

????
After Varvara Petrovna returned, a visitor who met her at her
mother-in-law's had this to say about her: "She is the same eccen-
tric, and is not at all unhappy. She has brought no end of dresses
from abroad and flaunts them." Above all, the widow outraged her
mother-in-law's visitor by what that old lady interpreted as designs
upon her son, absurd enough in any case, but intolerable in a woman
on the shady side of forty "and with such a hideous phiz." What-
ever impression Mme. Turgenev gave her neighbors at the time, four
years later she was writing to Ivan: "This [his father's study] is
my grave, here I pray for your father, and talk to him mentally.
Here I work, here I live in the past, on memories. It is only at the
Smolensky Cemetery [where the colonel was buried] that I am
happier."
Gé
G
25
26
TURGENEV
Such of Colonel Turgenev's letters as have come down to us show
him a solicitous, sententious parent, who went to the length of mak-
ing a trip to Switzerland in order to engage a tutor for his children.
His son Ivan paints him, on the contrary, as a cold, courteous
viveur. Whichever picture is true, certainly the affection that he
aroused in Ivan was insufficient nourishment for filial piety. In
later years Turgenev spoke of his father with a disrespect which
savored of malice. In the confessedly autobiographical story "First
Love" the boy's admiring worship of his father is met by a fitful
affection which alternates with long periods of chilling indifference.
"I used to stand and scrutinize his clever, handsome, brilliant face
. . . and my heart would begin to quiver, and my whole being would
yearn toward him . . . and he would seem to feel what was going
on within me, and would pat me on the cheek in passing,-and
either go away, or begin to occupy himself with something, or sud-
denly freeze all over, as he alone knew how to freeze; and I would
immediately shrivel up and grow frigid also.”
It is difficult to say
to what extent imagination has distorted memory in this picture, but
the novelist is firm on the point that the situation upon which "First
Love" is built-that of an adolescent in love with his father's mis-
tress was his personal experience.
The object of this early passion was the daughter of an impover-
ished princess who lived in the neighborhood. There are vague
references to other boyish amours, no less intense for being platonic.
But Ivan must have been tutored in love, as he had been in literature,
by domestic serfs. Even in the town house there was a constant
coming and going of women servants, all of whom were at the beck
and call of the young master, and some of whom were pretty.
On a winter's day in 1878, Turgenev was dining with some
French litterateurs who seasoned their entrée with talk of women and
love. The Goncourt Journals have preserved Turgenev's contribu-
tion. He received the spicy stories with "the somewhat médusé
astonishment of a barbarian who makes love very naturally." When
they began matching their sharpest emotional experiences in love,
Turgenev racked his memory to produce the following:
I was only a boy, and virginal, with the desire which one has at fifteen.
My mother had a pretty chambermaid with a stupid look, but you
THE METAPHYSIC AGE
27
know there are some faces to which stupidity lends nobility. It was
a soft, humid, rainy day, one of those erotic days which Daudet has
just painted. Dusk was beginning to fall. I was strolling in the gar-
den. Suddenly I see the girl coming straight toward me and she takes
me (I was her master and she-she was just a slave) by the hair on
my nape, saying: "Come!" What followed was a sensation not un-
like the sensations which we have all experienced. But this gentle
seizing of my hair with this single word sometimes comes back to me,
and the bare thought of it makes me happy.
Thus, if we are to believe the not wholly reliable Journals, Tur-
genev, in his first amoristic adventure, rejoiced to play the passive
rôle which a Shavian paradox asserts to be man's part. That
toward the close of his life he should, recalling this incident, declare
it to be his most intense love experience, is highly significant for one
who would draw the profile of his temperament.
The pricking of the senses was accompanied for Ivan, as for most
adolescents, by an atrabilious complexion of the spirit. Sixteen is a
melancholy, metaphysic age, and if there was a little dalliance in the
garden, there was much vexation in the closet. One may readily be-
lieve, however, that he sucked on the thought of suicide as a small
boy does on a lemon-stick, and that he played with transcendental
platitudes concerning the use of life and the meaning of death as he
used to play with new puppies. A youth of his feminine temper
and at his age is defenceless against the atmosphere and the influ-
ence of romantic poetry. But where another might be content to
mouth the sonorous syllables and the vehement sentiments, Ivan
must blunt his pens imitating his idols. The literary itch had seized
him before there was down on his lip. His earliest known composi-
tions, which are in verse, are inscribed in a meager note-book en-
titled "Prayer-book," its thick paper covered with idle drawings in
ink and pencil, notes on assigned lessons, Latin words with their
German equivalents, and some sentences in cipher. The poems are
puerile efforts: stanzas for an album, a disquisition on the sorrows
attendant upon the seven ages of man, a ballad on a maiden thrust
by an assassin into the sea, a patriotic ode, and, a curious item: an
imitation of a native folk-song. A later and more ambitious work is
a dramatic poem in three acts, with epigraphs from "Manfred" and
28
TURGENEV
"Timon of Athens." It is a sophomoric piece, mimicking Byron's
impatience with the social and divine order and showing the linea-
ments of its author's mind as in a quaint, indistinct daguerreotype.
Steno, the protagonist, who gives his name to the piece, is dis-
covered on a moonlit night in the Coliseum, soliloquizing on the
transience of things and the emptiness of life. These meditations
overwhelm the youth, who is found in a swoon by Giulia and Gia-
coppo, her brother. They bear him off to their mean cabin and the
girl forthwith falls in love with him. Himself the victim of un-
happy love, Steno has little tenderness for the sufferings of others.
To her passionate entreaty "Oh, my Steno, love me!" he replies with
a harsh "Ha, ha, ha!" Within a few days Giulia dies of a broken
heart, and her brother, mad with grief, kills her physician and rushes
off to avenge her. But his intended victim, Steno, had in the mean-
time committed suicide. The lesser members of the cast are a pale,
blood-stained demon, a pious monk, two airy Voices. From this
gory melodrama, overlaid as it is with literary influences, both native
and foreign, it is patent that the boyish author, like his hero, traf-
ficked in philosophic questionings and agnostic negations, divined
the dangers of reason left to itself, and enjoyed the pose of a spirit
"bloody but unbowed Under the bludgeonings of chance."
"Steno" was begun on September 21 and finished on October 13,
1834. Its sixteen-year-old author was not a little proud of his com-
position, and even pressed it upon the attention of his professors.
Undiscouraged by their strictures, he went on scribbling, and in the
next three years wrote several long narratives in verse and about a
hundred short lyrics, as well as a nameless drama and translations of
"Manfred," "Othello," and parts of "King Lear." Luckily for
Turgenev, none of them found their way into print.
imitative as an infant, and as serious about the business. The read-
ing of Rousseau in 1835 moved him to start an autobiograhy as
follows:
He was as
I turned seventeen a week ago. I want to write down all I know
about myself, my entire life. Why do I do it? For two reasons.
First, I have recently read Les Confessions de Jean Jacques Rousseau
and so I conceived the idea of writing my own confessions. Secondly,
having described my life now, I shall not touch this note-book till the
THE METAPHYSIC AGE
29
!
age of fifty (if I live that long), and then it will certainly give me pleas-
ure to recall what I thought and dreamed of at the time when I was writ-
ing these lines. And so, having made the exordium, which is always
necessary, I begin.
Unfortunately, he gave himself only one unfinished paragraph
to reread at the age of fifty; at least, that is the sole page of his
"confessions" that has come down to us.
For all the foolscap that he covered, Ivan did not look the part
of a budding genius. At any rate, Savelich, the beadle of the uni-
versity, who had seen at least half a hundred classes come and go,
did not think so. When the famous author of "A Sportsman's
Sketches" visited his alma mater, Savelich declared that he was sur-
prised to hear that this Ivan Turgenev was writing books.
"This Ivan Turgenev" was as eager as any literary aspirant to
hear the voice and touch the hand of the great. The briefest per-
sonal contacts with men of letters which he made during his univer-
sity years remained enduringly fresh in his memory. A few days
before Pushkin's romantic death, Ivan sighted him at a concert and
stared so hard at "the demigod" that after thirty years he still re-
called the "small swarthy face, the African lips, the grin of large
white teeth, the pendulous whiskers, the dark bilious eyes under a
high forehead bare of eyebrows." Gogol, Ivan knew in the unhappy
capacity of professor of medieval history in Petersburg. He sat
under him during those lectures to which Gogol brought Cyrano's
nose, but not his eloquence. A year later, in 1836, Ivan applauded
the première of Gogol's "Inspector General." He packed off Kolt-
zov, the Russian Bobby Burns, in his own sleigh, and drove him
home after an evening at the house of his professor of literature, the
man who wept in the class room at the news of Pushkin's death.
The drawing-rooms to which Ivan had entrance may even at this
time have afforded him a glimpse of the fabulist Krylov, sitting
placidly, like a Chinese god, his paunch attesting to his celebrated
passion for suckling pig with horse-radish.
Mme. Turgenev did not entirely share her son's literary sym-
pathies, but she made an exception of Zhukovsky, the ballad-writer,
who, family tradition had it, had visited Spasskoye when she was a
girl. Besides, he held the post of tutor to the Czarevich. At his
30
TURGENEV
mother's instance, Ivan went to pay his respects to the poet on
his saint's day, carrying him a present of a cushion on which was
embroidered a maiden in medieval costume, with a parrot on her
shoulder. The boy wandered through the dreary corridors of the
Winter Palace, stumbling upon motionless sentinels, and when he
finally found himself in the great man's presence he was in such an
agony of embarrassment that he thrust the cushion at Zhukovsky
without being able to produce a syllable.
On his own account Ivan paid a call upon the youngest poet in
Russia, to whom, he was pleased to discover, he was distantly re-
lated. The girl, who looked less than her sixteen years, and still
wore her hair in curls down her back, had just had her first book,
called "Essay in Verse," crowned by the Academy. Having armed
himself with a commission from one of his aunts, and having, prob-
ably, draped himself in one of the wide Spanish capes which were
then fashionable, Turgenev presented himself to the mother of the
prodigy, as the maid explained to him that her mistress insisted on
being the first to receive the daughter's callers. The lady was un-
fortunately blind and so she could not fall a victim to the outward
and visible charms of the tall young man whose colored spectacles
made his eyes look twice as blue. She consented, however, to let
him see her daughter, Elizabeth, the success of whose talent he
"wished to promote." The mother received these advances coldly.
She frowned upon the idea of a literary career for Elizabeth as a
danger to the child's religious welfare. The visitor hotly assured
his newly found relative that it was sinful to deprive society of the
fruits of genius. Before this bold championship Elizabeth dropped
her eyes to her black silk apron. But Ivan was not asked to call
again. And the young poetess in due time became a nun, like Liza
in "A House of Gentlefolk," of whom she is said to have been the
prototype.
At home, life went on with no grave disturbances. The last years
of her husband's life were difficult for a woman who was impatient
of invalidism and whose conjugal affection was not as strong as her
self-love. Varvara Petrovna must have felt the colonel's death to
be in the nature of a release. Thereafter she built up all her emo-
THE METAPHYSIC AGE
31
tional life upon her children, especially Ivan. There was, indeed,
something morbidly exaggerated about her maternal passion. She
was intelligent enough not to demand that her second son should
give her all his affection. But she was so fond a mother and so
overbearing a woman that she could not help impairing the weakest
element in his make-up, his will.
The widow, who wore her weeds with a certain coquettishness,
was a harsher and more eccentric woman than the wife. It was
usual for great ladies to have a large retinue of servants, but Mme.
Turgenev was reputed to have called the page who handled her mail
her Minister of the Post, and to have designated her butler as Minis-
ter of the Court. One of the duties of the court minister was to an-
nounce her sons to her. She had her own police force on her es-
tates, and with a feudal contempt for officers of the Government
consented to see only the highest local officials. The story goes that
she received the rural chief of police while in her bath, denying him
even the dignity of manhood. According to another anecdote,
reminiscent of the French seigneur who ordered his vassals to silence
the frogs that interfered with his slumbers, Varvara Petrovna had
her serfs divert the course of a stream which, in forming a waterfall,
disturbed her night's sleep on a visit to one of her villages. A
scarcely more credible story has it that this remarkable woman in-
sisted that since her porridge was most palatably cooked in a village
ten miles away, it should be brought to her hot by a relay of horse-
men. It is impossible to prove that these, and many similar stories
told about Varvara Petrovna, are untrue. The young democrat
must have been continually offended by his mother's despotism and
her affectation of feudal pretensions. Yet he was fond of her in a
mild way. Unequal to the task of combating her severities and
vagaries, he simply withdrew, an attitude which sorely vexed her.
Neither his mother's conduct, distasteful as it was to him, nor yet
his fits of Weltschmerz, seem, however, to have seriously affected
Ivan's youthful buoyancy. He had a histrionic streak which he
never lost, and a strong liking for fun and mystification. We catch
a glimpse of the grown boy teaching his small adopted sister what he
called "frog Greek." Standing her on a table in a classic pose, he
32
TURGENEV
makes her repeat the chorus from "The Frogs": Co-äx, co-äx,
co-äx, Brekekekex co-äx," first in the solemn accents of tragedy and
then in a high, thin, rapid voice. The performance ends in a burst of
laughter which brings Varvara Petrovna to the scene, full of re-
proaches for such "rire bourgeois!"
WWW.
WAS convinced," wrote Tur-
genev in his Reminiscences, "that
in Russia it was possible to get
only preparatory instruction and
that the source of real knowledge
was abroad. Among my teach-
ers at the University of Peters-
burg there was no one who could
shake this conviction." Accord-
ingly, in May, 1838, less than a
year after he received the degree
of "candidate," amounting to a
baccalaureate, he went to Berlin,
the new Athens, to finish his
studies. His mother consented to part from him because she flat-
tered herself that he would thus prepare to play in public life a rôle
befitting a descendant of the Lutovinovs. She filled the moon-calf's
purse with rubles and his ears with as many if not as wise injunc-
tions as Polonius bestowed on Laertes, warning him above all not to
touch cards, a command which was the first he disregarded. On the
morning of his departure the whole family went to the Kazan Cathe-
dral, where a mass was said for the safety of the traveler. Dur-
ing the entire ceremony Varvara Petrovna wept bitterly, and on her
return from seeing him off, indulged in a swoon.
It was customary in those days to go to Germany by sea. The
young man therefore embarked for Lübeck on the good ship Nich-
olas I, accompanied by a retainer who enjoyed Varvara Petrovna's
complete confidence, and who happened to be a bastard of her hus-
band's. This Porfiry, who was anywhere from seven to ten years
[PENSARPAMTEJA
MAY
CHAPTER V
G
THE IMMACULATELY CONCEIVED

M
33
34
TURGENEV
older than Ivan, somewhat resembled him in feature and was of an
even more generous stature. The mass was not altogether effica-
cious. When the vessel was off port, it took fire. Forty-five years
later Turgenev set down an account of the affair with a wealth of
detail which bears witness to his prodigious memory. He states that
in his fright he promised one of the sailors, in his mother's name,
ten thousand rubles if the man would save his life. When the first
panic was over, he perched on a stairway from which he could easily
have sprung into the water. While he was sitting there, looking at
the flame-lit foam and pitying himself because he must die thus
early, a simple old woman, thinking he planned suicide, begged him
to give up his intention. The romantic notion so appealed to him
that he made several pretences of leaping into the waves. But he
soon became ashamed, and desisted. He noted that the women be-
haved more bravely than the men, and for the rest of his life he was
to embroider on the theme of woman's larger courage.
His account of the disaster gives the impression that he re-
covered his nerve quickly, and in fact was something of a hero.
The rumors which reached Petersburg at the time, however, had the
bulky young gentleman cut an inglorious figure. It was drawing-
room gossip that the captain had to restrain him in his dash for the
life-boats, and that he cried out in a thin voice surprising in one so
corpulent, lamenting his untimely end. His mother wrote to him
quoting reproachfully the reports concerning "ce gros M. Tourgénieff
qui se lamentoit tant, qui se disoit mourir si jeune." The fire de-
stroyed the ship, but Ivan sustained no more serious injury than
this blemish upon his reputation.
He spent some three years abroad, with an interval of several
months at home in the winter of 1839-40. He matriculated at the
University of Berlin. The shadow of classical antiquity still hangs
over its marble corridors and dull lecture halls, although little re-
mains of the zest for the humanities which gave Turgenev his last-
ing taste for Vergil and Homer. Like the pedantry which walled
up that enthusiasm, the massive structure incloses a small courtyard,
planted with elms and acacia, looking rather fragile and embarrassed
against the heavy stone. The austerity of the buildings would be
impressive were it not for the Greco-Roman divinities who frown
THE IMMACULATELY CONCEIVED
35
down from the walls and who seem to have substituted beer and sau-
sages for their proper ambrosial diet.
Moscow and Petersburg had scarcely done their duty by the young
student. While he was taking Roman Antiquities with Zumpt and
History of Greek Literature with Böckh, he was cramming Greek
and Latin paradigms in the privacy of his room. He notes with
nice precision that the voice of the geographer Ritter contrasted
pleasantly for him with the bird-like whistle of Ranke the historian,
with Zumpt's antediluvian bellow and Böckh's lisping purr. To the
soothing noise made by the last-named lecturer, he wrote letters,
appropriately enough in hexameters, about a friend's love-affair with
a pretty scrub-woman. His chief intellectual interest was in phil-
osophy, that is, in the German philosophy of the day, dominated as
it was by the systems of Schelling and Hegel. His diligence is
attested to by his note-books, one of which shows clearly the trend of
his studies. While Boehme and Schelling get respectively one and
a half and one page, Bacon is accorded half a page, and Hobbes a
single line.
The young man, however, would break away abruptly from "The
Phenomonology of Spirit" to train his dog to catch mice-an ab-
sorbing occupation in which he was assisted by his attendant, Por-
firy. Or one might discover Ivan teasing a kitten by tying paper to
its tail, or again, with the faithful Porfiry, engrossed in playing at
cardboard soldiers. Porfiry was a person of voracious appetite-
he was not uncommonly served with two dinners-and amorous dis-
position, and Ivan would employ his German (the language in which
his earliest known letter is couched) in writing love-missives for his
smitten servant. Indeed, the man was more of a companion than a
valet to the student-a relation which elicited Varvara Petrovna's
reproaches.
Among Ivan's more expensive amusements the theater and the
opera played a large part. He had, like his mother, a passion for
music and the stage. The hero of Turgenev's "Faust," speaking of
student days in Berlin, recalls Fräulein Clara Stich, and Seidelmann
in the part of Mephistopheles-celebrities of the day whom Ivan
himself often went to hear. These, as well as two rival prima
donnas, received the young man's noisy ovations, which he mentioned
36
TURGENEV
to his mother, who wrote back with more force than elegance: "Do
not yell in the theaters the way you brag about!" Then there were
the farces at the Königstadt Theater, the excitement of masked balls,
the excitement after them, the stir and color of town festivals. In
one of his stories ("Asya") he describes a student fraternity ca-
rousal such as he must himself have witnessed.
There are always ways for young men to spend money, and Ivan
was quick at discovering them. The letters which Varvara Petrovna
addressed to her son contained repeated references to his spendthrift
habits, which were the chief theme of his brother's letters as well.
His mother begged him to keep some account of what moneys he had
left at the end of each month. She preferred to learn about his
balance rather than about the height of the Strassburg Cathedral. In
1838 he cost his mother twenty thousand rubles, but the following
year she cut his allowance, still leaving him a handsome sum, and in
three months he managed to spend nine thousand rubles. In 1840
there was a terrible famine in Russia, and a ruinous fire at Spasskoye
which led his mother to declare that she could not keep the young man
abroad any longer. These circumstances may have reduced his
allowance, but apparently did not appeal to him as a reason for in-
curring no further debts. When he left Berlin to go home in 1841
he owed one hundred and fifty écus to a German banker and three
hundred to the Russian ambassador in Berlin.
To her warnings and reproaches, his mother added the weighty
burden of her passionate affection. "You are my star," she writes.
"My life depends on you.
Like a thread in a needle-where the
needle goes the thread must follow." The essential meaning of
passion, both etymologically and psychologically, is suffering.
Varvara Petrovna tries to convey the pain of her own love for her
two sons by the homeliest metaphor. "I love you both passionately,
but differently. You especially wound me. . . If my hand is
squeezed it hurts, but if my bunion is stepped on, it is intolerable."
During Ivan's absence she makes the following entry in her jour-
nal, as usual, in French: "Jean is my very own sun. I see nothing
but him, and when he is in eclipse I can't see any more. I don't
know where I am any more."
There is a touch of more than eccentricity in her expressions of

TURGENEV AS A STUDENT
From a water-color made in Berlin in 1838 or 1839
UNIL
OF
MICH
THE IMMACULATELY CONCEIVED
37
tenderness. On one occasion she addresses Ivan as "ma chère fille,
ma Jeanette,” and goes on writing: "Vous êtes ma favorite—Ssh !
for Heaven's sake, let nobody hear it." Again, she refers to herself
as his "most tender father and friend." Her maternal absorption
in Ivan leads her to a flat denial of any intrusive paternity, as far
as his procreation was concerned: "I alone conceived you," she
writes on May 6, 1839, “all that I am, you are." Both mother and
son liked to indulge in such exaggerations. Certainly they differed
in many respects. What they did share was a neurotic temperament,
a strong sentimental strain, and the literary gift with which the son
was to delight the novel-reading public, and with which the mother
regaled her few ungrateful correspondents, and, posthumously, a
handful of more appreciative scholars.
As one reads her ill-spelled, nervous, pithy, shrewd epistles,
sprinkled with French phrases and redolent of an acrid personality,
it seems plain that Ivan inherited his talent from this delightful
termagant, who latinizes for the sake of her son, and who enters
into trenchant discussions with him on books, ideas, and amours.
She gives him the news of the household. His dog Napol "looks
as much like his father as your brother does like his, or you like me.
Fine comparisons!" The queen bee was caught in the rain and dried
by the drones: "She stretched her legs with an air of dignity, played
the coquette, feigned extreme fatigue. Oh, women!" adds Varvara
Petrovna, "you are the same in all creation, loving to please and to
be admired." Uncle Nicholas is cock of the walk. The little
adopted daughter, Bibi, is growing into a real little English girl, the
type Ivan dislikes, neither shy, pale, nervous, nor languid, but "gay
as the April sun." She is such a good little girl that one "could n't
have made a better one out of wax."
His mother follows his travels eagerly, recalling her own ex-
periences abroad and upbraiding him for his blindness to the fine
details of the European scene. "You are like a government courier
dashing along toward his destination." When Ivan is in Switzer-
land Varvara Petrovna exclaims over his not being impressed by the
mountains, and his failure to mention the Swiss cream, the white
veal, the cheese. "I do not recognize my son or his gastronomy.'
And she adds serenely: "Your uncle is afraid that while in Bern
""
38
TURGENEV
וּי
you may commit de l'inceste. When he stayed in Bern he was very
friendly with the girls there, and that was sixteen years ago." She
keeps an eye on Ivan's studies, but she frequently reminds him that
she sent him abroad not only to get learning but also to acquire so-
cial polish. She insists on knowing the status of his friends and
laments his failure to make connections with the right people.
Ivan's share in the correspondence with his family has not been
preserved, but one gathers from the letters which he received from
home that generally speaking he wrote when he was in need of
money. Toward the end of his stay in Berlin his mother heard from
him so rarely that she was reduced to the ignominy of inquiring about
him of his friends. He was a slothful boy; he was absorbed by new
interests and contacts; he was at an age when one's family seems to
be little else than a nuisance. Although at first he complained of
loneliness and strange faces, he could not have been sorry that so
many hundreds of miles separated him from the domestic complex.
Uncle Nicholas was the major storm-center. He was managing
the estate for his widowed sister-in-law, who one day protested that
she loved him as her soul, since he reminded her of her dead husband,
and the next denounced him as her enemy. Ivan, though siding with
his uncle, had no desire to come home to take his part. There were
periodic invasions of Spasskoye by Mme. Turgenev's relatives-in-
law, who ate and drank, and worried her to such a degree that she
said she would have preferred to stay alone and see her shadow on
every wall. She complained to Ivan that they tried to wean his
brother away from her by all sorts of insinuations, especially about
the paternity of her adopted daughter, Bibi, adding that they were
dealing in a pack of lies, and that her sons could say of her, "as the
Lutovinovs said of their mother: 'a sainted woman was our
mother.'
999
In fine, the young man's attitude was aptly characterized by his
brother in a letter in which he conceives Ivan to apostrophize the
family thus: "Cruel fate has decreed that I should be born a man
of 1941, but live in 1841. The people with whom I have to associ-
ate, that is, my near and dear, are therefore just one century behind
me. And so I say: Good-by. Keep well and happy, but don't for-
THE IMMACULATELY CONCEIVED
39
get my twelve thousand a year. Farewell, farewell' "-concluding
with a bar of music.
Sometimes Ivan used his verse as a substitute for letters, a pro-
cedure which his mother resented. The vanity of the young poet
had to suffer, for she was an opinionated critic with old-fashioned
tastes, who did n't mince words: "You, my friend, are like a deaf
man singing mass. I cannot understand poems without rhymes."
Here was an unappreciative family. When Ivan, being ill, wrote
home that he was hesitating between Paris and Italy, his brother re-
plied: "That a sick man goes to Paris for treatment is intelligible,
but tell me, please, what do you want to go to Italy for? Are you
a musician or a poet? I don't understand it."
The demand for some word from the callous Ivan is never absent
from his mother's letters. She threatens to whip an adopted child
for her son's failure to write to her. "It is a pity," she adds. "He
is a dear, good boy, and I teach him, and he is clever at his lessons.
But what's to be done? The poor boy will have to suffer. . . . So
do not bring me to this injustice." Provoked by Ivan's inattention,
she writes, "If philosophy chills us and makes us careless of our sa-
cred duties, you'd better not study it." The strain of hysteria which
seems to be her sign manual is written all over these sheets. Not
seldom they read like the letters of a neglected and importunate mis-
tress. "You are an egoist of egoists," she declares. “. . . I know
your character better than you do yourself. . . . I prophesy you:
you will not be loved by your wife. You do not know how to love.
That is, you will love, not the woman, but your own pleasure."
What Varvara Petrovna especially clamored for was a chatty let-
ter, such as she herself well knew how to write. On one occasion
she gives him a detailed account of her day, retailing how, on awak-
ing, she washes her eyes with a mixture of rum and tea, how she
makes her devotions, and follows these by telling fortunes with cards
between two cups brewed from the Chinese weed, and more gossip
of the same sort. She continues:
Here I am, sitting in the drawing-room all dressed, eye to eye with
my second son. You do not know him. He is a great rascal, is too lazy
40
TURGENEV
to write to me, and when he does write, it is as though only to fulfil his
duty toward his mother. I know him as I do my own self.
He
has the kindest of hearts, but the passions, the passions are ready to get
hold of him and he yields to them, although if he wished he could mas-
ter them better than a cold-blooded man.
The portrait which Varvara Petrovna kept on her desk was a
water-color made in Berlin in 1838 or 1839. It shows a romantic,
well-fed young man. The brooding melancholy eyes dominate the
round, mild, handsome face, with its broad brow and soft, thick
hair parted on the side. The somewhat lax, almost feminine face of
a youth accustomed to a sheltered, ample, and uncoördinated life.
FELY.
CHAPTER VI
THE LAY SECTARIANS

*mu
時間
​URGENEV came to Berlin with
an idea of Germany derived
chiefly from German books.
He found that the city was pop-
ulated not with the figments of
Goethe's and Schiller's imagina-
tions, but rather with plump,
neatly dressed, pusillanimous
Philistines, their empty guts
stuffed, in the words of the first
poet, with pitiable fears and
hopes. He did not dislike the
natives, and indeed established a
number of contacts with them,
but chose his friends chiefly from among his own countrymen. The
group to which he attached himself included some young men who
had been his upper classmen at the University of Moscow.
There had been two sets there. One was absorbed in philosophi-
cal interests, while the other, centered about a certain Alexander
Herzen, was engrossed in what was for them the no less abstract
problems of the socio-political order. The members of the first
were intent upon perfecting their own immortal souls, the members
of the second were concerned with the business of perfecting society:
more concretely, with effecting a political revolution in Russia, such
as the rebels who had stained with their blood the snow on the Sen-
ate Square in Petersburg, in the winter of 1825, had vainly striven
for. Both, but especially the first group, were impatient of partial
improvements, and would have nothing less than the complete reali-
zation of their superb, exacting ideal.
41
42
TURGENEV
While the callow politicals were nourished on French thought, to
the young philosophers in the wilderness of Moscow manna fell in
the shape of German metaphysics. In the latter part of the thirties
they were offering Hegel the cumbersome uncritical homage which
a later generation was to accord to Marx. They could not meet a
common drunk on Mokhovaya Street, without seeing him sub specie
aeternitatis. On the other hand, as Herzen tells us, a disagreement
on the attributes of the Spirit bruised friendships, and contrary opin-
ions on the Absolute Personality were taken as personal insults.
They gushed, quarreled, embraced, exchanged confidences, with the
facility of school-girls, and at the same time they took their philoso-
phy with religious gravity.
Indeed, these young Hegelians constituted something in the nature
of a lay sect, small, irrelevant, hopelessly isolated. Yet although
they spoke an esoteric idiom in which "Spirit," "Nature," "Reason"
were recurrent and almost interchangeable, the meaning of their
cloudy words was real enough. They believed that it was their
mission to transfigure life until it approached the image of perfection.
Like little hothouses, the minds of these young men nurtured in a
soft, secluded air the generous idealism which was to inform Rus-
sian thought for the remainder of the century. They had few and
lean newspapers to read, and no serious weeklies; there were no
political parties whose antics they could watch, no club committees
on which to serve; no cafés in which to loiter. And so they spent
their long leisure in abstruse studies, elaborate love-making, letter-
writing, and talking. The intensive and fruitful cultivation of the
art of argument was one thing which they had in common with
those ancient Athenians who, kept like themselves by the labor of
serfs, had no use for the more practical arts.
The "spiritual perspectives" that their talk opened up to them are
suggested in the following passage from Turgenev's first novel,
where he evokes the Moscow circle:
Philosophy, art, science, life itself, were all mere words to us-even
concepts, if you like, alluring, beautiful, but scattered and isolated. We
were not aware of any common bond between these concepts, we did n't
sense any common law of the universe, although we talked about it
vaguely, and tried to form some idea of it. . . . Listening to Rudin, it
THE LAY SECTARIANS
43
seemed to us that for the first time we had grasped it, that common
bond, that the curtain had at last been lifted. Let us admit that it
was n't his own ideas he was expressing. What does it matter? Order
and harmony entered into all that we knew, whatever was scattered sud-
denly assembled and composed itself into a whole, grew like an edifice
before our eyes. Everything was illumined, and informed with spirit.
Nothing remained meaningless, fortuitous; everything expressed
a rational necessity and beauty, everything acquired a clear and yet mys-
terious significance; every separate phenomenon of life sounded like a
chord of music; and we ourselves, filled with a kind of sacred awe, and
shaken with a sweet emotion, felt ourselves to be living vessels of the
eternal truth, its instruments, summoned to achieve great things. . . .
Turgenev happened to fall in with some of the members of this
Hegelian circle, who, like himself, had come to Berlin to drink ex
ipso fonte (for this city was still the source, although Hegel had
been dead some half-dozen years). The personality which domin-
ated this group was the "heavenly" Stankevich. This white-faced,
weak-chested youth attracted men to him by a kind of spiritual mag-
netism. Turgenev always remembered the black hair tossed back
from the slanting brow, the delicate, twitching nostrils of the Roman
nose, the large, gnarled, old man's hands on his stick, and the native
distinction of the youth, "as of a King's son ignorant of his origin.
Stankevich had the laughter of a child and a conviction of right
which his friends did not resent because there was no self-vaunting
in his didacticism. He had been in Berlin a year when Turgenev
reached there, and the two soon came to know each other, meeting
often at the house of the Frolovs.
""
The drawing-room of this Russian family was something of a
salon, presided over by a homely hostess who had about her the
charm of a French lady of the eighteenth century. Here Turgenev
gaped at the great Humboldt, beheld his own Professor Werder
beaming with child-like confidence upon a world safe in the pink
cotton-wool of his metaphysics, and watched Varnhagen von Ense
putting spokes into the wheels of Bettina von Arnim's conversation.
The lady was on the shady side of fifty and dyed her hair, but she
could still, unwittingly, twist Turgenev's heart, for had she not been
Goethe's friend? He wrote her name on the fly-leaves of his books,
44
TURGENEV
as he often did with the names of his idols, and in his first novel the
leading character reads Bettina to the heroine.
The latter part of 1839 Turgenev was forced by his mother to
spend at home. A friend in Berlin kept him informed of events of
interest to him there: a torchlight procession commemorating the
Reformation, the latest operas and plays, a new statue on the Mu-
seum Square. In January of the following year, with the snow
flaking from his sledge-runners, he traveled towards Vienna, and
thence to Italy. By March he was in Rome. The Roman sun, on
its rare appearances, caught in its mild amber long-remembered days.
It was here that Turgenev again met Stankevich, who had come to
Italy to die. In Berlin he had regarded the immaculate idealist, who
was five years his senior, with respect verging on awe. Years later
he attributed this attitude to an inner consciousness of his own "un-
worthiness and mendacity." Moments of self-abasement alternated
for him, as they do for most young people, with moments of self-
confident abandon. In the case of Turgenev, the sense of his own
inferiority was to outlive his youth.
In Berlin, Stankevich had been kind enough to "the fatty with the
complexion of old linen," as Turgenev then described himself, but
had been slow about liking him. Now an unexpected intimacy
sprang up between the two, although there was some condescension
on the part of the older man, who was impatient with his friend's
"frivolity." Accompanied by a couple of other young Russians,
they "did" the city together, with the aid of Nibby, the Baedeker
of the day. They wandered through the galleries, Turgenev quot-
ing appropriate passages from the Russian poets, and Stankevich
admiring the art of the ancients and looking down on them because
they did not ask beauty to be more spiritual. They visited the Villa
Borghese, where Turgenev chased lizards. They drove out to pay
their respects to dignified ruins, and one evening as they passed an
ivy-covered heap of stones on their way from Albino, Turgenev
made Stankevich pale by summoning the ghost of the divine Cæsar
with a shout.
There was music, too, a young Pole who was a friend of Liszt's
being of the company, and, since the smell of paint was in the air,
drawing-lessons, which Turgenev turned to account by making

UNIV
OF
NIKOLAY STANKEVICH
MICH
THE LAY SECTARIANS
45
caricatures of his friends. For nearly a month painting was the
stock subject of his conversation. Finally, there was the sixteen-
year-old Chouchou, who was stopping with her parents at 57 Via
dei Pontefici. Stankevich played duets with her and Turgenev wrote
a poem for her, a copy of which he kept for eighteen years, to incor-
porate it then in one of his novels. He also married her in his
dream. The young man was a susceptible young man.
He was
quite ready to listen, if with a touch of skepticism, while Stankevich
expounded his view of love as the fullest and noblest mode of being,
belonging to the religious order of experience.
With this friend, whom he saw daily, Turgenev would talk end-
lessly, of art, of antiquity, often of death. He was just then at the
mercy of formless dreams and conflicts, in a mood, which was to
grow increasingly familiar to him, of unrest and dissatisfaction with
himself: "barrenly pensive," as his own words have it. Stankevich,
on the contrary, seemed to have reached in his last days the serenity
of an Eastern mystic, although his lawgiver was not Buddha, but
Hegel. Perhaps for this reason he involuntarily offered Turgenev
the peace that he needed.
Whatever Stankevich thought of his young friend's capacities,
they were sufficient to bring him into close contact, especially in his
formative years, with those of his contemporaries who shaped the
intellectual life of the country. The ardent Hegelian himself
epitomized the character and the intention of the generation, usually
referred to as the idealists of the thirties, which adopted Turgenev
as a younger brother. Stankevich affected those who came after
him not through any tangible works, but through a faith strong
enough to impress itself on his immediate circle. He believed man
to be the crown of that sacred edifice which was the world. To him
the universe presented itself as the manifold aspects of a single, im-
mutable Idea, which in man attained to the supreme state of self-
consciousness. The whole creation was moving toward a far-off,
divine event: the mating of the fully developed psyche with the
cosmos. He made Turgenev aware of an adumbration of that
superb moment whenever they walked through a gallery, saw a monk
telling his beads, discussed an agronomical treatise, or analyzed a
friend's love-affair. Art, science, love, and particularly religion,
•
:
46
TURGENEV
were the precious gifts of the all-wise Goodness which ruled their
rational world.
For Stankevich, as for most of his fellows, philosophical concepts
had a magic way of changing into moral precepts. History being
the unfoldment of Reason, he felt that it was his duty to make his
own life as reasonable, and therefore as noble as possible. He de-
manded the utmost of himself in the way of expanding his knowl-
edge, disciplining his spirit, educating his moral being, governing
his conduct, as the universe was governed, by the divine principles
of reason and beauty. To Stankevich, as to his generation, culture
was an intimate matter which concerned the individual and nobody
else. He had no eye for the problems of man in relation to society.
When a friend suggested that one starving beggar was enough to
upset the harmony of Nature, Stankevich dismissed the notion sum-
marily. "Such questions never arise for me. Spirit and Reason
prevail in the universe. This makes me feel easy on every score.
Absorption in the task of personal improvement inevitably leads to
the consideration of man's social duties, a quarrel with the imperfect
world ensues, and sooner or later the young philosopher's frail
heaven crumbles. But Stankevich did not live long enough to travel
this road together with Turgenev and his other comrades. The
brevity and the resultant consistency of his life made more impres-
sive the single lesson of spiritual discipline he was allowed to teach.
By May, Turgenev was back in Berlin. Before he reached the
capital he managed to touch at Leghorn, Pisa, Genoa, take in the
Kingdom of Sardinia, sail on Lago Maggiore, travel to St. Gotthard
in a sleigh, visit Lucerne, Basel, Mannheim, Mainz and Frankfort,
all within thirteen days. In the same brief period he lost an um-
brella, a cloak, a box, a walking-stick, a lorgnon, a hat, a pillow, a
pen-knife, a purse, three towels, two neckerchiefs, two shirts, and,
for a little time, his heart. He wrote an account of this hectic trip
to his Berlin friends from a Frankfort café "to the thunder of bil-
liard balls," and under the influence of a bottle of Altmanshauser.
""
A few weeks later he heard Werder read a poem which the good
professor had composed upon the death of Stankevich, his beloved
pupil, his "apostle." Turgenev's own grief was no less genuine for
being voluble. In passing the news on to a friend, he indulges in
THE LAY SECTARIANS
47
those platitudes of mourning which so curiously comfort the com-
fortless. The letter ends appropriately: " '. . . Let us come to-
gether, join hands, stand closer. One of us, perhaps the best, has
fallen, but others are arising and will continue to arise. God's hand
does not cease to sow the seeds of great strivings, and sooner or later
light will conquer darkness." Two months later Turgenev was writ-
ing to his Berlin friends from the birch woods of Marienbad. The
letter, which mixes German and Russian, turgid philosophy and gen-
uine wit, holds the following solemn passage:
Do you understand the birth and development of my soul? How
eagerly I listened to him [Stankevich]-I, destined to be his last com-
rade; whom he initiated into the service of truth by his example,
the poetry of his life, his words. . . . He enriched me with silence,
the gift of fullness, me, the still unworthy one. . . . I have always
keenly felt the fascination of Nature, the breath of God in it. But
in its splendor it seemed to reproach me, poor, blind, and full of futile
doubts as I was. Now I joyfully stretched out my arms to it and
before the altar of the soul I pledged myself to be worthy of life.
My enemies have left my own breast, and feeling myself a whole man,
I am joyfully ready to wage war against them.
This exalted self-confidence was to be of brief duration. Not
again was Turgenev to feel himself "a whole man." The letter con-
cludes:
Stankevich! to you I owe my rebirth. You offered me your hand and
showed me the goal. And if perhaps at your very end you doubted
and scorned me, an attitude which I deserved because of my own petty
and overbearing behavior, now you know me, and you see that my striv-
ings were earnest and disinterested.
Exactly what their goal was, is not clear, but these youths man-
aged to believe that they were on their way.
GE
1}}}
CHAPTER VII
N the title-page of my encyclo-
pedia
der
[Hegel's Encyklopädie
philosophischen Wissen-
schaften im Grundrisse]," runs
another passage of this same
voluminous epistle, "I wrote:
'Stankevich died on the 21st
of June, 1840,' and below:
'I made the acquaintance of
Bakunin on the 20th of June,
1840.' Out of all my former
life I wish to retain no other
memories." That there were
other things he wished to remem-
ber is evidenced by the fact that on the margin of the same book is
the addresse of a café on Unter den Linden.
Wimo
SALAD DAYS

MITTA
maidodo
At the time when Ivan had been attending classes at the University
of Petersburg, Michel Bakunin, a retired artillery officer, had roomed
with Stankevich in Moscow. Both were then deep in Kant and
Fichte. And now Michel, having come to Berlin in the spring of
1840, was to share living-quarters with Ivan throughout the next
academic year. The two blue-eyed giants struck up a friendship at
first sight, and were soon on terms of complete intimacy. Within
six weeks of their meeting, Ivan was writing to Michel: "Stanke-
vich united us, and death will not divide us." Assured of the essen-
tial rightness of the world by his Hegel and his Goethe, and by a
family of five sisters and five brothers who religiously echoed his
dicta, the future anarchist was in those years vociferously at peace
48
SALAD DAYS
49
with life. Turgenev gave Bakunin not the worshipful admiration
which he had earlier accorded Stankevich, but the warmer affection
of an equal. Michel, who had long insisted that one should build
one's life on philosophical principles, had for him the added distinc-
tion of a man inclined to put his theories into practice, a quality
bound to attract a person of the opposite temperament like Ivan.
Obviously referring to Michel, Ivan wrote from Marienbad to his
Berlin friends: "I see a man, at first timidly, then with faith and
joy, going up a steep mountain crowned with eternal light. With
him goes a comrade, and they press onward, leaning upon each other,
and from the sky shines a quiet moon. . . His heart is light and
joyful, and he believes in the attainment of the goal."
Exalted ideas about human worth, the nobility of womanhood, and
the divine essence of love, lived in closed compartments in the heads
of Turgenev and his friends side by side with the reflections of the
average sensual man. Their moral ideas were so impossibly high
as to be out of sight as far as the conduct of some of their affairs
were concerned. In fine, they were lusty young men and lived as
young men have done since Adam's fall. Turgenev's unpublished
correspondence includes two scrawls in ill-spelled German, addressed
"To my dear friend Turgenev,-Well-born [sic], from his Lina."
In one of them she writes that she would like to wander by his side
all her life, but that he does not even give her a thought. She goes
on to say that she is deep in debt, and has been forgotten "by you
all." She had once refused a kindness which he offered, but now
she makes a claim on his good-will, and remains his "dear friend"
Lina or Carolina Foerster. In the second letter she says that she
called upon Turgenev but did not find him at home, that she is "no
merry little Lina any more," and that he should please tell her when
she may come to him.
It is presumably the same Lina who figures in a letter to Turgenev
from a fellow-student, dated Berlin, October 7, 1840. Ivan was
then in Dresden recuperating from an illness, and inveighing against
his fate, which he described neatly as a ghastly old hag with a bulbous
nose and a cudgel in her fist, constantly moping in a corner with a
threatening air. His correspondent, after mentioning that he has
written a dissertation dedicated to the memory of Boehme, that he
•
50
TURGENEV,
has lost a book to Bakunin in a game of cards, and that "the fierce
Bohemian of Krausenstrasse" has laid another friend low, goes on to
speak of news "more terrible than Napier's invasion," namely, that
he is reported to be the author of Lina's pregnancy. He denies the
charge vividly, and confesses horror at the prospect of paying the
mother three thalers a month for fourteen years: "with that money
one could put up a magnificent cross to Börne [a baptised Jew], or
build a small charitable institution." The victim of the fierce Bo-
hemian writes to Turgenev about another mutual acquaintance, one
Bertha, and projects an affair with a fourth young woman, named
Amalia, while yet another friend mentions "the three graces" in Ber-
lin, and a certain Mariechen into the bargain.
Ivan did not hesitate to confide to his mother some of the more
intimate incidents of his life. With her characteristic flightiness she
reproaches him for treating her, rather than his uncle or his brother,
to these confidences, only to declare in an ensuing letter that she is
his proper confidante, and has always been a comrade as well as a
mother. In the rôle of a comrade, Varvara Petrona, like Ivan's
male relatives, and indeed, most of the gentry of the day, inclined
to treat lightly the dangers incident to light loves. Learning that
Ivan was out of health, Varvara Petrovna was filled with anxiety
not due to the suspicion that he suffered from what she called "man's
disease," but rather to the fear that it might be his father's illness,
gallstones.
Yet the mother had her moments of panic. "Oh, my God!" she
writes to him in March, 1839, "why did n't I show you, when you
left, the lines which your father wrote 'd'une main égarée avec ses
larmes' the very day he was paralyzed: 'My son,' he wrote, with-
out naming him, 'take care that you do not infect your blood, take
care that you do not poison your body.'
,,,
One affair of Ivan's which, as far as we know, marks the begin-
ning of his more serious amours, is freely discussed in the corre-
spondence between him and his mother. The object of his affections
was one Mme. Tyutchev, who was well past her first youth-a fact
which delighted Varvara Petrovna, who had just been reading the
latest French novel, La Femme de Quarante Ans, by Charles de
Bernard. In this romance, which she pressed upon her son's atten-
SALAD DAYS
51
tion, a young man of twenty, coming from the provinces, is intro-
duced by his uncle to a woman of forty, that she may annex him and
make a man of him. The uncle believed, and Varvara Petrovna
with him, that such a woman, with a good social position and a
distinction of mind and manners, offers all the guarantees demanded
of one to whom a parent confides a child. A younger woman, he
argues, would have made the boy commit many follies, an older
one would have rendered him ridiculous; with a bourgeoise he would
have lost the tradition of good society; with a courtesan he would
have wasted his substance. On the other hand, the lady is re-
warded for educating him by the temporary happiness which he gives
her.
Mme. Turgenev writes to her son on December 16, 1838:
•
■
•
Speaking of sugar, let's talk of something sweeter. . . . Of the end
of your letter, of your little love-affairs, of Tyu-v
・・・ That's
news. I read it in your heart before you did, and I began to write
to you myself. Am I a mother like others? . . . I am always with
you, and all for you, and all yours. Well, thank goodness, I am not fat.
It seems to me that you wouldn't love even your mother if she were
fat.
She continues pointedly:
And sometimes it seems to me that as your first love was naturally your
mother, pale, sallow, nervous, so you are accustomed to love sallow
women. This is all right for little love intrigues, but a sallow wife is
not very savory.
She goes on at great length about the distinction between love and
coquetry, and the inequalities in love, adding that the balance of
happiness is on the side of the lover rather than that of the beloved,
and candidly concluding: "Although this agrees entirely with my
own thoughts, it is taken from Eynerley, by Alphonse Karr.”
Varvara Petrovna was given to quotations and allusions even more
than was her literary son.
The affair came to an abrupt end with the death of Mme. Tyutchev
in the spring of 1839. Varvara Petrovna, condoling with Ivan on
the event, writes:
1
52
TURGENEV
I always wished you the love of an experienced, middle-aged woman.
It is such women that educate the youth. It is a mutual advantage.
The woman is flattered, and the man has the benefit of her experi-
ence. I am sorry for the Tyutchev woman. She must have been
intelligent. You would n't have cared for a fool.
The mother cannot resist this opportunity of indicating that she
wants Ivan when he marries to give her a daughter-in-law who will
be not only young and obedient, but beautiful as well, for the sake of
the honor of the house, and of the race.
Before coming home to hear more talk about the house and the
race, Turgenev had a crowded winter of glorious life. As though
guessing that the season of 1840-41 was to end his career as a
student, he had planned to fill it with lectures and music, debates
and books. There were late vigils in his room, where he clung
to the stove and Bakunin to the divan. Deciding that their life
was too abstract, the two would plunge into reality by paying calls
together, the plump Ivan wearing his green velvet waistcoat and the
lanky Michel a lavender one. They must have swum, occasionally,
through the clouds of tobacco-smoke that thickened the air of Hip-
pel's famous Weinstube on Friedrichstrasse, seen its lights reflected
on the high forehead of Max Stirner, and mouthed the names of the
other radicals who frequented the place.
After a Beethoven symphony they would drop in to see Michel's
sister Vareñka, whom Stankevich had loved and in whose arms he
had died. It was to her that Ivan presented on New Year's Day,
1841, eight neatly copied poems by Lermontov, the poet of the hour.
At Varenka's they discussed things great and small over smoked
tongue, Russian tea, and sandwiches, from which butter dripped
as tallow from the candles whose sputtering Ivan imitated to the full
satisfaction of the company. There, one Sunday night in December,
Werder helped celebrate his own birthday by delivering the pro-
logue and first act of his poetic drama, "Christopher Columbus."
And then there was the bi-weekly gathering of the Russian contin-
gent, either in the third-floor chamber which Ivan shared with Michel,
or in the room of another friend, where they would sit till the small
hours of the morning, filling their stomachs with cold meat and
SALAD DAYS
53
their ears with hot arguments. What reads like an account of
these gatherings is given in this passage from “Rudin”:
Imagine a party of five or six lads gathered together, one tallow candle
burning. The tea was dreadful stuff, and the cake was stale, very stale;
but you should have seen our faces, you should have heard our talk!
Eyes were sparkling with enthusiasm, cheeks flushed, and hearts beat-
ing, while we talked of God, and truth, and the future of humanity, and
poetry.
Often what we said was absurd, and we were in ecstasies
over nonsense; but what of that? . . . It was already gray morning
when we separated, moved, happy, aspiring and sober (there was no
question of wine among us at such times) with a kind of sweet weariness
in our souls, and we even looked up at the stars with a kind of confidence
as though they had become nearer and more comprehensible.
•
Turgenev, although he did not always relish the memories of
these evenings, contributed not a little to them. And while not
all his fellows thought as highly of him as did his room-mate, he
had moments of proud anticipation which recurred more infrequently
as his achievements solidified. The preceding year he had written
to Michel, mentioning two of his friends who had died: "But you
will live and I shall live, and perhaps both of us not for naught."
Bakunin lived to be a flea in the ear of the established social order:
a life of sound and fury. Turgenev lived to write a dozen books,
the receptive, responsive, inward life of the artist, who, with the
thinker, alters his environment with what little permanency it per-
mits.
"
"
Em
ITERATE
VAN had been abroad hardly
four months before he was con-
fronted with the possibility that
the letters from home might be
supplanted by the presence of his
mother. Almost every envelope
he opened contained the threat
of an imminent descent upon
him. Early in 1839, having
heard that he was ill, Varvara
Petrovna wrote: '... Whether
you like it or not, I leave
Spasskoye and I go abroad on
the seventh of May. Wherever
""
you are I'll find you and I'll go back with you. Alive or dead, you'll
bring me back to Russia, and alive or dead I 'll bring you back into
the family and deliver you into your brother's hands."
(*.
CHAPTER VIII
T
3
Mind
LOVE, CARNAL AND SPIRITUAL

ht
This visit, like others, was postponed, but she could not give up
the notion of meeting her son abroad, pouring tea for him from the
samovar she would bring with her, going under his escort to the
theater, spending a spring with him in Italy, and then triumphantly
bringing him back to Russia to settle down. In the end, however,
she did not go, and Ivan finally paid a reluctant visit to his importu-
nate parent, starting for home in October. By January, 1840, as has
been stated, he was again off for foreign parts, and again his mother
renewed her cry of "Come back, come back!" mindless of his protest
that in summoning him home she wanted to pluck an unripe fruit.
While Ivan was in Rome with Stankevich, one of his friends, who
had a brother in Moscow, sent him this injunction: "If you see
54
LOVE, CARNAL AND SPIRITUAL
55
Mme. Turgenev give her my compliments, but keep her from
going to Italy." She had established herself in Moscow, where she
bought a house, but she was willing to give up her home for the
deserts of Arabia, if she could but meet Ivan in them. Her lamenta-
tions are not surprising in view of the fact that sometimes she did
not hear from the wanderer for two months together. On one
occasion she was forced to send a servant to the Bakunins to inquire
about him. In consequence, one of the sisters wrote to Michel to
tell Ivan that he must be more filial. "If you don't come home in
May," she wrote in January, 1841, "I shall die of grief in June."
Her untimely end was averted by the prodigal's return.
At Spasskoye Ivan found great changes. With the exception
of one wing, the old wooden manor-house had gone up in smoke.
He had been in Rome when the fire occurred, and a letter from
home had told him how it started. One of the women in charge
of the cattle had fumigated a sick cow by burning certain roots in
an old bast shoe. In accordance with the prescribed magic practice,
she had buried the shoe full of hot ashes under the threshold of a
stable. It is not known whether or not the cure was effected, but
the structure caught fire and the flames spread to the manor itself.
Ivan's home-coming to what was left of his mother's house oc-
casioned a general holiday. Varvara Petrovna busied herself think-
ing up ways of spoiling her learned son. The menu was arranged
with due regard for his preferences, such as tripe soup; and great
jars of currant jam, for which he had not lost the taste in spite
of his twenty-three years, were sent up to his room.
For his part,
"Jean" was affectionate and attentive.
At first he must have rather enjoyed the familiar sights of
manorial Russia, the sleepy ponds with their lazy swans, the
bonneted grannies skimming caldrons of jelly under the trees, the
spacious white mansions with their classic columns, the fat poodles,
the old servitors, the drowsy flies, the general air of imperturbable
placidity, and leisure to eat and sleep in order to eat again. But
his pleasure in all this was spoiled by memories of the busier,
brighter, freer life of western Europe.
Besides, the household had scarcely served up the fatted calf
when feasting gave place to domestic fury. In the autumn the
¿
+4
56
TURGENEV
elder brother secretly married his mother's chambermaid. Var-
vara Petrovna never forgave Nicholas the mésalliance which struck
so painful a blow at the roots of her pride. She refused to sup-
port him, thus reducing him to the meanest circumstances. Not
realizing that he was actually married, she was outraged by the way
he flaunted what she conceived to be a shameful liaison.
Galled by the publicity of the affair, she wrote to Ivan, who was
then in Moscow, with her usual bluntness, that one does not carry
one's night-pot to the theater even if it happens to be silver; hers,
like Trimalchio's matella, which figures in the "Satyricon," was
of that metal. Ivan was given the ungrateful commission of bring-
ing his brother to reason. Varvara Petrovna asked him to take
Nicholas to the grave of their father on the ninth anniversary of
his death, and kneel down in the mud, if necessary, not to rise until
Nicholas swore to give up his disgraceful alliance. If he agreed,
Ivan was to hand him their father's watch. "If he says it would
kill him, as he wrote to me," concluded Varvara Petrovna, "then
I would rather see him dead and pure, than alive and thus sullied."
This was an impossible charge for one who, like Ivan, believed
in the dictates of the heart, and who was, moreover, party to the
secret of the marriage. It is true, he never found that quality in
his sister-in-law which induced his brother to marry her.
During the summer Ivan himself had had an ephemeral connec-
tion with a pretty seamstress of his mother's-an affair of brief
duration and lasting consequences. On April 26, 1842, he be-
came the father of a girl who was baptized Pelagea. Inasmuch
as he was content to leave it a strictly private matter, Varvara
Petrovna was not at all distressed to discover the wild oat that
her shiftless "Jean" had sown. This was neither the first nor
the last of the young man's affairs with women beneath his caste.
One such relation with a serf girl had preceded his departure to
Berlin. While he was abroad he learned that she had been sent
away from Spasskoye. Fearing that she was being persecuted, he
wrote home asking that she should be given money and her freedom.
His mother replied that far from persecuting the girl, she had
totally forgotten her, and exclaimed:
LOVE, CARNAL AND SPIRITUAL
57
1
What a funny one you are, Ivan! Why should I reward and free an
old girl who bore children both before and after? A small bill is enough
for her. It is not as though she had presented you with her virginity.
That is my opinion. . . . I did not see any guilt in it, either on your
side or hers. It's merely physical passion. You sinner! you have
made me sin, too. Such stuff as I am writing the first Monday in Lent!
. .
When it came to the little seamstress, however, Varvara Petrovna
was at pains to ship her off to the city. But the culprit was re-
called when her child was born, and the two became the objects
of the dowager's ridicule and the servants' maltreatment. Both
sons had failed lamentably of the careers which Varvara Petrovna
had planned for them, and it is conceivable that she unconsciously
visited her disappointment upon her gratuitous grandchild. Ivan
himself showed no interest either in the little Pelagea or her mother.
Simultaneously with this "merely physical" affair, Turgenev was
engaged in a rarefied, metaphysical romance of a more exacting
nature. The lady in the case was one of Bakunin's sisters: Tatyana
-a frail, high-strung spinister of twenty-seven, concealing, behind
a pure brow and a stream of philosophical talk, the potentiality for
hysterical self-abandonment. She had been receiving the spiritual
homage of her brothers' male friends and the jealous adoration of
Michel himself, but, as she confessed to him, she thought that she
would meet her ideal only in heaven. As a matter of fact, she met
him under her paternal roof, in the person of Ivan Turgenev.
He had been eager to know the Bakunins, and had commanded
Michel to give him a letter to his family, saying, "Tell them nothing
about me but that I love you." Accordingly, when Ivan was pre-
paring to go home in May, 1841, Michel sent an encyclic to the
brothers and sisters in Russia, telling them in detail about this great
friend of his, with whom he had worked all winter long, from six
in the morning till late at night, and who had shared both joy and
grief with him and Vareñka, who, for her part, loved him as a
brother. Michel commended Ivan further as a master story-teller
and said he would act upon them like a cordial. Varvara Bakunin
herself in an earlier letter from Berlin had spoken of Ivan as “a
pure, bright, gentle soul."
58
TURGENEV,
It was not until October that Turgenev went to see the Bakunins
on their estate, near the town of Torzhok, remaining with them
almost a week. One of the brothers wrote of this visit that "every
moment of these six days contained an eternity." Ivan enchanted
the family, including those members of it whom he met in Moscow.
They adopted him as their "new brother." "In his presence,
wrote Nicholas Bakunin, "all the capacities of the spirit are quick-
ened as by living fire, and seize upon things eagerly." As for Ivan,
he called them "my children” and felt for them an affection slightly
tinged with superiority. He splendidly sustained his reputation as
a raconteur, thrilling an audience less skeptical than his biographer
with such tales as that of a moonlit night spent in the ruins of a
castle on the Rhine in the sole company of a bottle of Rhine-wine.
It was natural that Ivan should flee from the importunities of his
mother to the respectful admiration of these contemporaries of his.
Indeed, his first Christmas at home, for which she had waited so
eagerly, he chose to spend two hundred versts away from Spass-
koye, with Michel's people. One of the brothers had notified the
rest in advance by letter: "On Thursday, December 18th," he
wrote gleefully, "will proceed from Moscow to Torzhok two Bak-
unins, one Turgenev, one dog and the moon." Varvara Petrovna,
outraged by Ivan's absence at this time, wrote to him bitterly:
"If you become estranged from me, will the Bakunins console you?"
It is certain that his hosts provided him with all the entertain-
ment possible. Perhaps there were wrestling matches, such as
took place between him and one of the Bakunin boys in Moscow,
when Ivan was thrown and made the floor quake. Surely there
was dancing, and Ivan was in despair, because, although he had a
piano in his Moscow apartments, he had not learned to waltz.
There must have been sleigh-rides and walks, and probably fond
exchanges that verged on love-making. For-a circumstance his
mother did not know, being no longer in his confidence-this visit
to Michel's family was in a sense a sentimental journey.
It seemed to be the fate of Michel's friends to become roman-
tically involved with one or more of his sisters. There was Stanke-
vich, who had been hopelessly loved by Lubov, to whom he had been
temporarily affianced, and who had subsequently returned the
""
•
LOVE, CARNAL AND SPIRITUAL
59
passion of Varvara. There were Belinsky and Botkin, both des-
tined to become Ivan's intimates, who lost their hearts to two other
Bakunin girls. There were Turgenev and Tatyana.
His affair with her began almost with their first meeting and
dragged on for two or three years. Its only tangible relic was a
scanty correspondence, wordy, passionate and humble on her side,
and, so far as we know, glowing but non-committal on his. In
her trilingual epistles, innocent of punctuation, written sometimes
to the accompaniment of a storm, and at such romantic hours as
midnight and dawn, the girl tossed between avowals of sisterly
or maternal affection and protestations of a deathless passion, be-
tween surrender to her fate and rebellion against its ingloriousness,
between serenity and despair. She would forecast a marvelous
future for him and in the next letter scold him for being an insin-
cere phrase-maker and pleasure-seeking trifler. She cried over his
responses, whether they were gentle or, as frequently happened,
rather dry. Tatyana, demanding a hero, and patterning him on her
brother Michel, could not help making Ivan uncomfortable in re-
quiring him to fill that arduous rôle. Her "Christ," as she liked
to call Turgenev, was not eager to take upon himself the burden of
a passion which he had found it titillating to encourage.
He took pleasure in disserting upon his feeling for her. He sub-
mitted his verses to her, sometimes with a dedication. He de-
ferred to her critical opinion as in later years he was to defer to
that of other friends, habitually distrusting his own judgment. In
one of the lyrics which he sent her, he spoke of the "eternal mo-
ments" which the poet and presumably his correspondent had lived
through together, and of "the day of salvation" when they would
fully understand each other. He called her his Muse, but retreated
from the prospect of any less ethereal relation. He wrote to her:
I never loved a woman more than you, although I do not love even
you wholly and profoundly. . . . For you alone I would like to be a
poet, for you, to whom my soul is bound in an inexpressible, marvelous
way. Oh, if at least once on a spring morning we could walk under a
long row of lindens, if I could hold your hand in mine and feel that our
souls were mingling and that everything alien and morbid was vanishing,
everything mean was melting away forever. . . . You may still build
60
TURGENEV
upon me as upon a silent cliff, within whose innermost stone heart true
love and emotion are locked.
Unfortunately, Tatyana could not content herself with the part
of Egeria. Her emotions were wrought upon to an extraordin-
ary degree. She was literally love-sick. The family, seeing her
peak and pine, sent her to Moscow for medical treatment. But
her condition was only aggravated: long nights of crying were fol-
lowed by spells of nausea. Ivan, too, was in Moscow and all
through that winter he kept coming to see her and sending her
"touching, agitated letters." The more she saw of him, the more
clearly she realized that he would never offer her the love which
he had seemed to promise her in the beginning. Looking back on
the affair ten years later, she recalled with undiminished content
the miracle of the early days of their intimacy. Of that time she
wrote:
I lived with my whole soul, my whole heart, every little nerve shook
with life in me, and everything around me was transfigured. . . . I was
never as happy again. There is no greater joy for a woman than such
love, with which the whole heart trembles in the breast, and the whole
soul like a bottomless sea.
In the same letter she sums up the matter by stating that Turg-
enev imagined a passion which he did not truly feel, and that she
had responded too naïvely to the affection which his words and
glances falsely conveyed. Upon the margin of one of his messages
to her she scrawled a more bitter comment:
Strange, how some people can make themselves believe anything they
please!—how the most sacred things are a toy to them!—and how they
don't hesitate to send another's life to the bottom. Why can't they ever
be honest, earnest, and simple with themselves—and with others? Have
they no notion of truth and love?
The affair was naturally an open secret in a circle which was
given to analyzing minutely the sensations, desires, and actions of
its members. One of the young women who moved within it was
at pains to write to Michel about Tatyana's trouble, and even sug-
gested that there was cause for his breaking with Turgenev.
LOVE, CARNAL AND SPIRITUAL
61
Michel waited, however, to hear his sister's story directly from
her. Had n't he, in his New Year's greeting to her in 1842, recom-
mended Turgenev to her especially? "Let him be a brother and
friend to you," he had written; "that's my blessing for you and
my New Year's gift, and you must accept it because I've always
been your spiritual father." Surely he could n't have so grossly
misjudged the man.
In due time came Tatyana's account, in which she took care
to defend before her brother the man with whom she was in love.
Writing to Tatyana in April, 1843, Michel expressed his satisfac-
tion in the fact that his first informant had presented the matter in
the wrong light. He must cease to believe in a man before he was
willing to break with him. He was no slave of conventional ideas.
He knew Turgenev. If the man had weaknesses, they were the
fault of his youth.
Immaturity alone is not enough to explain Turgenev's reprehen-
sible behavior. Nor do the facts that Tatyana was three years his
senior and that her most enthusiastic admirer conceded beauty only
to her dark-blue eyes, quite account for his falling off. Turg-
enev, though content with beauty unadorned by any mind, liked
clever women even if they were homely. He had been drawn to
Tatyana because of the aura which clung to the philosophical family.
It was the very virtues by which she had attracted him in the be-
ginning which repelled him in the end. He was beginning to shed
his romantic preference for pale, languid, nervous creatures. By
the spring of 1843 he was scornfully calling a woman of Tatyana's
type "a metaphysical dumpling.'
"
In 1841 Turgenev was trying to make a true Christian of
Nicholas Bakunin. A year later it was said that he sponsored
Alexey Bakunin's conversion to a mundane way of thinking.
Writing to this convert of his in January, 1845, he observed that
there were natural causes for his breaking away from the Bakunin
family, and that even when he had still been close to them, he had
abandoned the realm of fantasy and begun to live in the world as
it is. Reaction against the ecstatic unrealities that had bewitched
him in his Berlin coterie was bound to assert itself with the sobering
effect of the Russian scene, and with them went his cerebral romance.
62
TURGENEV
An old maid who falls in love with a student is sketched into
the background of one of Turgenev's stories, written years later.
She at once rushed into an active and ardent correspondence with him;
in her epistles, as was fitting, she consecrated him to a noble and beauti-
ful life, offered "the whole of herself" as a sacrifice, demanded only the
name of sister, elaborated descriptions of nature, mentioned Goethe,
Schiller, Bettina and German philosophy, and finally drove the young
man to blackest despair. But youth asserted itself: one fine morning
he woke up with such a ferocious hatred for "his sister and best friend"
that he nearly gave a thrashing to his valet in his passion, and for a long
time afterward all but bit at the slightest allusion to "exalted and dis-
interested love."
It has been suggested, plausibly enough, that this is a simplified
and soured version of the author's affair with Tatyana Bakunin.
•
!
Coroll
CHANUS
邑
​CHAPTER IX
THE POET

S a student in Berlin, Turgenev
had at odd times cherished the
notion that his studies might
lead him to a chair of philosophy.
The notion tickled his mother's
vanity, and she got Nicholas to
pull the necessary wires. As a
first step toward the realization
of his ideas, in March, 1842,
Turgenev requested the Univer-
sity of Moscow to examine him
for the degree of Master of
Philosophy. The chair of phi-
losophy being vacant there at
the time, he went to Petersburg to take his examinations at his alma
mater.
In the apartment of his brother, who was putting him up for
the few weeks he was to be in the capital, he came upon some of
the smoothest weeks his life was to hold. He had a fine room,
with a fireplace, three arm-chairs, quantities of pillows, and a desk
with a lamp. The days began well with excellent tea, drunk out
of large English breakfast cups, and delicious rolls. They wore
on through placid hours, in which he lounged and crammed, warmed
by the open fire, lulled by the dancing snowflakes outside, vaguely
exhilarated by the profundities and promises of his texts. "Yester-
day," he writes to the Bakunins on April 9, 1842, “I swallowed
at one sitting Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibnitz. Leibnitz is still
growling in my stomach. But without waiting I gobbled down
63
64
TURGENEV
Kant, and now I am getting my teeth into Fichte, and as this man is
somewhat dry, I am putting him aside to write to you."
He goes on to note his train of thought as he sits, book on knee,
before the fire: he reads a line of his philosopher, decides that the
fire needs wood, puts it on, reads another line, suddenly recalls
a verse of Lermontov; he yawns, he paces over to the window,
he hums a sonata, he watches the falling snow for ten minutes,
he imagines himself a cabinet minister, then returns to his Fichte,
and for five minutes stares smiling into the fire. "Oh, the joy of
leisured, studious solitude!"
His examinations were in philosophy, Latin, and Greek. In
writing his paper on Latin literature he was so carried away by
his enthusiasm for Homer that he felt it necessary to append an
apology to his examiners for his unconventional manner. He owed
the German university a perdurable taste for the classics. His
His paper
in philosophy had Pantheism for its subject and its target. The
candidate's attitude was that of his teachers, who were all con-
servative, “right” Hegelians, and also largely that of the Russian
academic authorities. In proclaiming the falsity of the doctrine of
Pantheism, the young man upheld revealed religion, and took occa-
sion to refer disapprovingly to the heretical Feuerbach. The exist-
ing discord between religion and science he conceived to be tempo-
rary: . . . already many begin to believe that man must depend
lovingly on God, and only in this relationship is it possible to find
truth and freedom of thinking and happiness." He was expressing
an intellectual conviction current in Stankevich's circle, where the
terminology of faith had been freely used.
66
Among the papers of one of his friends was recently found a
yellowed sheet on the margin of which is penciled: "Turgenev in
his youth. Wanted to tear up." The paper bears in Turgenev's
handwriting two prayers. The first, entitled "A Prayer in Time
of Suffering," runs thus:
My gracious Lord and God, permit me to throw myself at Thy feet
with a humble prayer. God grant me relief from my suffering, hold out
to me the hand of help, hear my bitter groaning, look charitably upon
my tears. My God, my God, do not remember the sins of my youth;
THE POET
65
do not let me fall into despair, comfort my downcast and hopeless spirit.
Lord, help me, spare me. Oh, my God! spare me, the poor, the ailing
one; hear my weeping; Lord, let me draw my breath.
The second, apparently written after the danger was over and called
"A Prayer in Time of Relief," reads as follows:
Gracious Lord, I thank Thee from the depths of my heart for the re-
lief from my illness. Let the quiet joy of the appeased heart be my
prayer before Thee. Lord, favor me with Thy continued aid; let it
always dwell in my memory, so that I may not sink into obliviousness
and indifference, but that I may always remember Thy grace. Lord, I
thank Thee.
The paper is undated, but it was only in his early twenties that
Turgenev had anything like the naïve faith which is expressed in
these orisons. They may have been connected with the illness that
attacked him in 1839, which could easily have given him a moment
of panic. The fact that he troubled to write them down is quite
as characteristic as the fact that he wanted to tear them up.
Because his religion had no roots in the emotional subsoil, he was
later able to resign it without pain, yet even then a feeble religiosity
was to linger on in his comfortless spirit. At the same time that
he was turning Alexey Bakunin's thoughts to worldly matters, he
was attributing the unhappiness of the young Bakunins to their
lack of "deep religious feeling," and contemning them for making
a half-hearted compromise with reality on the basis of "some measly
little moral feeling or principle." At this stage he could argue for
a personal God, but it is certain that he could not, like his mother,
make an intimate and counselor of Christ, calling Him, as she did,
"Immanuel Josefovich Kristofovich." And even if he had been in
the habit of replying to his mother's letters, it is unlikely that he
would have been interested in answering her question as to whether
Christ had black hair, as she had dreamed when she was small and
as the Italians painted Him, or whether He had golden hair, as she
had recently read.
Ivan came through his examination in philosophy with flying
colors. To the Bakunins he confessed that all he had done was to
."
66
TURGENEV
rattle off a string of high-sounding phrases. He was sure real
scholars must despise him and his philosophy. He would despise
them if they did n't. The young man was obviously unsuited for an
academic career. Privately, he was taken up with his newly begun
play, "The Temptation of St. Anthony," the heroine of which was
a certain Annunziata, a mistress of the devil. He sent a song from
it to his friends, with directions to show it to Tatyana. "She will
say at once if it is good or bad. I trust her." His lifelong habit
of seeking criticism and deferring to the opinions of others began
with his literary career.
The only thing that now stood between him and his degree, since
he had passed both the oral and written tests, was the public defense
of a dissertation. But he returned to Moscow when the examina-
tions were over, with no further interest in pursuing the matter.
Not even his mother's offer, two years later, of two thousand rubles
if he would write a dissertation, was enough to revive it. Not long
before a young man of very good family had received his master's
degree and as Varvara Petrovna naïvely confessed to Ivan, she had
dreamed of the same honor for him ever since. But in vain.
The academic door was now definitely closed. His mother's
second choice for him was a bureaucratic career, upon which he pro-
ceeded to embark, entering the same year the Ministry of the In-
terior. The story goes that he came to his desk every morning to
sit down to the business of reading George Sand's romances and
composing verses. In fact, his first long narrative poem, “Parasha,”
is said to have been written here, to the scratching of quills and the
patter of sand upon official documents. The summer, spent in the
suburb of the capital, was equally placid: he promenaded, drank
Kreuzbrunnen, and affected a green shade for his eyes, which were
not very strong. After two years and several reprimands for tardi-
ness, Ivan shook the dust of the office from his fashionable boots.
He never forgot one instance of the carelessness which caused him to
lose his post: because of a slip of his pen, a poor thief was given
thirty lashes with the knout, instead of with the whip.
Varvara Petrovna was disgusted with her son's conduct. She
had done everything she could to help him find his way about Mos-
cow when he had returned from abroad, even providing him with a
THE POET
67
list of friends and relatives, which included a character sketch of
each, and instructions as to how to behave with them. One young
woman she called his "old flame," of another she said, "You may
flirt with her," and of a third, "Don't fail to call on her; if she says
you're all right, every one else will say you are a wonder." Re-
peatedly she had enlarged upon the advantages of a convenient mar-
riage and a career befitting his station. His defection drew down
upon him a letter full of maternal pain and pleading, and he tasted
the annoyance of an objective review of what he had done with
himself since he returned to Russia.
By his mother's report it amounted to nothing more than idling,
applauding a foreign prima donna, of whom more will be heard later,
and traveling for his health. She was referring to the fact that her
son had gone to Germany in August, 1842, and had remained there
well into the winter. In Dresden there had been a reunion with
Michel Bakunin and his brother Paul. Michel was especially happy
to see him. He believed that their friendship was a sturdier thing
than a mere youthful infatuation. "He is mine as I am his," he had
written to Tatyana some months previously; and at this period he
needed some one on whom he could rely.
Michel had just then decided to expatriate himself and devote his
life to the cause of social revolution, with that childlike unconcern
as to his daily bread which he never outgrew. He had come to Ber-
lin in the first place on Herzen's money. And now Turgenev,
though he did not share his friend's ideas, promised before leaving
him to shoulder his considerable debts. Michel sent a number of
letters after him, the last of which concluded thus:
We go two entirely different ways. Do not forget me. I shall never
forget you. Never, never shall I cease really, concretely to love you and
trust you. When you forget .ne I will think you dead. It's well we've
seen each other again. We have come to know each other and I am
certain that no matter where we meet, no matter under what circum-
stances, we shall shake each other's hands. I am certain that we shall
live humanly, that's the main thing.
Ivan's mother was not concerned about his living "humanly."
What she craved above all was that this twenty-six-year-old giddy-
68
TURGENEV
head should settle down, if only to being a flâneur. She wrote to
him:
If you were to tell me, Ivan, “Maman, my career in the civil service
has begun well, I am satisfied, and people are satisfied with me," then
without a moment's thought I give my orders and am taken to you. I
make a home for you; you shall have your pocket-money. You come
home, everything is ready: the table, the goodies, and a loving word.
As usual, every one waits for a glance from you, to take Ivan Serge-
yevich's orders. When my Ivan is with me in the winter, that's my
fur coat, and I'm warm; in summer, I'm kept cool and comfortable.
Without you, I suffocate and am miserable.
-
She does not insist on a bureaucratic career; she is content to see her
son a gentleman of leisure :
You don't want to serve; God bless you, don't serve. Live quietly,
where you please and how you please. You have an excuse which every
one will approve of: "Maman is very ill; how can I leave her to stran-
gers?" . . . I do not demand that you should serve. Why should you?
You like to write, to promenade, to hunt, to travel. Who interferes
with you? Spend the winter in Petersburg. Amuse yourself. Go to
the theater. . . . In the springtime come back to the country. .. The
summer we shall spend traveling. In the autumn you can do hunt-
your
ing. Live, and let us live near you. That's why I beg you: begin your
dissertation. Work on it a year, two years. Then you're a Mas-
Maybe you will even try for a doctorate. . . . You hold the hap-
piness of the family in your hands, but your laziness and indifference
is the cause of everybody's wretchedness. Sound your tuning-fork,
put it to your ear, and give voice: we shall all chime in.”
..
ter.
After Turgenev's retirement he continued to live in Petersburg,
while his mother was dividing her time between Moscow and the
country. Occasionally he would visit Spasskoye, chiefly for the
sake of hunting, since home was becoming a more and more distaste-
ful place. As she grew older, Varvara Petrovna was increasingly
given to violent eccentricities and to rages which terrorized the house-
hold. She did not suffer any independent opinion or interest on the
part of those about her. To come near her was to breathe a charged
atmosphere. She would deprive her favorite serfs of their dogs-
THE POET
69
nay, even of their children-when she was pleased to believe that
these interfered with her. She tormented her butler and her gar-
dener with a kind of idle sadism. She tyrannized over those she
loved and loved those over whom she tyrannized. Her cruelty
toward the dumb giant who was her porter afforded Turgenev ma-
terial for his "Moomoo," which Carlyle called the most pathetic
story in the world. It is noteworthy that the porter's devotion to
Varvara Petrovna was no whit abated by her injustice.
On occasion Turgenev's mother could enact a little comedy such
as might well have been imagined by Molière. It was Ivan's name-
day (in 1845), and, in spite of his absence, the household was cele-
brating it with the traditional roast goose, sucking pig, and vodka.
At nine o'clock in the evening the news ran through the house that
the mistress was dying. The priest, hurriedly summoned, confessed
the stricken woman, but before receiving extreme unction she indi-
cated her desire to bless her adopted daughter and take leave of all
the retainers and house serfs. After fifty men and women had filed
by her bedside, she seemed to rally, demanded tea, and proceeded to
mete out punishment to those who had failed to appear or who had
come in tipsy. The same year Varvara Petrovna abolished Easter
for her household. She happened to have suffered much annoyance
at about this season, and rose on Easter Sunday in the worst of bad
tempers. She ordered the church bells silenced and declared that
since there was no Holy Week for her, there should be none for any-
body near her. That she brooked no dictation even in her relations
with her God, may be seen from the fact that on one occasion she
forced her priest to confess her before an audience of her house serfs,
in complacent defiance of church statutes.
CA
C
All this can hardly have been after Ivan's taste. Indeed, he en-
gaged in occasional mild clashes with his mother on the subject of
serfdom, yet, being of an unheroic temper, he sulked in his tent more
often than he gave battle. He was not high-minded enough to quar-
rel with his bread and butter, nor practical enough to earn it. The
correspondence that passed between mother and son centered about
money matters. The would-be philosopher was not averse to play-
ing a part in the social life of the capital, and this mode of living
was expensive. Besides, some of the money he received went to
70
TURGENEV
satisfy Bakunin's creditors. He did not perform all that he had
promised, as Michel discovered to his pain, and there was some pre-
varication before the remittance was made. Michel, although in
desperate circumstances, excused him, since "his intention was truly
good and loyal, and that's all one person can demand of another.”
Ivan would receive sums from his mother with which to buy fashion
magazines and bonnets for her, but before he found time to carry out
her commissions, the money seemed to leak out of his pockets.
When three hundred and fifty rubles which she had sent him for the
purchase of a cape disappeared in this manner, his mother said
briefly, “That 's stealing." It was rather the negligence of a young
man engrossed with his own needs and desires, the same carelessness
which caused him to mislay his university diploma and to lose the
prescription against toothache sent him by Nicholas for the benefit
of Mme. Turgenev's sexagenarian teeth.
Society in those years carried on in an atmosphere of trifling and
imperturbable gaiety. The chief excitements were the introduction
of the polonaise in 1844, and, at about the same time, the inaugura-
tion of a new card-game, called "Preference." The dance took the
ball-rooms by storm, and hearts not exercised by the music were
agreeably agitated by the game. In the theaters, the audience was
stiffly seated in accordance with the official Table of Ranks, but the
stage was dedicated to the lightest forms of entertainment. A few
prescient spirits may have heard far off the rumblings of disaster,
but the general, believing that their world rested securely on its
foundations of bureaucracy and serfdom, faced life serenely enough.
The easy-going young man, being of good family and the heir
to a large estate, had the entrée to some of the best drawing-rooms
of the two capitals, and as a hopeful author he was beginning to
move in literary circles as well. He would be seen on the promenade
of an exclusive suburb of Petersburg, arm in arm with Count
Sologub, who matched him in height, if not in wit. Of afternoons
he would drop in at Mme. Panayev's, to kiss the hand of that famous
beauty and gossip across the purring samovar, and perhaps eat the
curdled milk that Dumas had praised. During the season he at-
tended her Saturdays, where all the literary celebrities and their
satellites came to drink tea and talk and pay court to the woman
THE POET
71
who was to become Nekrasov's mistress. Turgenev would come
here from some fashionable drawing-room, immaculate in his blue
swallowtail with gold lion's-head buttons, and light checkered trou-
sers, his white vest enlivened by a colored tie, and his hair worn à la
Liszt.
Half a century later his hostess was to roll upon her malicious
tongue various choice morsels about the young Turgenev. She made
him out a good deal of a snob, avid of aristocratic connections,
boasting of his successes in society, and no more reticent about his
affairs of the heart; above all, inclined to treat truth rather cavalierly.
There is no doubt that the budding poet won for himself the reputa-
tion of a liar. This would only bear out the contention of Plato
and Oscar Wilde that poetry and lying are not unrelated arts. In-
deed, admissions of mendacity recur in his appraisals of himself.
He irritated people by his poses, his insincerity, and his intellectual
frivolity. What Ivan abhorred above all, according to his friend
Annenkov, was the humiliation of being like everybody else. To
avoid this contumely he ascribed to himself all manner of eccentrici-
ties and vices of which he was incapable. He would nonplus his
hearers, for example, by declaring that in the presence of a great
work of art the hollow of his knees itched and his calves felt triangu-
lar. He would try on the rôles of a Don Juan or a Manfred-like
Lord Darlington cherishing the little vanity of pretending to be
worse than he was. But his masks deceived nobody.
Nor did they deceive himself. His affectations were the visible
sign of a morbid self-consciousness and maladjustment. He was
continually holding up the mirror to his own unintegrated nature.
"There was something feminine," says Annenkov, "in this
combination of resolution and caution, boldness and calcula-
tion, in this simultaneous readiness for initiative and repent-
And he was not the only one to find much of the
woman in his friend. In those years Petersburg was full of blasé
young men having Turgenev's irritating mannerisms and suffering
from the same complaint. He differed from them only in the fact
that he was able to analyze and objectify his ailment.
""
ance.
In the four long narrative poems which he wrote within the
decade 1836–46 there is the recurrent figure of a young man without
·
•
72
TURGENEV
i
desires or faith and without peace, unhappy in his play and inef-
fectual in his work. To this neurotic youth is opposed the normal,
unselfconscious woman-an antithesis which will recur throughout
Turgenev's novels like a theme in a sonata. The liberal opinions
which will be sharpened in his later work are added here to the
transmuted stuff of his personal experience. As for his lyrics,-
there were about thirty published in those ten years,―aside from
the stock themes of love and nature and the transience of things,
treated in the manner of the period and without technical distinction,
there is in them, too, the reiterated motif of the divided self. In
after years Turgenev conceived a strong distaste for his verse; he
contended that poems are like oysters: if they are not excellent, they
are worthless. Yet as late as 1876 he spent a wakeful night compos-
ing a political poem, and always retained the ability to write a rhymed
letter or make an impromtu quatrain for an after-dinner speech.
The prose which he printed during this decade consisted of a re-
view of a book of travel in the Holy Land, written at the age of
eighteen, two promising stories, a one-act play, and some critical
essays. The literary craftsman he was to be is presaged not only
in these pieces but also in the few letters of his which have come
down to us from this period. There is an unusually deft touch, for
example, about his sketch of the eleven ducks upon whose society he
was thrown in the autumn of 1840, when he lay ill in Marienbad.
He regaled his friends with a description of these fowls and with
the appropriate names he had given them, such as Schelling, My Fu-
ture, Nicholas I, Sky of Italy, Bakunin,-this last being bestowed
upon a lean, tall, active duck who was constantly waddling with
craned neck after flies.
As far as his literary preoccupation was concerned, Turgenev
had no serious opposition from his family to face. Varvara
Petrovna was delighted when on Easter, 1843, he brought her
"Parasha" (he called his first book, an imitation of Pushkin's
"Yevgeny Onyegin," after its heroine), and she kept the thin blue
brochure on her drawing-room table. Indeed, Turgenev's mother
was proud of him, and suggested that he take her maiden name,
Lutovinov, as his pen-name, in order to immortalize it. "I do not
know if it was difficult for you to give birth to a daughter," she
THE POET
73
wrote him, “but, thank Heaven, you came through it beautifully.
I am putting the amount of the Eleanora debt under the pillow of
my first granddaughter. That's over and above your allowance."
She thus accorded the child of Ivan's brain the honor she was
unwilling to bestow on the child of his loins. She was inclined
to encourage the young author: "Do not stop writing. No,
no, our ‘Parasha' is not without merits." A line therein, to the effect
that cider is not served in the best houses, deprived his mother's
guests of it permanently. His uncle's enthusiasm was even greater
than his mother's. The man dubbed everything he loved "Parasha,”
from a new-born calf to Bibi. Yet Varvara Petrovna could hardly
consider writing a serious occupation for a gentleman. She could
see little difference between an author and a clerk, since, as she
remarked in a moment of irritation, both were only soiling paper
for money. Further, an author was liable to suffer various in-
dignities. She watched the reviews jealously and said of criticism,
"Cela purge," but when Ivan proudly announced that his work had
been noticed, the whimsical lady burst into tears at the thought that
some priest's brat had criticized a Turgenev.
•
·
¿
?
·Y
·
MONG those who frequented
Mme. Panayev's drawing-room
was one man to whom Turgenev
gave himself whole-heartedly,
and who responded by overlook-
ing his friend's mannerisms and
appreciating his gifts. This was
Vissarion Belinsky, the man who
established some literary reputa-
tions for his century and undid
others permanently, although es-
sentially he was a critic of life,
rather than of letters. He had
a maternal tenderness for fledge-
ling talents and he greeted the appearance of "Parasha," in 1843,
with an enthusiastic review, pronouncing the author to be "the child
of our time, carrying within his breast all its sorrows and problems.'
""
TPU
1
Da
A
FOTOL
VHANDRAIN
BOOB
And
ölös
177
CHAPTER X
fitne
WESTWARD HO!

BOUN
Turgenev's further poetic efforts somewhat cooled Belinsky's in-
terest, and eventually the critic declared that he had no authentic
lyrical gift. Their friendship, however, suffered no whit. With
the gusto of the doubter, Turgenev savored Belinsky's fervor
and common sense, his intellectual honesty, his independent spirit,
and that candid obscenity of language which spots his published
correspondence with blank spaces. How could he but admire one
who was so single-minded in his allegiances, and who was so well
served by such knowledge as he had; for whatever Belinsky knew
was not dead ballast, but a very wind in his sails. It was a matter
of no account to the young Turgenev that his new friend had a
different social background, coming as he did from the class of
74
WESTWARD HO!
75
educated commoners, the betwixt-and-betweens looked down upon by
the gentry. As for the "fierce Vissarion," he loved the young man's
lively mimicry, observing eye, and wicked sarcasm. The little man
must, too, have enjoyed playing the mentor, and the frivolous giant
took his friend's scoldings more meekly than he took his mother's.
Belinsky replaced Stankevich in Turgenev's affections. Like
Stankevich, he was a man with a weak body and a strong devotion
to the things of the spirit; an intense and disinterested soul, shy
among people and ferocious in dealing with ideas. At the time
when the two men began their intellectual traffic, the critic, once as
ardent a Hegelian as any, was swearing not by the Absolute, but by
humanity. He had repudiated with his customary vehemence the
sanctified stand-pattism for which Hegel was supposed to act as
sponsor. He had damned the Prussian monarchy extolled by the
Master, and had declared his enthusiasm for the United States as
the country having the "most rational government" in the world.
The Belinsky with whom Turgenev had now to deal was a man
storming at the insults that the existing order heaped on his intel-
ligence and his sense of decency; a man pouring forth angry ribaldry
on the institution of marriage, the double standard, religion, the self-
righteous ethics of altruism, and indeed all conventions, traditions,
rituals, and exalted shams.
Turgenev, though to a lesser degree than the other members of
Stankevich's coterie, was beginning to turn his attention away from
ethical self-culture to the duties of man as a citizen of this uncouth,
inert, abused, pregnant Russia in which he lived. Belinsky helped
him on his way. The young men who had been able to resolve
their differences when these were in the realm of metaphysics, found
themselves in two hostile camps when it came to less abstract matters,
such as the immediate needs of their country. One camp went by
the misleading name of Slavophil. The other, which included some
of Stankevich's comrades and nearly all of Herzen's circle, under
Belinsky's generalship, was known as Westernist. Here Turgenev
naturally found himself.
For centuries the two orientations had striven for supremacy in
Russia, but until now the conflict had not been raised to the level
of elaborate theory. The Slavophils took over the ancient, simple,
↑
i
76
TURGENEV
nationalist faith, and made it flourish like a new evangel. The
native folk-ways were as much in their minds and affections as is
the Amerindian rhythm in the minds of certain American doctrin-
aires. But they went beyond the claims of civilized nationalism
in holding that the heart of the world throbbed with the Russian
pulse. In their eyes the proud civilization of Europe was nothing
but a magnificent tomb, while their native wilds were, in the words
of the historian, Kluchevsky, "the dirty village cradle in which
restlessly tosses and helplessly cries the future of the world." They
believed that a regenerated world order would be established with
the triumph of the principles which were embodied in Russian
history before Peter wilfully deflected it from its true course, and
which had been kept alive in the soul of the common folk. To their
thinking, Orthodoxy, autocracy, and the village commune were at
once the historic endowment and the messianic virtue of the Russian
people.
The Westernists were a humbler and more realistically minded
lot. They saw Russia as the stepchild of history, but however
neglected and immature, a born member of the European family of
nations. The country could be saved only if it consented to be
tutored by the West. Culturally, they were inspired by a humanist
ideal, fostered in Europe by the Renaissance and the Age of Reason,
both of which Russia had been denied. Politically, they ran the
whole gamut of liberalism, with its faith in constitutional government
and the initiative of the individual. They dismissed with amused
scorn the bizarre Utopia which the Slavophils projected into a fictive
past, where the lion of autocracy lies down beside the lamb of the
plebs, in the pleasant shade of a theocratic church. They submitted
that the ideas of their opponents meant, in practice, non-resistance
to the evils of the day, and indeed, support of the existing order.
The men on both sides, with few exceptions, belonged, like
Turgenev, to the gentry. But whereas the program of the Western-
ists expressed some of the aspirations of the third estate, that of the
Slavophils embodied the wishes of a reactionary land-owning class.
Among Belinsky's followers the rationalist mentality prevailed,
among the Slavophils, the temper of the mystic; where the former
desired to improve institutions, the latter held that social progress
WESTWARD HO!
77
could come only through individual perfection. Neither side, it
must be kept in mind, had as yet climbed down from the peaks of
theory onto the plain of performance. The nearest approach to
it was the adoption by certain brave Slavophils of an archaic costume
so historically correct that the natives failed to recognize it. What
could any reform movement be in the reign of Nicholas I except
a pious wish? The prevailing frame of mind under this régime
was such that a man felt that he had achieved the utmost by taking
thought. Men regarded ideas not as the blue-prints of action but
as the very sum of architecture.
Moscow was the chief scene of the combat between the two fac-
tions. Turgenev, making his home in Petersburg, and coming only
rarely to the old Russian capital, may not have been present at the
verbal tourneys that went on there from dinner-time until nearly
dawn, under the admiring eyes of fashionable ladies. But he was
undoubtedly abreast of the matters that were being debated no longer
in the salons only, but now even in the public prints. In one of
his longer narrative poems, published in 1846, he caricatures a
member of the Moscow gentry, giving him a fat nape, a costume like
a coachman's kaftan, and an appetite for horse-radish and for in-
vective against the nations of the West. Not for nothing had
Turgenev won the nickname "gamin" from Belinsky, who, soon
after the beginning of their acquaintance, wrote to a friend: "There
is malice, gall, humor in him. He understands Moscow deeply, and
mimicks it so that I get drunk with pleasure." Of course, the
battle had but a secondary interest for Turgenev. Even his verse
showed clearly that his concern was not with social theories but with
the social scene. Yet there was no mistaking his sympathies. He
accounted for his Westernism by the plunge he had taken into the
German sea.
There was also his affection for Belinsky, his own
rationalist temper, and the sense of reality which was strongly assert-
ing itself in him.
Turgenev spent the summer of his twenty-sixth year as Belinsky's
neighbor in a suburb of Petersburg. They met almost daily. In
the mellow light of the pine groves the tall, bulky figure might be
seen marching beside the slight, stoop-shouldered one, or both would
curl up on the soft moss, to finger the dry needles and talk and talk
78
TURGENEV
1
and talk. Belinsky was thoroughly convinced of some things that
Turgenev vaguely felt. In the end, Turgenev was convinced, too.
Not only that Russia must throw off the chains of serfdom and
turn her dull face westward. Not only that the Slavophils were a
set of well-meaning blockheads and damnable retrogrades. Belinsky
considered himself, after all, a critic of literature. Turgenev, even
if he was only the author of certain slight lyrical and some solider
narrative poems, was a literary aspirant. It is difficult to imagine
that they failed to talk shop. One must be a craftsman, of course.
And yet one must ask of every work of art to what extent it shows
awareness of contemporary problems and what it contributes to their
solution.
Listening to Belinsky's judgments and being made to participate
in his perceptions, one was put in the way of investigating the life
one wished to perfect. The sun seeped through the pungent dusk
of the pines. Turgenev drank in the mild air, the excited voice,
the gestures of the small, fine hands. The talk must sometimes
have made him wonder if beauty were not, perhaps, a spiritual luxury
in this day and generation. Before long he was to describe his age,
in one of the critical essays which association with Belinsky tempted
him to write, as a period in which people were unable to admire
a fine picture of a beggar because they were distracted by the ex-
istence of beggars. He watched his friend's features grow a pale
blur in the twilight, suffered for the weak body, adored the stern
mind, felt himself poor, unworthy, unaccomplished, dreamed of
turning over a new leaf, built, tore down, built up again, with a kind
of happy wretchedness, a hopeful insufficiency. These were the
days when he wanted each moment of his life to be "significant.
A daring," as he admitted later, "and hardly sinless desire!"
The following three winters Turgenev was a regular visitor to
the shabby rooms which the critic shared with the musty lady who
had recently annexed him as a husband. The host would pace up
and down, tapping his snuff-box with his frail hands, or sit huddled
in his gray cotton-lined jacket, his blue gold-flecked eyes widening
with animation as the talk progressed. These colloquia went on even
when the consumptive Belinsky was ill, and Turgenev, much to his
opponent's displeasure, was usually the first to suggest breaking off
WESTWARD HO!
79
the discussion for some more sustaining occupation. "We have n't
yet settled the question of the existence of God," Belinsky once re-
proached him, "and you want to eat!"
Turgenev's youthful capacity for exalting some individual who
won him emotionally and intellectually is evidenced in his relations
with Belinsky as it had been in his friendship with Stankevich. Many
years after the critic's death in 1848 Turgenev was still speaking of
him with unlimited admiration, worshiping his memory as that of
"a saint." His affection found a practical expression when he
gave a pension to the dead man's widow. In the character of
Pokorsky, described in "Rudin," the novelist blends the essences of
his Stankevich and his Belinsky. "It seems," we are told in the
novel, "as though a man had become a perfect wild beast, but no
sooner do you mention Pokorsky's name in his presence than all the
remnants of nobility begin to stir within him, just as though you
had uncorked a forgotten bottle of perfume in a dark dirty
""
room.
Belinsky's circle included several exceptional men. But the group
as a whole had the vices as well as the virtues of any artistic coterie.
Like Belinsky, Turgenev often resented its tyranny. He was to
write in one of his early short stories:
A circle substitutes arguments for conversation, trains men for fruit-
less jabbering, diverts you from solitary, beneficent work, infects you
with the literary itch. It robs you, in short, of your freshness and vir-
ginal firmness of soul. A circle-why, it is staleness and boredom un-
der the name of brotherhood and friendship, a concatenation of mis-
understandings and cavilings under the pretext of frankness and
sympathy.
Hovering around the group were a number of hangers-on with
conveniently full pockets who paid liberally for the sensation of
entertaining the great. And the great were quite willing to be
entertained. A satirist of the period, aiming at the circle, declared:
"Petty foibles, mean impulses, low feelings, are just as common to
those who write good books as to those who read them." Cards
and wine were as much a matter of course at the gatherings as was
good talk. Turgenev, whose mother was keeping a tight hold on
80
TURGENEV
the purse-strings, was hard put to it to pay his gambling debts.
He amused himself, like the others, with skits and sometimes.
with quite obscene inspirations coming from the pen of the notorious
Longinov, and he was also a good hand at writing epigrams as
cruel as they were clever. The object of one of these shafts was
a pale, awkward, self-conscious youth, an admirer of Mme. Panayev's
whom Belinsky had only just dragged into the lime-light and who,
some thirty years later, was to become the author of "The Brothers
Karamazov.'
The beginning of 1847 found Turgenev winding up his affairs
preparatory to a trip abroad. By the middle of February he was in
Germany. The six years that had passed since he left western.
Europe after his first extended stay there had dulled his sensibility
and enthusiasm, fed his experience and shaped his opinions. The
cessation of his formal instruction had initiated a new phase of his
education. His commerce was now more with people than with
ideas, and he was laying in a varied and substantial stock of ob-
servations on life and character. What he jeered at aloud, he was
quietly studying. He took in the company in the drawing-room
as he took in the landscape on his hunting-trips, with the greedy
interest of a child in a toy-shop.
Besides, his contact with Belinsky had encouraged whatever non-
conformist stuff was in him, and so, like many others among his
contemporaries all over Europe, he was turning away from "right"
Hegelianism, toward the radical, materialistic outlook of Feuerbach
and the other "left" Hegelians. And yet he was always to hold
to the fundamentally conservative position of his German professors,
who conceived the human race to be pushing up through the darkness
as slowly and unconsciously as a turnip, and considered revolutions no
better than sterile tempests. The subsequent changes in his mental
attitude could not erase, though they obscured, the idealistic notions
that had taken hold of him during his formative years: a reliance
on consciousness, a profound appreciation of such generous, if
general, values as Art, Freedom, Humanity.
Turgenev was later to declare that his escape from Russia was a
strategic retreat, executed so that he might the more freely attack
serfdom, and carry out his Hannibal's oath against that evil. He

VISSARION BELINSKY
UNIV
OF
MICH
!.
WESTWARD HO!
81
left the country because what he saw there confused, repelled, and
outraged him. He could not, he said, breathe the air of oppression.
There is some truth in these assertions, but he failed to mention
perhaps the most cogent reason for his departure. One is led to
believe that he went to Berlin, as he was to go so many places during
his remaining thirty-six years, to be near Pauline Garcia Viardot.
+
܃
!
..
##
VAN was bumping his three-year-
old shins against the clumsy
heirlooms at Spasskoye when the
youngest Garcia's first cry broke
against the walls of her parents'
Parisian flat. Pauline was a
born cosmopolite: she had Span-
ish progenitors, an Italian god-
father, a Russian godmother, and
in good time a French husband.
Further, she was a born musician,
like her sister, la Malibran, in-
heriting the gifts of both parents
and developing them to the point
of genius. Her mother, who was a prima donna, came of good
family. But her father was born in the gipsy quarter of Seville
and could never tell Pauline who her paternal grandfather was.
The handsome Don Manoel was characterized by his daughter as
an ebullient mixture of passion, folly, kindness and indomitable
cockiness. He could do everything, from composing a sauce to
composing an opera. The man was also a singer and eventually he
became an impresario, taking his company, which included his wife
and his two older children, from one capital to another.
When Pauline was four years old she found herself in New York,
where for nearly forty weeks running, generally on Tuesday and
Saturday nights, her celebrated family deserted her to divert the
fashionables with the first Italian opera ever produced in that city.
The initial performance took place on the night of November 29,
at the Park Theater-on the site of what is now 21-25 Park Row,
אר
200
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CHAPTER XI
NOVEMBER FIRST, EIGHTEEN-FORTY-THREE

Holanır?
82
NOVEMBER FIRST, EIGHTEEN-FORTY-THREE
83
opposite the old General Post Office-the finer of the two theaters
in New York at the time. The opera was Rossini's "Barber of
Seville"; Don Manoel had created the rôle of Almaviva in the
original production in Rome nine years previously. In the audience
were such gentlemen as Fenimore Cooper and Napoleon's brother
Joseph, one-time King of Spain. "The New York Evening Post"
reported the next day that "an assemblage so fashionable, so numer-
ous, and so elegantly dressed, was probably never witnessed in our
theater." This assemblage was "surprised, delighted, enchanted.
The repeated plaudits with which the theater rang were un-
equivocal, unaffected bursts of rapture." The opening night netted
the company three thousand dollars. Box-seats were two dollars,
orchestra chairs one dollar, and the gallery seats sold for a quarter.
With the proceeds in his pocket, Don Manoel, in September, 1826,
extended his tour to Mexico City, where he remained two years.
It was a real undertaking at the time, but the Garcias were a
hardy lot; the doctor who attended them in New York observed
that they had "good constitutions and took little physic." Little
Pauline, who made one of the party as a matter of course, was al-
ready speaking four of the languages in which she was to sing.
Their adventure in the wild south ended disastrously. As they made
their way to Vera Cruz on the return journey they were overtaken
by bandits, who disembarrassed Don Manoel of his fortune, which
he carried with him in the attractive form of gold and silver coin.
Pauline always remembered how her teeth chattered as she lay in her
mother's arms, wrapped in the frightened woman's Scotch plaid,
while the bandits were looting the caravan. One of them made off
with Pauline's own little plaid, a possession which she thought to
be exactly like her mother's and of which she was very proud. What
she resented was not so much the loss of her cape as the indignity
of seeing it shrink to the proportions of a child's cloak across the
huge shoulders of the Mexican.
When they again settled in Paris, in 1829, Pauline's musical
education was taken in hand by various members of her family,
assisted by professional teachers. As a matter of fact, she could
not remember the time when she had been ignorant of music. It
was an element of the air she breathed. Franz Liszt, under whom she
84
TURGENEV
studied composition, was very proud of her. He came to rank her
with Pasta, Schroeder-Devrient, and Rachel, and indeed assigned her
a unique place in that dazzling sorority for her diversified gifts,
her intellect, and her character. "The ant," as her family nicknamed
her for her patient industry, had had a sound education and profited
by it. Like Turgenev, she was devoted to the classics. She brought
up her own daughters on Homer, so that Louise, the eldest, knew
by heart every episode of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and Claudie
called her rocking-horse "Ballios" for Achilles's steed.
Pauline was sixteen years old when her voice was placed; it com-
bined the registers of soprano and contralto; and it was then that
she made her début on the concert stage in Brussels, although even
previously she had assisted la Malibran at her recitals. Two years
later, in London, she began her operatic career, as Desdemona.
Louis Viardot, the director of the Italian opera in Paris, immediately
engaged her for the next season.
When Pauline sang in the French capital for the first time at
l'Odéon, la Malibran had been dead for three years, and Musset,
who had adored the elder sister's voice, and whose stanzas had
mourned her passing, was of course in the younger sister's audience.
The first notes gave him the uncanny sensation that la Malibran
had returned from the grave to sing for him. He recognized the
same timbre, the same combination of roughness and sweetness, the
same after-taste as of the tang of a wild fruit. His admiration of
the artist soon warmed to a more personal emotion, which was also
to be aroused in him by her mother. He began paying court to both,
at the same time bestowing his attentions upon Mlle. Rachel, who had
made her début in the world and upon the stage during the same
period.
Whether due to Rachel's superior charm or to George Sand's
maternal interference, or to the fact that Mlle. Garcia had rejected
him, Musset drifted away from "l'ingrate Pauline," as he called her
thereafter, and a year later, in 1840, Pauline was married to Louis
Viardot. Saint-Saens speaks of him as one of the handsomest men
of his time, but he was also more than twice as old as his bride.
The match was largely engineered by George Sand. The pair
visited her at Nohant, her estate, the year after the wedding. There
NOVEMBER FIRST, EIGHTEEN-FORTY-THREE
85
the two women promenaded and played billiards while the men
hunted, and in the evening young Mme. Viardot was at the piano
with Chopin. Pauline was in a measure the model for Sand's
heroine, Consuelo, in the novel of that name, and the flattered-
and flattering-original wrote to the novelist that to have assisted
her in creating "this remarkable figure" was undoubtedly "the best"
she had ever done in the world. In spite of frequent absences
from France, on tour, Pauline continued to keep in touch with Mme.
Sand, who remained a lifelong friend of the family.
Louis Viardot gave up his post to become Pauline's impresario.
He accepted in his usual responsible fashion the ungrateful rôle of the
husband of a celebrity, and soon after the wedding Pauline resumed
her triumphant career. She was by no means beautiful; she had no
illusions on that score. She had, she believed, only a second-rate
voice, yet she claimed, paradoxically enough, that this was the
secret of her success: had her natural endowments been richer, she
would have been less of a conscious craftsman and therefore less of
an artist. As it was, she owed her achievements to a virtuosity
depending on her infinite capacity for taking pains. She found her
audiences in all the European capitals, and her reputation as a dra-
matic singer rolled up like a huge snowball.
During the season 1842-43 she was singing in Paris at the
Théâtre Italien, where Heinrich Heine often came to hear her.
About Easter of that year she went to Vienna to sing for the
Emperor of Austria on his birthday. In the summer she was heard
by the King of Prussia, at a concert arranged in Berlin by Meyer-
beer. Of her three distinguished auditors, only the prince of poets
voiced his opinion of her. As usual he seems to grin at his own
emotion. He wrote of her in 1844:
She is no nightingale, who has only the talent of her kind and who
sobs and trills exquisitely in spring fashion; nor is she a rose, for she
is ugly, but of a noble, I might almost say a beautiful type of ugliness,
such as sometimes fascinated and inspired the great painter of lions,
Delacroix! Indeed, la Garcia suggests less the civilized beauty and tame
grace of our European home land than the terrible splendor of an ex-
otic wilderness, and during some moments of her passionate perform-
ance, especially when she opens wide her large mouth with its dazzling
86
TURGENEV
white teeth, and smiles with such savage sweetness and bewitching fe-
rocity, one feels as though the monstrous growths and animals of Hin-
dustan or Africa were arising before one; as if giant palms, enlaced by
thousand-blossomed lianas, were shooting up; and one would not be
surprised if suddenly a leopard or a giraffe or even a herd of young ele-
phants were to tramp across the stage.
Heine made these notes in a mood of reminiscence and regret, for
during the season of 1843-44 Mme. Viardot was a thousand miles
away from Paris. She had accepted an engagement to sing in
Petersburg, at a salary of fifty thousand francs, plus the proceeds
of one special performance. That season saw the return of Italian
opera to Petersburg for the first time since the half-witted martinet
Paul I abolished it in a fit of parsimoniousness in 1798. The capital
was all agog. The opera opened in October at the Bolshoi Theater
with the very piece which had initiated the New York performances,
"The Barber of Seville." The tall, bald German conductor lent
an added note of color to the evening by waving his baton in a yellow-
gloved hand. Mme. Viardot sang the rôle of Rosine for a packed
house which she swept out of skepticism into a frenzied ecstasy.
That evening, marking another triumph for her, also assured the
success of the new musical venture. Night after night, until Lent
closed the season, the opera-house was filled to capacity, impecunious
music-lovers overflowing into the aisles, balancing themselves on
every possible and impossible ridge, and even perching, at the risk
of their lives, in the space between roof and ceiling around the
aperture from which the central chandelier was suspended. It is on
record that two students crossed the Neva before the ice was tested
and the gangways laid, simply to hear the incomparable Viardot.
The opera was the chief topic in all the drawing-rooms, so that
finally the outwearied hostesses agreed to rule it out of the conversa-
tion entirely. There was no end of gossip, not all of it kindly, about
the prima donna. It was repeated at Mme. Panayev's as else-
where, that the great artiste had Jewish blood in her veins. Else
why should she be so grasping? Perhaps not without reason, the
reputation for being greedy clung to her. She was certainly the
sort of woman who insisted on receiving her due. Turgenev took
up the cudgels in her defense.
NOVEMBER FIRST, EIGHTEEN-FORTY-THREE
87
He must have been in the first-night audience which burst into a
fury of applause on the last note of Rosine's aria, "Una voce poco
fà.” A few weeks later, on the morning of November 1, 1843,
he met the singer for the first time. For years he celebrated the
return of this "sacred" day. He went to her apartment-it was in
a corner house on the Nevsky opposite the Alexandrinsky Theater
-in the company of a notoriously ridiculous little major. Turgenev
writes to Mme. Viardot on the ninth anniversary of this meeting
that he always thinks with pleasure of the stupid fellow because
chance had associated him with that morning.
The woman who stood before him that November day, seen by the
sober eye was a thin, flat-chested, slightly stooped person, with a wide,
full-lipped mouth, prominent features, and huge, hot, black Spanish
eyes. A pencil drawing of the period which was recently found
among Turgenev's papers confirms the universal testimony to the
homeliness of the woman, but conveys no hint of the fascination of
the artiste. Before her engagement to Viardot, a Belgian painter,
on being introduced to her, said to her future husband, "She is
atrociously homely, but should I see her again I would fall madly
in love with her." Which he did. It must have gone not very
differently with Turgenev.
The young man, who was introduced to her as a good hunter, an
interesting talker, and a poor poet, found himself not the most dis-
tinguished among a group of the prima donna's admirers. It grad-
ually narrowed itself down to what Turgenev called her "Old
Guard," which included a general, a count, and the son of the director
of the Imperial Theaters. The latter, according to legend, had a
private greenroom built just off the stage for Mme. Viardot's com-
fort. After the performance the prima donna would rest there on
a bearskin shot by one of the faithful. Four gentlemen were ad-
mitted to enjoy seats of honor on the four gilded paws, each of which
had its number and its regular occupant, who had to tell a story dur-
ing the intermission. Mme. Viardot, in a white peignoir, was
throned in the center. Rumor had it that on one of those golden
corners-Number 3, to be exact-sat the rapt Turgenev.
Mme. Panayev expatiates in her memoirs on how he dinned his
passion into everybody's ears. He annoyed her especially by his
88
TURGENEV
,4
uninvited invasion of her box, where his huge frame would interfere
with every one's view and his ear-splitting applause arouse the in-
dignation of the neighboring boxes. On one occasion, she writes, he
broke up a game of "Preference" in which Belinsky was taking a
hand, to relate how his divinity had with her own fingers rubbed his
aching temples with Eau de Cologne. Since his mother kept him
short of money, he had sometimes to appear in a cheap seat. It is
reported that ashamed of being seen there, he explained to his fashion-
able acquaintances that he was looking after claqueurs he had hired.
The few letters from Turgenev to Mme. Viardot for the period
up to his departure from Russia, do not, however, fit in with Mme.
Panayev's presentation of the affair. If the interest they show is
too deep for a cool friendship, it is not importunate enough for pas-
sion. The singer was in Russia for three successive seasons. It
was after the first winter that Turgenev was writing her: "We
poor famished creatures feed upon our memories," the disarming
plural referring to the Old Guard. The subsequent summer he made
a short trip abroad to have his eyes treated, and visited the Viardots
at their estate, the Château de Courtavenel, making the acquaintance
of the whole family.
Curiously enough, even from the beginning, Turgenev's regard
for his lady embraced her relatives as well. He is in correspondence
with her mother; he receives letters written jointly by Pauline and
Louis Viardot; he sends their small daughter Louise "a fat kiss."
It is of a piece with the familial serenity of this relationship that he
should fill his letters with such impersonal matter as the theatrical
gossip of Petersburg and intelligence concerning his griffon, answer-
ing to the name of Paradise Lost, and his English bay mare, Queen
Victoria. Nevertheless, he sometimes lets his voice drop to a more
intimate tone, as when he begs Pauline to care for her health, advises
her about her reading, speaks of following her engagements in local
papers, and writes in March, 1844: "I wanted to look into our dear
little rooms, but some one is living in them now." Though these
words seem to smile to themselves secretly, the context allows of no
compromising interpretation of this phrase. All the meager evidence
points to a platonic affection.
It was just before she left Russia that an acquaintance of Turge-

PAULINE VIARDOT IN 1843
From an engraving by Achille Martinet after the painting by
Ary Scheffer
UNIL
OF
MICH
NOVEMBER FIRST, EIGHTEEN-FORTY-THREE
89
nev's, a certain prince, came to pay his respects to the departing prima
donna. Standing in the twilit foyer as he waited to be announced,
he noticed a tall, heavily built man panting over a trunk which would
not close for him. At first the prince ignored him, thinking him a
servant. But the man's obvious incompetence attracted the visitor's
attention and he and Turgenev recognized each other with mutual
embarrassment. Talking rapidly, Turgenev explained that M. Vi-
ardot had left for Paris in advance and that Mme. Viardot was
about to follow him. Half a century later the prince, recalling the
incident, spoke of the curious fear for Turgenev that had seized him
at that moment.
Mme. Viardot did not return to Petersburg for a fourth season,
and on November 20, 1846, she being then in Berlin, Turgenev wrote
to her that the coming year would bring her one more auditor at the
Opern-Haus there. "What a wonderful thing it is," he writes in a
subsequent letter, "the mere possibility of telling you ‘au revoir'!"
ה
F
1
..
-
L
C
CHAPTER XII
I
THE DARK LADY
HREE months later Turgenev was
applauding Pauline Viardot in
"Les Huguenots" at the opera-
house of the Prussian capital.
Berlin revisited after half a dozen
years appeared to him a changed
city. Bettina no longer dyed her
hair, Max Stirner looked sleek
and tame and sad, Schelling was
silent, and Werder, unserenaded,
expounded Hegelian logic, as
Turgenev wrote home, to an
audience of three students, of
whom only one was German, and
he a Pomeranian. Alone the influence of Feuerbach's sobering
iconoclasm sustained itself, Turgenev believed, amidst the general
indifference to speculative thought. He sensed the end of what he
called "the literary, theorizing, philosophic, fantastic epoch of Ger-
man life.” His acute perception of this change he owed to the
fact that a parallel process was going on within him. Another
decade will pass and he will be unable to understand his own notes
on the lectures he had attended in Berlin. Indeed, here was a harder,
more realistic mind, now seldom dallying in the metaphysical play-
ground, rather fitting itself to the harness of literature.
He followed Mme. Viardot to Dresden in the spring of the year.
With him went the consumptive Belinsky, a veritable babe in the
woods away from home, who threw himself upon his friend as upon
a nurse. After twelve days there, which cannot have offered the
young man many glimpses of his idol, although he stopped at the

CON
*1111
90
THE DARK LADY
91
same hotel as the Viardots, Turgenev accompanied the invalid Belin-
sky to Salzbrunn, where the latter was sent to take the cure. There
the two were joined by the plump and practical Annenkov, who was
to become Turgenev's lifelong friend, factotum, and guide in the
conduct of his literary affairs, and from late May to the close of
June the air of the quiet Silesian watering-place was stirred by many
discussions in a strange tongue. It was here that the ailing critic
wrote Gogol the letter of furious invective against the infamy of
serfdom, the plague of bureaucracy, and the abomination of the
official church, which, spread in innumerable handwritten copies, be-
came the manifesto of Russian liberalism. It was the letter which
was instrumental in sending Dostoyevsky to Siberia, and which Tur-
genev accepted as his credo.
It was nearly midsummer when, after a flying visit to London,
Turgenev came to port at last at the Château de Courtavenel. The
estate of the Viardots lay about forty miles east of Paris, in the
midst of the meadows and forests of La Brie. The castle was a
moss-grown structure, dating back to Henri IV, with all the feudal
circumstance of turrets, drawbridge, and moat, and a rear view
which reminded the châtelaine of a jolly grocer. Summering here,
the owners opened its gates to their relatives and friends. The
household adopted the young Russian, and he in turn responded with
an all-inclusive gesture of affection. The castle offered him the spa-
ciousness, if not the abundance, to which Spasskoye had accustomed
him, without its offending brutalities, and here too there were game
in the brush and fish in the streams. In the drawing-room, more-
over, there was frequently music, which may have been to Turgenev,
as it was to Orsino, "the food of love," but which also satisfied an
impersonal and permanent appetite. And above all, whether or not
the hostess was there in the flesh, Courtavenel provided the exquisite
reassurance of her presence.
The château was, however, only a summer home, and when the
singer left for her autumn and winter tour in Germany, Turgenev,
like her mother, moved to Paris. This was the first of several
separations during the three years he spent in France. The months
of her absence were filled for him with a kind of contented loneliness,
and it would seem as though they mortised this unshaken friendship.
92
TURGENEV
It was impossible for him to follow her in her peregrinations, be-
cause of lack of funds. He had left Russia with a very modest sum
in his pockets, and his tailor's bill of two hundred rubles still unpaid,
not to mention other debts. Three lean years, financially speaking,
were ahead of him. Money remittances from home were few and
far between, and he was virtually thrown upon his own resources.
His mother declared daily, "I must send Vanichka some money,"
and every day omitted to do so.
The young man found a room for himself near the Palais Royal
and settled down to plain living and earnest writing. When the
wolf howled at the door he threw his ink-bottle at it. He spent long
mornings at his desk, over many prose sketches and not a few plays.
He gave hours to the study of Pauline's native tongue. His pro-
miscuous reading included Voltaire, the Koran, and Lady Montague.
He discovered compatriots, among them old friends like Bakunin
and new ones like the émigré Herzen, the most brilliant publicist of
his time, and, to use his own phrase, a tireless suitor of the Penelope,
revolution. He saw much of Annenkov, a born satellite blessed
with admirable taste. Turgenev described this friend to Mme.
Viardot as "an excellent fellow, whose mind is as fine as his body is
fat." Much of his time the incipient novelist spent getting the sort
of education a young man could pick up in the streets, the cafés,
the galleries, the concert halls, the theaters of the Paris of the
forties.
Turgenev's day usually included a visit or two to "Maman," as
he called Mme. Garcia in his letters to her daughter. He was per-
haps more filial to this old lady, who mended his shirts for him,
than to his own mother. The two would have many a long tête-à-
tête over sheets hastily scribbled in ill-spelled Spanish by the vagrant
prima donna. It was his privilege to read the letters aloud. He has
himself described those regalements: "After having devoured it
[the letter] en bloc, we start to pick at it here and there. Appetite
grows with eating, and we begin to read it once more." And again:
"Ah, Madame what a good thing long letters are! It is as though,
in summer, one entered a long alley, green and fresh. Ah, one says
to oneself, it is pleasant here, and one walks slowly, listening to the
twitter of the birds. You chirp far better than they, Madame.
THE DARK LADY
93
f
Pray, go on. You will never find more attentive or greedier read-
ers."
Of his correspondence with Mme. Viardot we have but a portion,
which includes only the man's letters, and not all of these. He kept
her informed of what he did with his time, filled pages with opinions
on life and literature, with accounts of his reading and his writing,
with comments on music and musicians, and with domestic details.
He would keep a letter on his table for days, until, when he finally
mailed it, it assumed the shape of a diary, in which he even re-
counted his dreams.
He was a critical admirer. He advised Mme. Viardot, he
cautioned her, unweariedly he followed her triumphs in the papers;
and there is ground for believing that she deferred to his opinions
on music and acting even when she disagreed with them. When,
during one of his later solitary stays at Courtavenel, an aunt of
Pauline's, leaving the château, gave the penniless Turgenev thirty
francs, he used them on a trip to Paris, simply to read in eight papers
When
the English press notices of the singer's London successes.
she was preparing for her début in "Le Prophète," he wrote: "In
Heaven's name, let me know in advance the day of the first perform-
ance. . . . That night somebody at Courtavenel will not go to bed
before midnight." He kept his promise and wrote to her as the
clock struck the hours which, he presumed, called her before the
curtain. The same somebody applauded her in effigy and threw
flowers to her portrait, which, he said, "unfortunately does not
resemble you."
In general, his tone is one of respectable solicitude and friendly
regard. The letters are marked by a cheerful equanimity and an
effortless humor. Yet the springs of a more troubling emotion
sometimes agitate their calm surface. A phrase here and there sug-
gests, however feebly, that the quintessence of all these gossipy bul-
letins is Heine's "Madame, ich liebe Sie." "Dear, precious crea-
ture!" he writes on one occasion, "I am thinking of you every
minute, and of joy, and of the future. Write me even on little
scraps of paper in your letters you know what." And again:
"I cannot tell you how many times I thought of you in the course of
the day. On my way back [from a country festival] I shouted
94
TURGENEV
your name with such force and stretched out my arms to you with
such passion. .
. . You must have heard and seen it." After de-
claring that his wishes for her are strong enough to uproot oaks, he
adds: "Liebe, Teuere: Gott sei mit dir und segne dich!" This
employment of the intimate second person singular is unique in the
correspondence, but not so the use of German, the language of the
warmest passages of his letters to her. It was a tongue which Mme.
Viardot's husband admitted, on a page of his "Souvenirs de Chasse,"
to having no knowledge of.
A letter dated Paris, January 4, 1848, written while the singer was
in Berlin, speaks even more plainly of the degree of their intimacy:
I know where you are living; is n't it near the Brandenburger Thor?
You will excuse me if I allow myself to speak about certain details of
your apartment: Why are certain regions of it which are only referred
to by their English name—perhaps because the English are most discreet
in their vocabulary-why are these regions subjected to the inclemency
of the elements and the rigors of cold? Please be careful, and do some-
thing about it. It's more serious than it appears at first blush, espe-
cially at this season of grippe and rheumatism. You will probably
laugh at me and the subjects which I mention in my letter. I see from
here how you smile, raising your right shoulder and inclining your head
in the same direction (that's your customary gesture and I advise you
not to give it up, because it is very beautiful, especially when it is ac-
companied by a peculiar little grimace).
Through pages of advice, gossip, discourse, and invective, Mme.
Viardot's correspondent scattered, as had been his mother's habit,
slight precise sketches of men and beasts. The craftsman peers
out in such passages as this:
I have made the acquaintance of two dogs: one, communicative, gay,
flighty, of little or no education, witty, fond of raillery, somewhat of a
rogue, on the best terms with every one and, to tell the truth, without
true dignity; the other: gentle, wistful, lazy, gluttonous, steeped in La-
martine, insinuating and disdainful at the same time. We frequent the
same café. The first belongs, if a dog can be said to belong, to a little
army surgeon, very lean and very crabbed; the other has for a mistress
the cashier, a little old woman who has worn out her teeth chewing on
kind thoughts.
THE DARK LADY
95
About political events, Turgenev had little to say, in spite of the
fact that he was a witness to the revolution of 1848. At six o'clock
in the morning of February 26 he was lying abed in a Brussels
hotel when he was roused from sleep by a voice shouting: "France
has become a republic!" He hurried back to Paris, reaching the
city as soon as torn-up tracks and a wrecked train allowed him, and
arrived in time to see the cockaded workingmen taking the barricades
apart. Rushing from Brussels to Paris, a day or two earlier
was Bakunin, who went to participate where his friend went to
watch.
Turgenev loitered on the streets for hours. He listened to a soap-
box orator, whom, as he wrote to Pauline, he found very violent and
very flat and whom the crowd warmly applauded. He heard Rachel,
draped in the tricolor, sing the Marseillaise. He watched a workers'
demonstration, noticing the peddlers of cigars and licorice-water who
darted through the crowd, "avid, satisfied and indifferent. They
looked like fishermen bringing in a heavily laden net." Things
seemed to happen irrationally. His comment to Pauline Viardot
on a day spent in the streets was: "What is history, then? Provi-
dence, chance, irony, or fatality?" He ran with a crowd which was
driven with bayonets from the Place de la Concorde, and ten days
later he was under the fire of the insurgents. A national guardsman
from the provinces mistook him for a Russian agent fomenting
trouble, but not all his compatriots in Paris, concerned as they were
with the outcome of the revolution, could make him other than an
artist who was also a liberal. They had called him "Republican"
as a boy. The man was, unwillingly, a mugwump. He looked
on at the drab pageant in a frame of mind which began with curiosity
and ended with a sad shrug of the shoulders.
Turgenev was still in Paris in the sultry June days when the red
flag was wagging from the barricades, as he phrases it, like a sharp,
ominous tongue. He was to use one of these barricades as the place
for the futile death of his Hamletic hero, Rudin. The June days
themselves he described in his Reminiscences, where he tells the
heroic story of an old workman who was sent by his comrades into
the enemy's camp simply to tell a father, a bourgeois father, of his
child's safety. Yet the tale does not celebrate the cause of the
96
TURGENEV
workers, but is, characteristically enough, merely a sober psychologi-
cal study.
By this time the meteoric Bakunin was no longer in Paris. He
had gone to the duchy of Posen on money borrowed from the French
provisional government (his friend Herzen said that he accepted
money from strangers as children take it from their parents), in
order to rouse the Poles and the Russians against Emperor Nicholas
I. Meanwhile Herzen had arrived from Italy and begun keeping
open house for shipwrecked revolutionists from the four corners of
the continent. Turgenev was by no means one of these, but he
found the house a congenial place for a lonely Russian.
He soon shook the blood-stained dust of Paris from his feet and
went home, as it were, to Courtavenel. In October Mme. Viardot
was receiving letters from him dated Hyères, Toulon, and Lyons.
In one of them he confesses that he tried to write verse for her but
failed: "I could only look, dream, remember." In another letter
he allowed himself a purple patch evoking for her the Mediterranean
colors she knew so well. On the whole, he found France "decidedly
unbeautiful." He seemed to dislike the country as heartily as he
loved the woman who was to keep him there so many years of his
life. Had n't Belinsky, the previous year, called France a land of
shame, and its face a cuspidor for all the nations of Europe? A
fortnight before returning to the capital Turgenev wrote to say that
on the fifth of November she might expect one more guest at table
in her little Chinese salon. "I demand," he added, "a charlotte russe
that day."
That winter Turgenev was a daily visitor at the Herzens.
It was
not a cheerful house. They could not get over the failure of the
revolution. It was Turgenev's rôle to clown it among the mourners.
There was another Russian family, the Tuchkovs, in the house, and
these helped to form a tiny Russian colony. Turgenev would amuse
the ladies with his old tricks of foolery and mimicry. He perched
on the window-sill and crowed like a cock, he draped himself in Mme.
Herzen's black velvet cape and played the madman till the ladies.
shivered and begged him to stop. He had chess-bouts with M.
Tuchkov and brought gardenia scent to his daughter. When other
pleasures failed he would avail himself of any unoccupied couch,

UNI
OF
6.21644
PAULINE VIARDOT IN 1844
From a sketch made during her Petersburg engagement;
found among Turgenev's papers
MICH
THE DARK LADY
97
with a genius for curling up his big body in the smallest possible
space. Although he gave Mlle. Tuchkov a note-book with an in-
scription to the effect that he would never forget her, and had heart-
to-heart talks with Mme. Herzen, both ladies found him dumb on
the subject of Mme. Viardot. "All that relates to him, that is,
to Viardot," Mme. Herzen wrote to a friend, "is under the veil
of darkness." The girl agreed with the matron that to take Mme.
Viardot's name in vain was blasphemy to him.
Then came another, his last summer at Courtavenel. Part of
it he spent there in the absence of his hosts. After Mme. Viardot
left, he wrote to her that he had seen her in his dream, bending over
the ship's screw and looking at the white foam on the green water.
At the château he had his old room, with its friendly willow-green
wall-paper. He lived, as he told the prima donna, as in an enchanted
castle, where the table spread itself and the linen laundered itself.
For a time he was alone with the cook Véronique, and threw out the
suggestion that he might marry her to reward her for her services,
inasmuch as any other mode of payment was chimera to him. He
amused himself by hanging literary allusions on the trees about the
place, naming a certain chestnut Hermann and seeking for a Doro-
thea, and the like. He gossiped to his absent hostess "like a magpie
who has remained an old maid." With a woman's sense of detail
he gave accounts of the rat who was caught in the kitchen, the little
white cock that had an aversion to him, the gnats that turned his
body into one wound like that of Hippolytus, and the hare that was
drowned in the moat and whom he suspected of suicide.
Turgenev's position at the château was somewhat ambiguous.
He stayed on in the ill-defined capacity of one who, without being
a pensioner, was not exactly a guest. Neither his allowance from
his mother nor his scanty literary earnings so much as permitted him
to tip the servants. By winter he was "in dire poverty" and wrote
home that he needed three hundred rubles to save himself "from
starvation." Whether because of friendly interest or a nagging
sense of obligation, he made himself useful, draining the moat,
teaching the little Louise German, arranging the library. Besides,
there was the husband. Judging by Turgenev's letters, the relations
between Viardot and himself were cordial. They shared the
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TURGENEV
pleasures of the chase, and the younger man did not hesitate to
borrow from the older. Before his departure for Russia Turgenev
wrote to Viardot, on June 24, 1850:
I do not want to leave France, my dear good friend, without having
told you how much I love and esteem you, and how I regret the necessity
of this separation. I shall not feel truly happy until at your side, rifle
in hand, I can once more beat the brush of dear la Brie. One's country
has its rights, no doubt, but the true Fatherland-is it not where one has
found the most affection, where the heart and the spirit feel at ease?
There is no place on earth which I love as much as Courtavenel.
But there were moments when the thought of his "dear good
friend" pricked him. "What is the matter with Viardot?" runs a
German phrase in a letter of July 23, 1849. "Is he perhaps an-
noyed at my living here [Courtavenel]?" And again recurs the
note of Turgenev's uneasiness: "I feel as though I had the look
of a braggart, but at bottom I am just a little boy. I have my tail
between my legs and I am seated very shabbily and miserably on
my haunches, like a dog who feels that he is being made fun of
and who looks vaguely out of the corner of his eyes, blinking as if
dazzled by the sun.
"
Pappe
NY politically minded young man
would have found the France
in which Turgenev spent three
of his most productive years an
absorbing and instructive scene.
But what he called, in a letter
to Pauline Viardot, political
"Pathos" was not, he felt, a part
of his make-up. He was edu-
cable chiefly in matters esthetic.
And yet he could not remain un-
touched by the drama of current
history. The streets of revolu-
tionary Paris taught him the un-
pleasant rudiments of crowd psychology, and the logic of the class
struggle, albeit the lesson made no enduring impression. The re-
action which followed the upheaval of 1848 intensified his disgust
with the governments, the philosophy, the art of his time.
To some of his friends, notably to Herzen, the failure of the
revolution was a personal tragedy. They identified it with the
bankruptcy of Western civilization. Herzen regretted that he had
not accepted the rifle a workman had offered him on the Place.
Maubert, and died on a barricade: "I would then have taken with
me to the grave two or three beliefs." His wife said that she dared
not wish that her children would live, for fear that history might
treat them to the horrors it had shown her. The June days which
affected Herzen like a grave illness, his literary compatriot appeared
to take merely as a depressing yet withal interesting spectacle. But
while he seemed to turn up his nose at the nasty mess, he was being
VOTON
WHARDY
FOOD
177
CHAPTER XIII
"A SPORTSMAN'S SKETCHES"

uit Uli
MATILLA
99
100
TURGENEV
profoundly worked upon by the atmosphere of disappointment.
Herzen did not remain disconsolate long. In his disillusion with
the West he turned hopefully eastward, and like the very Slavophils
whom he had laughed to scorn a few years earlier, he conceived
the idea that salvation would come from the common people of his
native land. But Turgenev had no such faith. Looking East and
West, he cried a plague on both their houses. "An honorable man,”
he wrote to Mme. Viardot in the summer of 1849, "will end by not
knowing where to live: the young nations are still barbarous like
my dear compatriots, or else if they rise and want to advance they are
crushed like the Hungarians; and the old, rotten, gangrenous nations
are festering and dying." The letter goes on in a tone of dejected
cynicism: "And then, who said that man is destined to be free?
History proves the contrary. It was not in the spirit of the courtier
that Goethe wrote his famous line: 'Man is not born to be free.'
It is simply a fact, a truth, which he announced as the accurate ob-
server that he was."
And yet Turgenev was certainly not the man to relish this par-
ticular truth. The liberal in him must have his fling at Leviathan.
In writing to Mme. Viardot about a book on Napoleon, he refers
to him rhetorically as the man who “organized authority, govern-
ment, this hideous phantom which, unproductive, hollow, and stupid,
the word Order in its mouth, a sword in one hand and gold in the
other, is crushing us all under its iron heel." Paskevich's military
successes in Hungary prompt this outburst: "To the devil with na-
tional sentiment! For a man with a heart there is only one father-
land,-democracy, and if the Russians are victorious, this will
receive its death-blow." Elsewhere he puts kings and soldiers on
a par with hail and cholera as an indication that God may be a mis-
anthrope. He had himself suffered a touch of cholera in 1849 and
the disease became the object of a phobia.
The gesture that comes most naturally to Turgenev during this
period is one of negation. This attitude is due not wholly to the
malfeasance manifest in the times, but certainly in part to his inner
lack of adjustment. His opinions carry a critical sting. He is
impatient with contemporary art, seeing around him nothing but a
mediocrity infected with exhibitionism. "We are like dogs," he
"A SPORTSMAN'S SKETCHES”
IOI
writes, "returning to their vomit. God and the devil are no more,
and the advent of Man is still far off." He believes himself to be
living in a desolate interregnum.
He oscillates between the pose of a romantic, fleeing to the golden
islands of the past, and that of the more sober dreamer who puts
his hope in the future. Finding no great general movements, such as
united men in the middle ages, he looks to industry as the possible
"regenerator of mankind," and concludes that "the greatest con-
temporary poets are the Americans, who are going to pierce the
isthmus of Panama and talk of laying a transoceanic cable." There
is an inescapable "post-war" flavor about his state of mind. Like
the young of the nineteen-twenties, Turgenev was galled by the
events which were so ugly a denial of the fine hopes of his student
years. He was living in a waste land, from which he was never
wholly to escape.
Here was no romantic, certainly no mystic. The faith which had
been his habit in the early Berlin days was now of no more use to
him than the waistcoats he had then worn. The reading of a book
on Christianity moved him to write to Mme. Viardot: "You cannot
imagine the painful effect produced by all the legends of martyrs
which he [the author] tells you, one after another, all these proces-
sions, sacred relics, autos-da-fé, this ferocious contempt of life, this
horror of women, all these wounds and all this blood." To his
fascinated reading of Calderon Turgenev brought a strong distaste
for unreasoning faith. He considered Calderon "the greatest
Catholic dramatist," as he considered Shakspere "the most human,
most anti-Christian."
Not even the formal perfection of Pascal reconciles him to the
Church of Rome. The sympathetic student of the humanist Feuer-
bach feels that man, in sacrificing his dignity to the Divine will,
and proclaiming the indifference of Grace to virtue and vice, rises
to the level of that strange Divinity which is, after all, his own
creation. “Nevertheless," Turgenev assures Mme. Viardot, "I pre-
fer Prometheus, I prefer Satan, the embodiment of revolt and in-
dividuality. Atom though I am, I am my own master; I want truth,
not salvation; I expect it from my intelligence and not from Grace."
This was not only the language but the spirit of youth. He was
102
TURGENEV
young; he was in love; he was, for a brief period, tasting the in-
dependence peculiar to poverty; he was feeling his strength.
During a stay at Hyères, he witnessed a funeral mass, and his
description of the spectacle-the coffin draped with a black pall
and the yellow candles-winds up with the declaration that he
prefers the wide skies of the ancients, the oak-wood pyre and the
games. Yet his God is no more Pan than Christ. He is inclined
to identify the Deity with Nature, a force "indifferent, imperious
voracious, egoistic, pervading," bringing forth a star as it brings
out a pimple on the skin. He sees Nature as no less brutal than she
is beautiful: "The nightingale," he says, "may throw us into
delicious ecstasies while an unhappy insect is dying a painful death
in its crop." The soul seems to him "a feeble radiance which ancient
night eternally seeks to swallow." All life is frail. And yet he
professes himself dedicated to this frailty:
I cannot see without emotion a bough covered with young green leaves
outlined clearly against the blue sky. Is it because of the contrast be-
tween this little living sprig-which sways at the mercy of the least
breath, which I can break, which must die, but which a generous sap
animates and colors-and that eternal and empty immensity, the sky,
which is blue and radiant only owing to the earth?
He shares Heine's willingness to leave heaven to the angels and
the sparrows, but whereas the poet voiced his social conscience,
the future novelist voices the consciousness of the artist. He con-
fesses to Mme. Viardot:
I would prefer to contemplate the precipitous movements of a duck's
wet foot as it scratches the back of its head on the edge of a marsh, or
the long and glistening drops of water slowly falling from the muzzle
of a motionless cow which has just drunk from a pond in which she
stands knee-deep, rather than all that the cherubim can behold in the
sky.
I One might take this statement as the rationale of the method
which Turgenev followed in the writing which he was doing at this
time. It was now that he was composing most of his plays and the
pieces that were to form "A Sportsman's Sketches." He worked
hard and steadily. Neither the distractions of travel nor yet those
"A SPORTSMAN'S SKETCHES"
103
provided by Pauline Viardot could come between him and his manu-
scripts. From 1847 to 1850 he wrote at least twice as much as in
any equivalent period in all the forty years of his literary activity.
His mind functioned with uncommon facility and his brain tired no
sooner than his hand. He wrote to Mme. Viardot during this
period:
Never have ideas come to me in such abundance. They have pre-
sented themselves by the dozen. I felt like a poor devil of an innkeeper
in a small town who finds himself suddenly swamped by an avalanche of
guests; he ends by losing his head and not knowing where to lodge his
crowd.
In trying his hand at play-writing Turgenev was at once respond-
ing to a native impulse and yielding to that interest in the theater
which was as much Pauline's as her personal effects. His sense
of dramatic conflict, however, required for its expression a more
leisurely medium than the drama. He grew to dislike his plays as he
disliked his poems. But while he denied his verse as often as the
cock crowed, he included his dramas in his complete works, as closet
pieces at worst. Yet they were originally written for the stage,
with particular actors in mind, and scored successes both at home
and, later, abroad. It was his own dissatisfaction rather than that
of his audiences which led him to renounce the idea of himself
as a playwright. His most ambitious piece, "A Month in the
Country," first entitled "The Student," was revived by the Moscow
Art Theater for the generation that applauded Chekhov. The
theme, like that of Balzac's "Marâtre," is the struggle between a girl
and a mature woman for a young man's affections, and the play is a
psychological piece for the intimate theater, quite in Chekhov's vein.
With the exception of "The Parasite," the other plays are less serious
in content, nor can the farcical element in their situations quite break
through the film of dullness that covers them. These comedies were
written by a man who was a regular theater-goer in Paris, night after
night seeing the curtain rise on Scribe and Musset. At the same
time they were the work of one who drew his materials exclusively
from his native Russian background, and who painted himself into
the picture like another Tintoretto.
104
· TURGENEV,
The origin of "A Sportsman's Sketches" was more casual than
the subsequent career of the book might suggest. The first sketch
appeared in the initial number of "The Contemporary" (Sovrem-
menik), a Petersburg monthly to which Belinsky gave the last two
years of his life, and which had been started by Turgenev's friend
Nekrasov, with his own active assistance. The sketch was used as
more or less of a filler, and was tucked away in the back pages
among the miscellaneous items. Turgenev gave it to the editor just
before leaving for the West, and with no intention of picking up the
thread again. He still considered himself primarily a poet. Yet
for nearly a decade he had been collecting impressions and jotting
down notes which could be useful only to a prose writer. So
warmly was the first piece welcomed that he soon found himself
writing a series, the title of which was supplied by the editor.
The result was a group of narratives, ranging from the casual
sketch to the formal short story, and concluding with a lyrical
encomium to his favorite sport and its background of forest and
steppe. The narrator, tacitly identified with the author, observes his
neighbors at their dinner-tables and the peasants in the enforced and
withal relished democracy of the hunt. These pages fill the lungs
and clear the eyes. Agreeably, if a little too complacently, the story
halts like a leisured traveler to abandon itself to the odors of woods
and fields, the warm smell of hay and horses, to the colors of the hilly
patchwork of plowed and fallow ground. Everywhere Turgenev
shows that love of landscape which the painter Kuo Hsi ascribes only
to the virtuous. The men and women who pass across this natural
background hold to the distinct social planes on which they live and
move and have their being. There are the masters and the class that
keeps them. Among the serfs who catch Turgenev's eye are some
who are endowed with spirituality and moral force. But on the
whole he sees his peasants as rather stodgy, brutalized, and helpless.
In "The Singers" he discovers a group of common people in a mo-
ment of æsthetic enjoyment which mounts to a fine frenzy, but he
concludes on a sordid, homely note: the crowd drunk and turned ab-
ject; the singer in the same wretched state outside; across the foggy
field, one boy calling another home to be whipped.
The men gain from contrast with their masters. These are drawn
"A SPORTSMAN'S SKETCHES"
105
without flattery: the cultivated gentleman who has his servant
flogged for failing to warm the wine; the several landowners who
sell or retain their serfs to gratify a private whim; the gentry whose
fortunes fail and who get their dinners by playing the parasite.
The fiery Chertopkhanov, with his exaggerated sense of honor, is
the white crow of the flock. The book poses the problem of serf-
dom, and is thereby furnished with a dramatic element, but it is quite
lacking in the militancy of "Uncle Tom's Cabin." One recognizes
in this author the man who was revolted by his mother's behavior
toward her serfs, but did not interfere with it. The abolitionist
never shouts down the story-teller. He is a humane observer, who
sides with the slaves against the master, annoying the latter, but not
helping the slave, nor rousing any rebellion in him. Wisely enough,
Turgenev limits his observation to house serfs or, generally speak-
ing, peasants who have slipped out of the routine ways. The aver-
age peasant in normal circumstances-of whom he had, after all,
very slight knowledge—is not in the picture.
Fully half of the tales ignore the sore subject altogether. They
are socially neutral studies of people and situations. Such, for
example, is "The Tryst," which defines the "great constringent re-
lation between man and woman" in the terms of a dandified flunky
aping his betters and a simple-minded peasant girl whom he is casu-
ally dismissing from his affections. Such, again, is the tale of the
country doctor and a death-bed passion told in a manner which an-
ticipates Chekhov. "The Hamlet of the Shchigry District" is the
history of a neurotic acutely aware of his maladjustment, the type
that Dostoyevsky was to vivisect more ably in "Notes from the
Underground" some twelve years later. This sketch contains a
jaundiced version of Turgenev's German period and bears traces of
self-analysis and self-flagellation. The note of wistful retrospec-
tion which sounds throughout his work yields here to scorn and
skepticism.
On the whole, the manner which he employs in this book is to be
rejected later for a more generous and more objective attitude. He
is still the disciple of Gogol, that master of caricature, and enjoys
snapping the whip of a facile irony, but even at this early period
Turgenev's work shows a stronger response to the normal than
".
106
TURGENEV
Gogol's ever did. There is little drama here, and the general effect
is that of a pastel drawing. His interest in details shows him more
observant than penetrating, with the result that he sometimes gives
the impression of a reporter, incurious of motives. And indeed,
journalism is a common apprenticeship for the novelist.
One also recognizes the man who never completely identifies him-
self with the peasant and his point of view, the man who remains,
as far as his realization of life is concerned, the creature of his caste.
The author is sensitive to nature and the moods of nature as one
brought up in the country is likely to be, but he lacks the sense of the
soil which dominates him who has tilled it. Aside from a desire to
expose the condition of the masses, there worked in Turgenev a deeply
rooted interest in simple, whole-hearted people. It was this as much
as anything that moved him to choose the peasant as his model.
Such an interest was natural to an unintegrated personality with a
neurotic strain.
:
שון
CHAPTER XIV
P
*******
"BONNE NUIT, MAMAN"

Stree
The ne se re
Le soseaua ***
CAND.
All
ARIS and Courtavenel alike had
roused in Turgenev a nostalgia
traces of which appear in "A
Sportsman's Sketches." His
thoughts kept returning to the
shapes, the odors, the colors, of
his native scene: unkempt vil-
lages, the thatched roofs hud-
dling together under a mild sky;
caravans of slow carts creaking
along dust-padded roads; white,
humble churches rising out of the
dun plain; an unhurried beggar
etched against the green hemp-
patch; the moist smell of the forests; and the tilled fields, huge and
monotonous, hunching themselves slightly on the horizon and rolling
on beyond. On a summer day in 1849 he saw a gray crow in the
fields around the château. "The sight of this compatriot moves me,"
he wrote to Mme. Viardot. "I take off my hat to him and ask him
'for news of my country." He turned the incident into a joke, mak-
ing a quatrain on it à la Béranger. But, for all his homesickness, he
was returning to Russia with a heavy heart.
-
To the ache of separation from Pauline Viardot was added the
disagreeable foretaste of what he might expect at home. He knew
very well that the country was in the vise of the White Terror which
the events of 1848 had inaugurated, and that his aloofness from poli-
tics would afford him small protection. Official corruption was as
naked as Noah. People who entertained independent opinions con-
•
107
108
TURGENEV
}
cealed them as though they were fugitive slaves. Several weeks be-
fore his departure Turgenev wrote to Mme. Viardot :
Russia will wait; that immense and somber figure, motionless and
veiled like the Sphinx of Edipus. It will swallow me later. It seems
to me I see it fixing its heavy inert look upon me with gloomy attention,
as it behooves eyes of stone. Be calm, Sphinx; I shall come back to
you, and you will be able to devour me at your ease if I don't guess your
riddle! Let me be in peace for some time yet! I shall come back to
your steppes!
His pleasure in returning to Spasskoye was considerably flattened
by the prospect of facing its mistress, with whom he was not on the
best of terms, and whose temper had scarcely been improved by ill-
ness. Varvara Petrovna was exasperated with hope deferred. In
the summer of 1848 she had been preparing for the reception of her
"Benjamin," as she liked to call her absent son. But he did not
come, and in a fit of pique she cut his allowance. The next winter
she again pressed him to return and sent him six hundred rubles.
In the summer Spasskoye resumed preparations against his coming.
His wing was being renovated and the flower garden put in order.
The poplar-circled pond where as a boy he had gone sailing with his
brother Nicholas, and which had dried up, was now being cleaned;
and on the bank facing the highroad Varvara Petrovna erected a
sign-post with the inscription "Ils reviendront." But no son of hers
came along that road. Ivan informed his mother that he needed
six thousand rubles to settle his debts. There was no reply. If it
had not been for lack of money he might have returned sooner. It
was only in the spring of 1850, when she became seriously ill, that
the necessary rubles were sent him and he came home.
Varvara Petrovna received him in her town house in Moscow with
every sign of rejoicing. By that time her elder son, with his im-
possible spouse, was also living there. Varvara Petrovna had sum-
moned him from Petersburg, and recognized his marriage on con-
dition that he retire from the service and manage her affairs for her.
She went as far as buying a house for him, and giving him servants,
but failed to provide the means of running it, thus creating an in-
tolerable situation for him. Ivan did not fare very much better.
"BONNE NUIT, MAMAN”
109
His mother gave him generously of her time, but was niggardly
in supplying him with pocket-money, so that he borrowed change
from the servants to pay his cabmen. At the same time she made
mock of her sons by showering expensive gifts on her adopted
daughter. Her maternal passion was as selfish as it was violent.
It had in it more than a tinge of the sadism which was her rightful
heritage. She tried to hold her children by the shortsighted ex-
pedient of keeping them financially dependent upon her.
When Ivan remonstrated with her about his brother's plight, for-
bearing to mention his own, she consented to deed each of them a
piece of property. The deeds were actually made out, but in such a
form as to be invalid-a fact which she knew, which they knew, and
which she knew they knew. Upon receiving the farcical documents
the two sons did not thank her, but on leaving they said, "Bonne nuit,
Maman," and kissed her hand as usual. She made the sign of the
cross over them as she had done for thirty years, yet as she dealt out
the cards for her game of patience, Bibi, sitting in the next room, saw
her fine white hands, reflected in the mirror, tremble. There was no
method in her madness. Although she actually retained the proper-
ties, she secretly ordered the crops thereon sold at any price, so that
there was not even seed-grain left. The morning after the comedy
the brothers held a council of war, and decided to take possession of
Turgenevo, their father's little estate, which was their inheritance,
and to remove thither.
When Ivan paid his usual visit to his mother that forenoon she
cruelly kept up the pretense of having made her sons independent.
This broke the camel's back. Losing control of his tongue, he asked
his mother the purpose of the farce she had enacted, declared that she
was making a vain parade of her power over them, and that no one
could be happy near her. He concluded by saying that neither he
nor Nicholas wanted anything from her, and would try to make out
on what their father had left them. Her retort was to cry out in her
irritatingly nasal voice that she no longer had children, and to fly
into a passion. Ivan moved to Nicholas's house and never saw his
mother again. The next morning she received a letter from Nich-
olas advising her of their plan to remove to Turgenevo. When
Ivan called she refused to see him, and dashed to the floor the por-
110
TURGENEV
trait of him which had stood on her desk since his student days in
Berlin. Later in the day, finding that they had carried out their
threat, she again flew into a passion. The unhappy woman then left
for Spasskoye.
-
Her son, at Turgenevo, was hardly well off. Separation from
Pauline Viardot gave an edge to his passion. For what he now ex-
pressed in his tireless letters to her was no less than passion. He
had sufficient reasons for feeling forlorn, and he reached out for
comfort to his recollections of Courtavenel and to the "dear, good,
excellent friend" whose home it was. "I see you walking on the
grass of Courtavenel," he wrote, "a guitar in your hand. . . . And
my memory for places brings back to me at this very moment the
sky, the trees, your dress with the brown pattern, your gray hat. It
seems to me I feel on my face the light autumnal breeze which whis-
pered in the apple-trees above us." Autumn was bleak in Tur-
genevo. He watched the cranes flying across the sky and listened
to their crying, until it seemed that they taunted him because they
could go southward while he must remain alone in the snows.
Petersburg did not distract him. "Not a day passes but the be-
loved memory of you comes to me a hundred times. Not a night
passes without my dreaming of you." On the seventh anniversary
of his meeting with Louis Viardot, which happened to coincide with
his thirty-second birthday, he wrote to Pauline: "I rejoice to say
that in these seven years I have found no one better than you; that
to have met you on my way was the greatest happiness of my life;
that my devotion and gratitude to you are limitless and will die only
with me." Present, she enchanted him; absent, she brought him
literally to her feet. "Oh, God," he wrote to her in German, "I
would like to lay my whole life as a carpet beneath your beloved feet,
which I kiss a thousand times. You know that I belong to you
wholly and forever." The seventh anniversary of his meeting with
Pauline herself occasioned this protestation:
I am happy to feel after seven years the same profound, sincere, un-
alterable sentiment dedicated to you. The consciousness of it acts upon
me benignly and penetratingly, like a bright ray of sunlight. Happiness
seems to be my lot, since I have deserved that the reflection of your life
"BONNE NUIT, MAMAN"
III
should mingle with mine. As long as I live I shall try to be worthy of
such happiness. I have respected myself since I began to bear that
treasure within me.
At the moment when the curtain rose upon a play of his ("A
Woman from the Provinces") the nervous playwright whispered
Pauline Viardot's name to himself to bring him success, which it did.
It was Turgenev's distinction to receive from his lady at this time,
aside from the usual gifts of letters and pressed flowers, a unique
token. A letter in which he asks permission to dedicate "A Sports-
man's Sketches" to her, concludes: "A thousand greetings to all,”
and in German: "And as for you, I kiss your feet for hours on end.
A thousand thanks for the darling finger-nails." A letter written
a fortnight later ends as follows: "I want to live and die at your
dear feet. I kiss them for hours, and I remain your friend forever."
When Turgenev had returned from France he discovered that little
Pelagea, his daughter by his mother's seamstress, had suffered from
more than her father's neglect. He found her pitiably circum-
stanced in the care of one of Varvara Petrovna's laundresses. He
decided that something must be done, and laid his problem before
Mme. Viardot: "I want there to be nothing about me," he wrote to
her, "that you do not know. Nine years ago I was staying in the
country, and I was bored. My attention was attracted to a rather
pretty seamstress hired by my mother. I whispered a word to her
and she came to me. I gave her some money and then I left..
In due time this woman became what might be expected; the rest you
know." He continued that all he could do for the mother was to
protect her from want. As for the child, he declared, “It is neces-
sary that she should forget her mother completely." Mme. Viardot
offered to take the little girl, who was then eight years old, and bring
her up with her own children.
Pelagea, who was to be known hereafter as Pauline, was accord-
ingly shipped to Paris in October. On November 29 the father
wrote: "Little Pauline must be in Paris by this time, if nothing
happened to her on the way. I thank you in advance for the ca-
resses which you will give her and the kindness with which you will
surround her. I repeat, the only thing I told her in parting was that
112
TURGENEV
she must adore you as her God. In this she will not be alone. She,
of all people, must not think of you except with hands folded and
knees bent." Falling into German again, he begs Mme. Viardot to
permit the child to kiss her hands often: "Remember, that if they
are not my lips, they are lips which are near to me." And on
November 26:
Little Pauline has arrived. She pleases you and you have already
become fond of her. Dear, dear friend, you are an angel! Every
word in your letter breathes inexpressible tenderness, kindness, gentle-
I
How can I help falling madly in love with the little girl?
repeat, I shall end by becoming genuinely attached to her as soon as I
learn that you love her. . . . I feel that Pauline is becoming dear to
me because she is with you.
ness.
Two weeks later he writes: "I like to imagine her heart in your
hands," adding in German: "You know why. My life and my
heart lie there also, as before. You have not let it drop, have you?"
With the humorless egotism tolerable in a lover but rather graceless
in a parent, he writes: "I implore you when you receive this letter,
call in Pauline and allow her to kiss your hands, both hands, you
hear? And think of me while she enjoys that happiness. Then
write me that you did so." Three days later :
•
I have just received, dearest, most precious, worshiped friend, the
dear letter in which you give me so many details about Pauline.
Well, if our daughter is a good and affectionate little girl, all the better.
You see, I told you that she worships you. Yes, she does worship you.
I feel it with all my heart. What else could you expect? Is she not my
daughter? Please send me the drawing of her which you made and let
her write underneath: "Pauline, drawn by Mamma."
While Turgenev was making this tardy provision for his daughter,
his mother lay dying in Moscow. After the quarrel he had written
to her several times, but she did not reply, and his secret visits to
Spasskoye to inquire after her health never afforded him a glimpse
of her. Toward the end the dropsical old lady, immured in her
gloomy old Moscow house, sustained her life on grapes and fruit
ices. Her sole occupation was to pencil some shocking remark in
"BONNE NUIT, MAMAN”
113
the journal which she kept on the shelf attached to the side of her
big mahogany bed.
She became curiously apathetic, as though the cumulative pains
and passions of her thwarted girlhood, her unsatisfactory marriage,
and her disappointed motherhood, which had defeated her body, were
also sapping the obstinate insolence of her spirit. When her time
came she received the viaticum, but it is doubtful whether she, who
a few years previously had spoken of retiring to a nunnery, died like
a Christian. On December 6, 1850, Turgenev was writing to Pau-
line about his mother:
Her last days were very sad. May the Lord preserve us all from such
a death! She only tried to stupefy herself. On the eve of her death,
when the death-rattle had already begun, an orchestra was playing polo-
naises in the next room, by her orders. . . . In her final moments my
mother thought of nothing else, shameful to say, but of ruining us-me
and my brother. In her last letter, written to her steward, she gave
him a clear and explicit order to sell everything for a song, to burn
everything if necessary, in order to . . . [ruin us].
The unnatural'mother had her elder son with her when she lay on
her death-bed, but Ivan was notified so late that when he reached
Moscow she had already been buried. Her diary fell into the hands
of the brothers, and gave Ivan a sleepless night. "What a woman!"
he wrote to Mme. Viardot. "... May the Lord forgive her every-
thing. But what a life!"
The brothers divided the land (the old lady had not left any
money) between them, Spasskoye, with other estates totaling some
fifteen thousand acres, going to Ivan. The new barin made gener-
ous provision for his mother's personal servants and set at liberty
many of the house serfs, all of whom the deceased had neglected in
her will. He did not, however, attempt to free his peasants,-the
male "souls" alone numbered one thousand nine hundred and fifteen
-and for the ten years that were to elapse before the Emancipation
Act he remained in possession of what his friend Herzen called
"baptised property." But he was a conscience-stricken slave-owner,
ashamed of his privileges and awkward in his enjoyment of them.
114
TURGENEV
+
His meekness in dealing with his subjects was made up partly of
uneasiness and partly of his wretched inability to assert himself.
Naturally, they took advantage of their "blind" master (his pince-
nez had won him the nickname). He had granted some of his
freedmen land close to the manor, and it is said that the grateful
recipients cut off the path to a certain well whose water was particu-
larly prized by their benefactor. An anecdote, attributed to Tur-
genev himself, beautifully illustrates his abject helplessness. He is
driving to a neighbor's in his own carriage, drawn by his own horses,
both the driver and the footman being his own serfs. He is in a
great hurry. Suddenly the carriage comes to a halt. After many
patient minutes he looks out and sees his two men on the box playing
cards! He withdraws his impertinent head and the game proceeds.
When his men are quite finished, the journey is resumed.
PART II
MIDDLE YEARS: 1851-68
Great genial power, one would almost say, consists in
not being original at all; in being altogether receptive;
in letting the world do all, and suffering the spirit of
the hour to pass unobstructed through the mind.
EMERSON
سرا
1
JMSTEET
HE lean years had now come to
an end. Turgenev's annual in-
come, as he wrote to Mme. Viar-
dot, amounted to the handsome
sum of twenty-five thousand
francs. True, that carelessness
about money matters which had
exasperated his mother, even
now left him sometimes short of
ready cash. But his properties
were so large that even though
they were woefully mismanaged,
for some time he continued to be
fairly well off. For a while he
stayed with his brother in Moscow. His presence made the old
house on Ostozhenka a magnet for some members of the former
Belinsky circle, such as Granovsky, the historian, Ketcher, the patient
if uninspired translator of Shakspere, and the son of a rich tea-
merchant, Vasily Botkin, a gifted, self-taught amateur of the arts.
But the place was uncongenial. Most of his time and money he
spent in Petersburg, making occasional visits to Moscow, and going
on long hunting-trips. The years had worn off his youthful angles,
and even if his friend Annenkov found in him the "puerile vices" of
earlier days, he also discovered those "amiable qualities of the soul
and mind" which impressed so many others. Fresh luster had been
added to the gloss of European culture which he had early acquired,
his mind had been fed and his talk mellowed.
He was naturally welcomed in the drawing-rooms, and, as the
6 CANAL!
MIN
POKOLEWERRETTUNA
CHAPTER XV
} {
THE CROWN OF MARTYRDOM

HELE
ƒ
117
118
TURGENEV
celebrated author of "A Sportsman's Sketches" and of several suc-
cessful plays, he was deferred to in the meeting-places of the literati.
Already budding writers were inviting his opinion on their efforts.
Turgenev responded generously. One of these young men, in de-
scribing a first interview, drew a portrait of him as a broad-
shouldered giant, with a sharp aristocratic profile, and large, well-
cared-for hands, cutting more of a figure than his heroes ever could.
He was as careful of his person as his mother had been of hers, and
imitated her in taking special pains with his hair. He was always to
keep his thick silky mop, but like Shelley, grew gray early, and in his
thirties he was quite grizzled. In 1854 a cabby, seeing him run
downhill, observed to him sententiously: "Yes, that's what a hill
is; it makes even an old man run." Turgenev's gray head on his
young shoulders made him an interesting figure to the ladies. But
an acquaintance not affected either by his literary halo or his sex,
saw merely a large man with a weak mouth and a skull padded with
fat, who gave the impression of being as soft as butter.
Turgenev was the most distinguished figure in the group which
hung about "The Contemporary." This was a close confraternity,
in a sense a closed corporation, whose shrewd and not always
scrupulous business head was Nekrasov, a poet as well as a pub-
lisher. The intimates who made up the group were bound to one
another by friendships of long standing, by the fact that they were
all of the gentry, by a common interest in a literature which placed
Russia beside the Western nations, by a fund of sharp wit which
found vent in elaborate hoaxes and occasionally in mere ribaldry.
Turgenev defended the latter on the grounds that, being perpetrated
in the reign of Nicholas I, it was, like the Decameron, the effort of
revelers in time of plague.
On February 21, 1852, Gogol died in Moscow. Turgenev's ad-
miration for the author of "Dead Souls" was perhaps exceeded only
by his worship of Pushkin. He had met the great humorist but
once, a few months before the latter's death, although he had sat
under him years previously during Gogol's brief professorship.
Turgenev carried away from the visit the memory of a keen, health-
less man, with a schoolmaster's manner, and measured emphatic
speech, coming through bad teeth. Slight as was Turgenev's knowl-
THE CROWN OF MARTYRDOM
119
edge of the man, he wore mourning for the writer. "I may say
without exaggeration," he wrote to a friend, "that never within my
memory did anything make a greater impression on me than Gogol's
death. . . . The tragic fate of Russia is reflected in the fate of those
of us who are nearest to its heart.
""
Indeed, coming as it did at the very height of the reaction, Gogol's
death shook the more sensitive as the sound of a slamming door
makes a nervous man quake. "Truly, it seems to me," Turgenev
said in another letter, "that dark, silent waters have closed over my
head and I am sinking to the bottom, growing cold and numb." He
wrote an obituary notice for a Petersburg paper, sobbing aloud over
it. The article did not pass the censor. In spite of his professed
orthodoxy, Gogol, being a writer, was therefore a suspect character,
and a eulogy of a mere pen-pusher was in itself considered seditious
in high places. Turgenev sent his rejected manuscript to Botkin in
Moscow, with the request that he get it published, which he did, the
Moscow censor being ignorant of the fact that the article had been
prohibited in Petersburg. There was nothing unlawful about the
proceeding, but when the matter was reported to the emperor he
ordered Turgenev arrested. The prisoner's lodging was sealed, but
not searched. He spent a month in jail and was then sent to his es-
tate to live for an indefinite period under police surveillance.
The month during which he was confined in the station-house was
not without its pleasant distractions. For one thing, he could not
complain of solitude. The narrow street on which the jail looked.
out was jammed with the carriages of his visitors. For a whole
fortnight his name was declined tirelessly in the drawing-rooms of
the capital. A middle-aged female admirer sent him an icon and
some soda powders. Young girls with husbands in their pretty
heads were at pains to walk past his window, and favored him with
pressed flowers sewn upon pale-blue note-paper. Nor did he subsist
on the coarse prison fare. His dinners came regularly from Mme.
Panayev's kitchen. He did not go dry, either, and after twenty
years he was to regale his Parisian friends with the story of how
the police captain, drunk on his prisoner's excellent champagne,
nudged his elbow and lifted his own glass with a husky: "To
Robespierre!"
120
TURGENEV
Another of his prison anecdotes was that his cell, which was next
to the room where convicted serfs received their floggings, contained
the records of the station-house and that he amused himself by ex-
amining the secret files. The cell was small and extremely stuffy.
The prisoner invented an ingenious way of getting his constitutional
in these cramped quarters. Twice a day he carried every card of
two packs from one corner of the room to the other and back again,
—making altogether four hundred and sixteen trips, a walk of about
a mile and a half. All these various diversions afforded him suffi-
cient leisure to write "Moomoo" and to study Polish. This last
occupation was a source of worry to one of his friends, since it was
folly, she wrote him, for a prisoner to be learning the tongue of
Russia's hereditary enemy under the very eyes of the police.
When, in May, he went to Spasskoye at his emperor's instance, he
probably traveled over the new railway between St. Petersburg and
Moscow, virtually the first railroad to be built in Russia, its sole
predecessor being a suburban line connecting the capital with
Tsarskoe-Selo. Turgenev was condemned to keep to his estate in-
definitely. The emotions of the native returning home is a subject
upon which the novelist wrote many profoundly evocative pages.
Once more the triumph of time over faces and furniture thrust itself
upon him. Once more he was in the midst of the placid, drowsy
country life which appeared to Lavretzky, the hero of "A House of
Gentlefolk," to move as inaudibly as water among marsh grasses.
Once more he was surrendering himself to the rural ennui which both
liberated and depressed him. The contrast between the clipped,
civilized landscape of western Europe and the rude immensity of the
home scene was in itself dispiriting. There the very soil spoke of
man, his mastering will, his cumulative labors, his solid heritage;
here the human creature was nearly obliterated by a vast plain, the
surface of which he just scratched, and which barely suffered his
flimsy habitations. The empty solitude of these fields, the shape-
lessness and sameness of the land had a hypnotizing, enervating
effect.
Two years had passed since the walls of the Spasskoye manor had
watched Varvara Petrovna's matchless rages, and her son must some-
times have wanted just a moment of her querulous presence, and often
THE CROWN OF MARTYRDOM
121
have missed, in the unkempt house, her careful eye and stern hand.
He was persistently annoyed by the local police. The agent who was
charged with his surveillance and who never approached him without
doffing his cap, noted in his memorandum-book that Turgenev eyed
him as though he were a devil.
What was most irksome to the prisoner was the fact that he could
neither go to Moscow to consult a physician nor to Petersburg to
hear Pauline sing. He petitioned the Heir Apparent and General
Dubbelt, and Count Orlov, Chief of the Gendarmerie, for the re-
moval of the restriction imposed upon him, but in vain. His appeal
to the Heir, made in April, 1853, began as follows: "I heartily re-
pent my guilt, albeit involuntary, and not desiring to be reckoned a
wilful rebel, I make bold to lay before your Imperial Highness my
very humble petition." Of course, the author of this petition knew
as well as anybody that his arrest and deportation was a most revolt-
ing case of administrative arbitrariness, executed in violation of the
law of the empire.
""
Meanwhile he had to content himself with the provincial society
in the neighborhood. He was exaggerating when he wrote to a
friend: "I am not dead yet, but the deep solitude in which I live
gives me an idea of the silence which awaits us beyond the grave.
As a matter of fact, his neighbor, the poet Foeth, calling on Turgenev
in defiance of his family, who feared association with a reprobate,
found the latter "surrounded by ladies as a honey-pot by flies." He
had continual companionship in the manager of the estate, one Tyut-
chev, and that gentleman's relatives. Indeed, they succeeded in
interfering with him almost as much as his mother had done. Tur-
genev was not one to insist on his rights, and so Tyutchev (whom he
had chosen in preference to his tight-fisted brother Nicholas, fearing
that the latter would be too hard on the peasants) genially usurped
the place of the master of the manor. The deportee found himself
relegated to a wing. There is an obscure tale that the Tyutchevs
even made an attempt upon his celibacy, and certainly he would have
made a very good match for his manager's sister-in-law, a tearful
maiden who abused the piano of an evening.
He hungered for music as men hunger for meat, and he prevailed
upon Mme. Tyutchev and her sister to give him what makeshift for it
122
TURGENEV
they could. They played, four-handed, Mozart, Beethoven, Mendel-
sohn, and Weber. He describes these musicales to Mme. Viardot:
"I stand behind the ladies' chairs, I turn the leaves, and I conduct.
In moments of enthusiasm I cannot prevent myself from emitting
something in the nature of horribly false notes under the pretext of
singing, which cause nervous spasms to all present." He preferred
singing to any other form of music, "but in my throat," he wrote
many years later, "instead of a voice sits a scrofulous sucking pig.'
29
He had another diversion at Spasskoye in the shape of a serf-girl
possessed of a bad memory and rare beauty. The story goes that he
bought her from a cousin of his for seven hundred rubles,—an ordi-
nary maid then costing fifty rubles at most,-but a kinder view
would suggest that he purchased her freedom with that sum. Al-
though he assured Mme. Viardot that he wanted her to know every-
thing about him, he never, as far as can be discovered, mentioned this
affair to her, and indeed it was only in 1915 that anything definite
became known about it. That year there came to light a letter of
his written in 1865, in which he says:
In 1852, '52, and '53 a girl by the name of Feoktista with whom I had
a liaison lived with me here [at Spasskoye] and in Petersburg. . . .
Eventually I helped her to get married to a small functionary in the
Naval Ministry and she is now flourishing in Petersburg. When she
left me in 1853 she was with child, and in Moscow she gave birth to a
son, Ivan, whom she placed in an asylum. I have sufficient ground to
believe that he is not my child. I cannot, however, be absolutely cer-
tain of it. He may be, after all, of my own making.
We gather from the rest of the letter that Feoktista lost sight of
her child, who was transferred from the institution to the care of a
peasant in a village the name of which escaped the mother's memory.
It appears that he fared ill there and passed into the hands of a lady
who was subsequently taken sick and left her charge, to go to a
hospital. At the writing the mother was on her way to Moscow to
find her son, and en route she stopped at Spasskoye, as Turgenev
has it, "to get a look at me." His letter was to serve her as an intro-
duction to a friend of the writer, and requested the man to help
Feoktista in her search. "If this Ivan is alive, and should be found,"
the letter concludes, "I am ready to place him in a trade school and
THE CROWN OF MARTYRDOM
123
1
pay for him. . . . The husband knows nothing; or rather, he is a
very meek and decent sort." The fate of the woman and her child is
unknown.
The first summer of his exile, a cold and rainy one, Turgenev
spent in relative idleness, frequently ailing. In the autumn he ex-
changed the pen for the fowling-piece. A harsh winter set in early
that year, and as Turgenev's passion for sport shrank with the cold,
he returned "to human feelings and ideas," as he wrote, "like a
drunkard after his drinking-spell." This was the first winter that
he had spent in the country since his boyhood, and it was also to be
the last. He evoked the white season, as it must then have presented
itself to him, in "Fathers and Children": "the cruel silence of the
cloudless frosts, firm creaking snow, pink hoarfrost on the trees, a
sky of pale emerald, caps of smoke on the chimneys, puffs of steam
from doors opened for a moment, faces looking fresh as though
bitten, and the bustling trot of chilled horses."
It was a season of leisure and literature for him. He had a sub-
stantial library consisting mostly of eighteenth-century books, and
there were occasional games of chess. But in spite of these dis-
tractions, the hibernal scene afflicted him with melancholy. He had
always been afraid of the sky, and now the earth itself had the sky's
blank insubstantial immensity. He wrote to Mme. Viardot that
work and reminiscence was all that was left to him. "But that work
may be easy and memories less bitter, I need your letters, with the
sounds of a happy and active life, with the smell of sun and poetry,
which they bring me. By the way, always inclose with your letters
some grass or flowers."
With a blizzard hammering at his windows and a phrase from
Gounod's "Autumn" running through his head, he recalls to his
friend the siestas under the poplars at Courtavenel, with the leaves
dropping about them from a fretwork of boughs against an incredible
blue. He has but to shut his eyes to see it—a beauty which he fears
he may never know again. "Let's sit down side by side," he says to
Diana, the flesh-colored piebald English setter whom he had brought
with him from France, "and summon up the days at Courtavenel.'
He writes to Mme. Viardot that if he ever sees her again, the only
thing he will be able to do is "weep for joy." When spring comes
">
*
124
TURGENEV
he dreams of his happiness were Pauline to walk with him in the
Spasskoye garden to the singing of his nightingales and the call of
the cuckoos.
But if he occasionally plumed himself on the rôle of another Ovid,
he did not fail to perceive that the uses of adversity were sweet.
There were moments when he was glad he was not in Petersburg.
He had formed plans of using his enforced leisure to enlarge his
education. He expected, he told Mme. Viardot, to continue his
studies of the Russians, "that most astonishing and singular people
in the world." And indeed his idleness fostered his industry. At
Spasskoye he could control his diversions better than he could in the
capital, with the continual demands that society there made upon him.
Further, the contacts which the country afforded were such as to
gratify the artist if not exactly to entertain the man. He could e-
gard his provincial neighbors with an objectivity difficult to apply to.
his familiars, and certainly not to be relished by the latter. Here
was, after all, a side of Russian life that he had been away from for
so long that it was virtually new to him. Here, with greater assur-
ance than in a more sophisticated scene, he could participate, without
ever ceasing to play his own little game, without ever blinking his
acutely observant eye.
He was like the narrator in his story "Asya": "I enjoyed going
where others went, shouting when others shouted, and at the same
time I liked to look at the others shouting." In the country people
were less likely to notice that while he shouted he was looking at
them. That his friends noticed it and were discomfited by it has
been given as the probable explanation of the disagreeable impression
which he sometimes made. Thus, Herzen's wife, a discerning and
sensitive woman, felt in Turgenev's presence as though she were in
an uninhabited room: "There is dampness on the walls and it gets
into your bones, and you are afraid to sit anywhere or to touch any-
thing, and the only thing you want is to get out into the open as soon
as possible."
In the same breath she speaks of how she was chilled and repelled
by what she calls his "microscopic view," that is, his habit of mi-
nutely examining the nose or the leg or some feature of the dress in-
stead of the whole person under his eye. She found Turgenev a
THE CROWN OF MARTYRDOM
125
+
}
""
"good man," and declared him easy to get on with, "but after he is
gone," she said, "there is nothing left; perhaps because he is too un-
concerned about me, our relationship is as light as a soap-bubble.
One suspects that most persons with whom he had to do found him
similarly unconcerned, unconsciously preserving the distance which
would give him the correct perspective.
--
,
.
+
.
"A
*
TỪN
HILE Turgenev was confined to
Spasskoye, a Petersburg pub-
lisher was bringing out in book
form "A Sportsman's Sketches."
July 18, 1852, was the date of
publication. Circumstances had
prepared a peculiar atmosphere
for the reception of the work.
Cultivated people applauded it be-
cause it allowed them to feel that
their own sentiments on the vex-
ing subject of serfdom were
shared, and indeed neatly defined,
by another cultivated person of
distinguished literary gifts. The volume took on the guise of a po-
litical act. The salons labeled it “an incendiary book," and the Min-
ister of Education, in a secret report to the emperor, treated it as a
dangerous piece of writing, likely to cause disrespect on the part of
the lower classes toward their rightful superiors. The Westernists
declared it to be a testimony to the human dignity of the brutalized
peasant. Nationalist opinion held it to be an indirect encomium to
the incorruptible native soul which survives among the masses under
the worst conditions. Both factions saw in it a powerful, and prob-
ably a calculated, attack on serfdom.
Ĥ
CHAPTER XVI
satqiat +420 6
A MAN OF LETTERS

CODEDE
Of course, Belinsky's friend and disciple heartily disliked this
national institution. He would have been more outspoken, had it
not been for the muffling effect of censorship. Of the eight stories.
which he sketched out but never wrote for the volume, one which
would certainly have been debarred by the censor has for its theme
126
A MAN OF LETTERS
127
1
the murder of a landowner by his serfs. The man had been steadily
robbing them of their land, and was known among them as the "land-
eater." They avenged themselves by cramming several pounds of
excellent black earth down his throat, the cook standing by and press-
ing it upon his master's palate. When Turgenev, at a riper age and
in an expansive mood, considered his own epitaph, he expressed the
wish that it might refer to the services of "A Sportsman's Sketches"
toward the cause of emancipation. "The Emperor Alexander," he
said, “had me informed that, among other things, the reading of my
book led him to free the serfs." This epitaph was never written,
nor was Edmond About's suggestion carried out, that Turgenev's
sole monument should be a pedestal bearing a slave's broken chain.
As a matter of fact, although the effect of the book in shaping
abolitionist opinion is unquestionable, its author did not have the
temper of a reformer. At heart he was a non-combatant. He sym-
pathized with Montaigne, that skeptic in an age of faith, that ob-
server in an age of action. "If I had been Cicero," he is credited
with saying, "I confess that after the battle of Pharsalia I should
have cringed before Cæsar even more than he did. He was a man of
letters, and to a man of letters politics is poison." It was a poison
at which this disciple of Belinsky's could never refrain from nibbling.
With the appearance of "A Sportsman's Sketches" between covers,
Turgenev felt more than ever that he was come to the turning of the
road. Exile seemed a gate closing upon his youth and leaving him
upon the sober plateau of middle age, where he was to remain until
he adopted, with equal precocity, the attitudes of an elderly gentle-
man. It was now that he began to feel what the bulk of his work
was to emphasize: that after thirty-five a man is finished. For a
time he endured one of the fits of despondency which assaulted him
with the periodicity of hay-fever. He announced to Pauline that his
life was over: he had eaten all his white bread and must hereafter
chew what remained of the black. Usually with such an attack
went the decision to give up writing forever. This time he thought
only of resigning his old literary manner. He felt that now if ever
the moment had come when he must concentrate, and consciously
direct his energies. From a subsequent letter it appears that this
effort at concentration did not prove effective. He discovered that
128
TURGENEV
he was the sort that needs the stimulus of constant contact with the
outside world. What was certain was that he must "take another
road," as he wrote to a friend on his thirty-fourth birthday.
I must find it, and give up my old manner forever. I have done
enough of extracting the triple essence from human character, of pour-
ing it into small bottles: "Sniff it, please, gentle reader, uncork it and
sniff it. It has the Russian bouquet, has n't it?" Enough, enough.
But the question is, am I capable of something great and calm? Am I
going to succeed with clear simple outlines? That I don't know, and I
sha'n't know until I try. But believe me, you will hear something new
from me, or you will hear nothing. For that reason I am almost glad of
my winter seclusion. I shall have the time to collect myself; and, above
all, in solitude one is away from things, literary and journalistic espe-
cially. I shall become somebody only when the litterateur is destroyed
in me.
This self-estimate, while not wholly acceptable, presents his prob-
lem without indirection. He wanted to deal plainly with the great
commonplaces of existence. He was seeking the achievement of an
objective style. He came to identify both with the Pushkin as op-
posed to the Gogol tradition, to which most of his early work be-
longed. He was feeling more and more, as he said, where Gogol's
shoe pinched. He was beginning to be sensible of the need for see-
ing life steadily and seeing it whole. "The striving after impartial-
ity and integral truth," he wrote, "is one of the few good qualities
for which I am grateful to Nature, who gave them to me."
Meanwhile, "simplicity, calm, clarity of line, conscientious crafts-
manship, that conscientiousness which derives from certainty"-
all this was merely an ideal which beckoned him. He put off the
writing of the novel whose elements had been fermenting in him for
years, because of this lack of self-confidence. But he was con-
tinually teased and prodded by his literary impulse, and he had the
uneasy knowledge that life would not wait for him to make up his
mind. His friends also were urging him in the direction of a large
work. Annenkov wrote paternally:
I certainly expect a novel from you, with full control over all the
characters and events, and without taking voluptuous pleasure in your
A MAN OF LETTERS
129
own self, that is in your authorship, and without the sudden appearance
of odd fellows of whom you are all too fond, and finally, all the miseries,
contradictions and absurdities should not display themselves coquettishly
as is sometimes the case in your writings, but should appear unostenta-
tiously, without suspecting that any one is looking at them. If you write
it, the Sketches will be doubly remarkable, first in themselves, and
second as a stepping-stone.
During his exile, Turgenev finally prevailed upon himself, or was
prevailed upon, to begin a novel. In February, 1853, he was "tun-
neling through it like a mole." He wrote the first part of it,
amounting to twelve chapters, and sent the manuscript around to his
friends for an opinion. This deference to criticism was a habit
which, as a mature "middle-aged" man, he should have given up,
but which he was never to outgrow. The consensus was unfavor-
able, the objection being that the piece was dull and too biographical,
and so this first experiment was never concluded. The fragment of
the work, which was published some years later, presents what is
substantially a portrait of the flighty generalissimo who was Tur-
genev's mother. One familiar with Varvara Petrovna's memoranda
and letters recognizes how much he is the photographer here.
He looked forward with some dread to a second winter in the
country, but he was spared that cup. The humble petition which he
addressed to the heir apparent on the anniversary of his imprison-
ment was tabled by Count Orlov. But some writers and influential
friends notably Count Alexis Tolstoy, the poet, interfered, and Orlov
informed the emperor of the exile's repentance, suggesting that in
his opinion Turgenev had already been taught a good lesson. The
emperor graciously consented to forgive the culprit, with the un-
derstanding that he should be kept under the strictest surveillance
during his residence in the capital. The surveillance was lifted by
the manifesto of August 26, 1856, issued when Alexander II was
formally crowned. He had come to the throne the previous year,
but had postponed the coronation ceremonies until the close of the
Crimean War, in which the country was engaged.
In December, 1853, Turgenev was again in Petersburg, installed
in Povarskoy Lane, under the care of his cook Stepan, whom he
130
TURGENEV
had brought with him from Spasskoye. His rooms showed more
than the usual disorder to be found in bachelors' apartments. He
was the sort of man who is at the mercy of his servants. The domes-
tic chaos that he suffered was enough to make his mother turn in her
grave-she who had governed her household with such harsh pedan-
try; she who had kept an inventory of the family wardrobe, even
to Ivan's wadded green-silk dressing-gown, with a note of the date
on which it had been presented to him; she who had written down
opposite each day's menu each day's fault-findings. Thus she had
been at pains to note that her sausages were not so good as Mme.
Krylov's, that she must find out where the best pickled cucumbers
were to be bought, that it was now unfashionable to shoot champagne
corks at the ceiling, and that if you don't warn your maids about bed-
bugs, you are likely, as she was, to be bitten out of a night's sleep.
Her son, while equally fastidious in the matter of sausages and
bedbugs, was generally too lazy to admonish his servants to se-
cure the one or to destroy the other. As a result, his valet was apt
to be indifferent as to whether the master dressed in a cold room
or a warm one. A friend coming in to see him one chilly morning
found him arguing with his man on the subject, and finally crying
out with a kind of peevish humor: "All right: you're clever and
I'm a fool, but for pity's sake, I have enough sense to know when I'm
cold!" He had not outgrown the habits of the young student who
wrote love-letters for his valet in Berlin. Where to be born to one's
caste is more a matter of course than to be born with five wits,
familiarity is likely to reach good-naturedly across the impregnable
wall.
Before returning to the capital Turgenev had written to Annenkov
that he intended to live there very modestly, devoting himself solely
to "literary work, a circle of friends, music, and chess. It's
time for me to settle down. It's not for nothing that I have turned
as gray as a rat." But he could not keep this resolution. Life in
the country had sharpened his taste for social commerce. His liter-
ary friends of the "Contemporary" circle gave him a dinner to
celebrate his liberation, following it up with several less formal
symposia. He was renewing acquaintance not merely with men
of his own way of thinking, but also with such professed nationalists
A MAN OF LETTERS
131
as the Aksakovs, especially Aksakov senior, who was less of a
doctrinaire than his two sons, Constantine and Ivan, the Peter and
Paul of Slavophilism. For a little time they thought that here was
a chance of making a proselyte. But as a matter of fact they mis-
took the interest which Turgenev shared with them in Russian history
and Russia's future for agreement with their proud prognostications.
Their hopes of him were shattered in the course of a visit which
he paid them in January, 1855, at Abramtzevo, their estate near
Moscow, where he had spent a few days with these friends some
months before. On this second occasion the place swarmed with
guests, so that Vera, the daughter of the house, noted in her diary
that after dinner the drawing-room looked like a Moscow rout.
There were sleigh-rides over the immaculate snow, naps to fortify
the company against the long meals and longer talks, philological
discussions between Constantine Aksakov and the young linguist
Hilferding which made Turgenev wring his hands and furnished
a target for his best jokes. Homyakov, that vehement lay theolo-
gian, had brought along his latest paper on the nature of Orthodoxy,
written in French, for which there was only a small audience, but
there was a large circle ready to listen to Constantine read aloud a
fresh page from his old father's genial memoirs.
Turgenev found this pastime more to his taste than the footless
debates about Russia's destiny and the hidden virtues of her peasants,
with Constantine and Homyakov. The young Aksakov was as
fanatical on the subject as when in the first flush of nationalist zeal
he had tucked his trousers inside his high boots and put on a blouse
with its collar fastened on the side, peasant-fashion. How could
you argue with a man to whom the people of the West were no
better than Houyhnhnms? Nor had Homyakov changed since the
time, ten years earlier, when the ladies who had assisted at the noc-
turnal bouts in the salons of Moscow had admired the toss of his
blue-black mane and the force of his dialectics. He was more certain
than ever that the Orthodox Church was the only true embodiment
of Christianity, while to Turgenev the whole question of the respec-
tive merits of the Eastern and Western churches was like the con-
troversy over the eating of non-existent gryphon as viewed by Vol-
taire's "Zadig." He outraged both men by declaring that his own
132
TURGENEV,
entire religion was comprised in Belinsky's famous letter to Gogol,
which advocated not faith but reason, not nationalism but humanism,
not Eastern Orthodoxy but Western civilization. The faith of the
masses was bound to be a sealed book to him, for in Russia the con-
nection between the church and the humanities was not nearly so in-
timate as in the West.
Constantine's revenge was to dub Turgenev's attitude toward life
gastronomic. The guest had the grace to say to the old lady: “I
promise you that at least next Sunday I will go to church. You,
for one, don't despair of me as your son does." But if his remark
was calculated to flatter the good soul, it did not deceive the rest
of her family. Hot upon the visit, Vera made this entry in her
diary:
I decidedly disliked Turgenev... He has no notion of faith. He
has lived immorally, and so his ideas are sullied by his life. Besides, he
is only capable of experiencing physical sensations. All his impressions
pass through his nerves, he is not capable of either understanding or
feeling the spiritual side of things. . . . He lacks even pagan force and
loftiness of soul. All he has is spiritual and physical flabbiness, in
spite of his huge stature.
Indeed, the vague Christianity of his university years had almost
completely evaporated. It left behind that private interest in the
supernatural and those odd superstitions which men without faith
somehow manage to preserve. He had, in addition, the enthusiasm
for strength of character common to weak-willed people, just as
anemic clerks and flabby brokers make a hero of the perfectly fit
baseball player. This admiration was one of the chief elements
in the soil that nourished his work. Certainly his response did not
stop short of spiritual matters. With him, as with so many artists,
the intense perception of the physical world alone was so transcend-
ent an experience as to unlock the gates of the spirit.
The contacts which he made at this time were seldom with such
exacting people as the Aksakovs. He now counted among his ac-
quaintances virtually all the writers of note. His house was, in his
own words, neutral ground. Thither Count Sologub brought "his
dragging legs, a finger stuck in his vest, and his tongue stuck in his

OF
UNIV
S
UPPER ROW: TURGENEV, SOLOGUB, TOLSTOY
LOWER ROW: NEKRASOV, GRIGOROVICH, PANAYEV
ABOUT 1858
MICH
A MAN OF LETTERS
133
cheek"; the double-chinned Goncharov came with his deceptive
phlegm; Botkin, the perfect connoisseur of Spanish bull-fights, Eng-
lish literature, and French cooking; Ostrovsky, looking more like a
comfortable Moscow merchant than the playwright he was; the
æsthete and critic, Druzhinin; the giddy Grigorovich. Here also
came a young aristocrat, Count Leo Tolstoy, the only member of the
"Contemporary" circle in uniform, having lately seen service in the
Crimea, a man who in addition to his successes with cards and
women, had already scored a literary triumph.
Turgenev had never looked the dandy more than now, and his
towering figure with the large gray head was conspicuous in the
drawing-rooms. He was as good as ever at making the ladies laugh,
reciting the verses of his friend Foeth, mimicking, punning. But
if he wore his buffoonery like a flower in the buttonhole of his
dark-green velvet jacket, there were times when he chewed on his
melancholy as on the stem of an old pipe. The half-dozen stories
that he had written since the completion of "A Sportsman's Sketches"
betray, in passing, a sad resignation to the dreary business of living
and aging, and suggest a theme he was later to amplify, concern-
ing love as an irrational force which enslaves whom it does not
destroy.
Whether or not his failure to achieve a new manner was the cause,
he was again despondent about his literary career. Always readier
to believe those who censured rather than those who praised his work,
he took pleasure in commending the critics who flayed him. He felt
that the time had come for him to "alight" from Pegasus; at least
he said so.
His pet word "enough" was beginning to be often on
his lips, but it was spoken less with the accent of the wise Epicurean
than with the drawl of fatigue. It was in these low days that he
wrote to one of his young literary protégés, whose works have been
blessed with oblivion: "My activity, it seems to me, is already
finished. But I shall consider myself happy if I succeed in being
midwife to your writings." In the summer of 1855 he wrote
"Rudin."
The novel was composed in six or seven weeks, at Spasskoye.
Having set "Finis" to the manuscript on July 24, Turgenev, at the
instance of his critical friends, spent the rest of the year revising
134
TURGENEV
and rewriting it. He took the piece more seriously than anything
he had done up to that time. In the course of revision the story
underwent profound mutations: the hero became a villain and the
villain resolved himself into a man with human greatness and human
failings. The difficulty with the completed portrait is that the two
strains are not really reconciled. The protagonist, Rudin, is a man
of moral fervor who, being unable to take root in any work, con-
tents himself with rhetoric; a man aptly described by another person
in the novel as having genius but not character. "A Man of
Genius" was the author's first title for the book. The main plot
follows Turgenev's familiar pattern of a strong, loyal, high-spirited
girl who is left broken-hearted by a man whose will is too spineless to
sustain their common ideal. But before the book comes to an end
Turgenev makes a series of efforts to rehabilitate Rudin by show-
ing that after all he was faithful to generous ideas, that his golden
eloquence, however flamboyant, could infect others with a fine eager-
ness, and that his weakness was as piteous as it was blameworthy.
That Turgenev was not satisfied with the result may be seen from
the fact that after the lapse of ten years he thought it well to add
a short epilogue, in which he has his hero die quixotically on the bar-
ricades in an alley of the Faubourg St. Antoine in the last days of
the revolution of 1848. It is as though the novelist who started out
to stone his own German period, in the end saw the value of sheer
enthusiasm and softened toward the vaporizing ghost he had evoked.
His tolerance was apt to weaken his sword-arm. Besides, there was
enough of himself in the hero of his first novel to make him gentle
with the man's shortcomings. There is a belief, which was en-
couraged by the author, that in drawing Rudin he was thinking
of Bakunin. But, as Herzen put it, it is more likely that "Turgenev,
affected by the Biblical example, created Rudin in his own image.”
Turgenev was writing his first novel to the steady tolling of
funeral bells and the wailing of peasant women over their dead.
Cholera was now ravaging the countryside in and about Spasskoye,
as it was also depleting the ranks of the troops in the Crimea. Since
he had suffered an attack of this disease in Paris six years previously,
he had had a morbid fear of it. For years afterward he fretted
about his stomach, complaining about gastritis, stomach-fever, and
A MAN OF LETTERS
135
even cancer of the pylorus,-he named one of Diana's pups for
this euphonious part of his anatomy. Whenever he had indigestion
he took to his bed and declared himself lost. It was perhaps natural
that he did not allow his work to be disturbed by the agitating news
from the front, for, after all, Sebastopol was hundreds of miles
away. But that he went on covering the paper with his comely
sloping script while the danger of cholera was at his very door
testifies to genuine self-possession and a rare capacity for working
under difficult circumstances.
To judge by his writings, the war did not engage his interest
deeply. He must have savored his friend Tyutchev's pun: "C'est
la guerre des crétins contre les gredins." The news of the fall of
Sebastapol elicited the comment: "If only we could profit by this
terrible lesson, as the Prussians did by the Jena defeat! But no; we
are n't even allowed to write about it." Like most thinking Rus-
sians, he probably felt that the war showed up the rottenness of the
bureaucratic system. It is less probable that he realized the far-
reaching consequences of the Crimean disaster. It was to usher
in the period of reforms which gave the final blow to the tottering
structure of patriarchal Russia and to the serf-owning gentry whose
exodus was long overdue. Turgenev, setting down in the pages
of
"Rudin" his recollections of a vanished period of his own youth,
was ensconcing and illumining certain aspects of Russian life which
were even then disappearing forever.
¡
Vinum
**AININ
CHAPTER XVII
"THE ONLY WOMAN"

T is a pity that you are absorbed
in a feeling for a single person.
Thus Turgenev to a young liter-
ary protégé who was about to
marry for love. There was
something to be said in favor of
an unhappy marriage, but the
cramping emotional routine of a
successful union was fatal to the
artist. One should approach
every woman as a potential mis-
tress: variety, not satisfaction,
is what talent feeds upon. For
himself, he found he could work
99
best when the page was warmed by the glow of a casual affair, more
especially with a married woman, "who can manage both herself
and her passion." He could not understand this young man's
curious predilection for a mere girl. As the years went by he was to
regret that he had not married, but he seems to have retained the belief
that any permanent relation with a woman was harmful to an
artist. In 1874 he was writing to a friend: "I know the subject
intimately and have studied it thoroughly. If I have n't touched it
so far in my literary ventures, it is because I have always avoided
themes which are too subjective, they embarrass me."
That Turgenev was not always ready to pursue the game that
sniffed at his traps is plain from such an incident as his affair with
Katherine Ladyzhensky. The lady belonged to the eligible category
of married women-indeed, was the mother of four children. Moved
by a more than ordinary interest in literature, she started a cor-
respondence with the author of “A Sportsman's Sketches." The
136
"THE ONLY WOMAN”
137
fact that she kept secret her epistolary adventure proved, even before
she confessed the intention, that she had vaguely hoped to "faire
un peu de roman." At first Turgenev was complaisant, and spoke
with absent-minded gallantry of her "beautiful hands," the feature
he was most sensitive to in women he admired,-forgetting that he
had never seen them. She managed to arrange a meeting at the
house of a common friend, but to her further advances he turned
a cold shoulder, a circumstance which she attributed to his laziness.
There may have been another reason for his backwardness. Just
then his interest was centered otherwhere. He had a distant cousin
named Olga, a girl exactly half his age, with whom he was pre-
occupied, the gossips said, to the point of an actual proposal. She
was a demure creature, and a diligent if not an accomplished musi-
cian. In May, 1854, when upon his first visit to the Aksakovs he was
scandalizing them with his worldliness, he delighted the old man
by a filial confession of his matrimonial hopes. The genial old
huntsman consulted the cards as to the outcome. Three months
later Turgenev wrote him that his plans had fallen into the water
"as the cards predicted."
The facts of the case are uncertain. It is believed that his suit
was accepted, but that in the end he refused his happiness, leaving
Olga in a wretched state. At all events, in July, 1855, having re-
ceived a letter from her, he was writing to Annenkov: "Lately
I've again been thinking a good deal of O. A. [Olga Alexandrovna].
Say what you may, she's a charming creature." Shortly afterward
he sought divertisement in the company of a pretty little Pole, whose
favors he rewarded with such gifts as a silver service. But he re-
mained solicitous that Olga Alexandrovna should amend his defec-
tion, and remarked to a friend that "it would be a pity if this beautiful
soul were doomed to suffer the oxidation of old-maidenhood." Two
years after the unfortunate event Olga had recovered her balance and
her good habits, so that Leo Tolstoy held her up to his then fiancée,
a frivolous fair, as a model. Olga's aunt had told him that the
young woman rose at seven in the morning, played the piano until
two in the afternoon, and spent her evenings over some book. The
following year she consoled Turgenev, and presumably herself, by
taking a husband.
138
TURGENEV
In retreating from an entangling alliance, Turgenev was behaving
like so many of his own heroes, young men unable to be the same
in their own act and valor as they were in desire, and so failing
at the critical moment to accept the responsibilities of action. For
himself he could find at least two ways of rationalizing his natural
evasiveness. There was in the first place the artist's fear of domes-
tic interference with his main business in life: the fear he had ex-
pressed as a warning to his young confrère some years earlier.
There was, besides, the excuse of an anterior passion whose tenacity
even he had not fully measured. To the maternal if astigmatic
eye of a middle-aged lady who was fond of him, this attachment
appeared to be no more than a ghost, a memory, which must dis-
solve at the touch of a real affection. Turgenev's life was to prove
the strange vitality of this ghost, to prove also "the pity" and the frail
comfort of his absorption in a feeling for a single person-Pauline
Viardot.
By midsummer of 1856 he was again on his way abroad. He did
not go to study: his student years were over. He did not go for
his health: he was enjoying a temporary respite from illness, both
real and imagined. He did not go, like Dostoyevsky, to escape his
creditors: he had none. He did not go, like Tolstoy, to break with
his fiancée: he appears to have done that two years previously. He
did not go for the sake of his novels, since his material and the
leisure in which to shape it were both to be had in abundance at
home. He went, then, for the same reason that he had gone nine
years ago: to be close to Pauline. It is hard to account for this
apparently sudden impulse. For the last two or three years she
seemed to have absented herself from his life. Whether the gap in
their correspondence from 1853 to 1857 was created by an estrange-
ment or by a later concealment or loss of the letters, it is certain
that already during his exile their friendship was cooling. When
she was singing in Petersburg during the season of 1853 she did n't
trouble to visit the involuntary recluse at Spasskoye, and lost her last
chance of seeing him against the background of his home. At the
same time he was receiving laconic notes from her in which he found
"every word striving to be the last."
He could offer no reason for his going now but that the thing
"THE ONLY WOMAN”
139
was stronger than he: it was his fate, the fate that he himself
stigmatized as the alias of a flabby irresponsibility. He went against
the advice of his friends, as well as his own good judgment.
Had n't he been bruised enough? asked Nekrasov. And how
would he feel when the time for parting came, as it must? Countess
Lambert, from the vantage-point of her femininity and her middle
age, and with the frankness of a green friendship, apostrophized the
nightingale of Paris, and begged her to keep to the skies, or the
stage, but at all events not to descend to lunch with the novelist.
Turgenev felt that the countess was almost right; he half agreed
with Nekrasov as to how the visit must end; besides, he believed
that the train that carried this aging creature out of Russia was
cutting him off from his last chance of a normal family life.
He was to admit to Countess Lambert, with belated wisdom, that
he was knocking his head against a stone wall. But when he set
out there must have been a small, vague hope tucked away in his
luggage. The wall had had a chink in it once. Pauline was as
secret as Thisbe, and Turgenev silent as the slain Pyramus, yet
every one believed what no one could prove. On an autumn day of
1862, after having dined with Ivan at the Viardots' in their Baden
villa, his brother Nicholas was to sit down to pen a letter to his wife.
Two days earlier he had written her that Ivan had told him in
confidence such secrets as are revealed only to a brother, and that
she would hear them on his return home. If these confidences
finally came to the ears of Ivan's sister-in-law, they seem to have
gone no farther, and all that we know of them is that then, as
always, Ivan preserved a discreet silence about Pauline. His
brother, like his biographer, is reduced to conjecture. "The Viardot
children," Nicholas writes to his wife, "treat him [Turgenev] like
a father (although they don't resemble him in the slightest degree;
don't let 's gossip); in other words, I think that there were relations
between them, but many years ago, and that now he simply lives
with them and has become a friend of the family."
It was as a friend of the family that, toward the end of the
summer of 1856, Turgenev greeted once more the familiar scenes
of Courtavenel. There was the moat he had drained, the library
he had arranged; there was his little pupil, Louise, who was now
140
TURGENEV
a girl of fifteen, and her adopted sister, Pauline Turgenev, who in
these half-dozen years had grown actually into a jeune fille, and—
thank Heaven!-forgotten every word of her Russian. There was
Louis Viardot, at fifty-six, no more middle-aged than Turgenev
felt himself to be at thirty-eight. There was Mme. Viardot herself,
the idol of the opera-house, with her one-shouldered shrug, her lovely
hands, her enormous eyes. She was as she had always been, the
good wife, the kind mother, the affectionate friend, above all, the
adorable singer. The voice which, as her friend Saint-Saens noted,
made of light pieces the badinage of giants and gave a superhuman
grandeur to tragedy, her true medium, was now at its best. Her
features had not changed; only, perhaps, she closed her wide lips a
little more firmly, her eyes lighted less with her one-sided smile.
Nothing had altered very much. Nothing was quite the same.
Turgenev had not been here very long before he had a visitor,
in the person of his friend Foeth, then a lieutenant in His Majesty's
Uhlans. He had omitted, with characteristic absent-mindedness,
to warn his hosts of the arrival of this new-comer from Russia,
so that the guest was received with some confusion. Foeth, already
exhibiting the appetite which instructed his cook to make apple-cakes
worthy of Alexander III's fork, went empty on the fare offered by
the château. The bouillon was "weak to the point of unconscious-
ness." It was followed by a small meat-patty such as is served with
the soup in Russia. The third course, the unkindest cut of all, con-
sisted of daintily arranged and transparently thin slices of boiled ham,
garnished with string-beans, and the dessert was a jelly omelette.
The worst of the visit was that the lieutenant came away feeling that
Mme. Viardot requited his friend's affections as ill as his own
prandial hopes.
Not that Foeth's memoirs cast any light upon the nature of the
relation between Turgenev and Pauline Viardot. In fact, he spoke
of it in the vaguest terms, and many years later, in the opaque
garrulousness of old age. A single moment stands out-the moment
when Turgenev, striding hugely up and down the room, with his
hands clasped above his head, and in the shrill squeak that betrayed
him when he was excited, confided: "She eclipsed all the others
long ago. Forever. I deserve what I am getting. I'm only happy
"THE ONLY WOMAN”
141
when a woman puts her heel on my neck and presses my nose into
the dirt." He clapped his mouth shut on the thoughts that followed,
only to break out, bewildered and bewildering, "My God! What
happiness for a woman to be ugly!"
Certainly, he was n't maltreated all the time; or, if this was what
made for his happiness, perhaps he was. "Each day," he wrote
retrospectively to a friend, "seemed a present." However unreason-
ably, he felt that he had come to port, and knew the taste of
contentment. He had formed an attachment for this place, which
There
was now the setting for homely entertainments of sorts.
were books to be read aloud. There must have been walks and
drives. The "Potato Theater" rang to the lines of Racine and
Molière. This remodeled guard-room owed its name to the fact
that the entrance fee was a potato, which every member of the
audience had to find for himself in the kitchen-garden and deposit in
a crate which stood beside the door. Turgenev's daughter was
charming in "Iphigénie." Louise, playing Athalie, was privileged
to wear a scarlet robe cut by her grandfather Garcia, decorated with
fringe and spangles by her grandmother Garcia, and originally worn
by her aunt, la Malibran. Turgenev, too, was sometimes impressed
into the caste. In her recently published memoirs, Louise (Mme.
Héritte-Viardot) recalls how they would go boating of an evening
and sing on the water a chorus that Gounod had composed in the
morning. She retails at length the practical jokes the children
played on Turgenev, in which her mother also sometimes took
part.
There was surely music: after the lean years, Turgenev could not
be surfeited, though he was the guest of a prima donna. They
played all of Beethoven-indeed, almost everything except Wagner,
who was the bête noire of the whole company. When, a few years
later, all Paris hissed the première of "Tannhäuser," Turgenev, so
he asserted, took a key out of his pocket and contributed to the
general hooting. In time, Mme. Viardot accepted an invitation to
sing excerpts from this very opera and she gradually became recon-
ciled to the new music. Turgenev granted that there might be.
beauty in it, but it was so different from everything he loved that it
was too hard a wrench for him to bring himself to like it. He found
142
TURGENEV
"Rheingold" intolerable and "Meistersinger" atrocious, and dubbed
their author a "eunuch-Priapus." Not that he was more receptive
to other innovators in his favorite art. He had a low opinion of
Russian music, making an exception of Chaikovsky and Rimsky-
Korsakov. Liberal in all other respects, he remained a complete
conservative in music, reserving his devotion for such masters as
Mozart, Gluck, Beethoven, and Schumann.
As for his own little job, Turgenev was keeping in practice, here
at Courtavenel, even with parlor games. When they played jeux de
têtes, and he drew the profiles to which the company attached char-
acteristics, he retained the sketches and some of the commentary to
use for his stories. In short, he was as happy, he wrote, "as trout
in a clear stream when the sun beats down upon it and suffuses the
waters." Breathing this mild autumn air, he could feel, about his
sentimental life, with the poet whom he quoted: "The last flowers
are dearer than the luxurious firstlings of the fields.'
But this Indian summer of serenity came to an end when he left
Courtavenel, following the Viardots to Paris. The height of his
hopes might be measured by the depth of his disappointment when
his worst anticipations were justified. Tolstoy, after meeting him,
wrote home that Turgenev was "pitiful to see." He added: "I
could never have believed that he was capable of such love." The
trouble was that Mme. Viardot could n't give this middle-aged lover
what he required. It was cold comfort to be forever sitting on the
edge of another man's nest, even if the edge was broad and well
cushioned. Turgenev had left Russia with the feeling that he had
resigned his last chance of establishing a home there. Now his no-
tion of the untrammeled artist seemed more than ever a youthful
aberration. And yet what hope had he of creating a home with the
woman who played Naomi to his Ruth? Writing to Tolstoy on
January 3, 1857, he spoke of how some people, Mme. Viardot among
them, disliked his story, "Faust," and added: "By the way, what
are the absurd rumors that are spreading among you? Her husband
is well, never was better, and I am as far from a wedding as you,
for example. But I love her more than ever, and more than any-
body in the world. This is true." Two months later he was writ-
ing to Annenkov:
د.
"THE ONLY WOMAN”
143
Mme. Viardot made me a present of a bronze bear who lies on his
back and scratches his belly. This bear is doubly dear to me, first, be-
cause it was given me by the only woman whom I love and always shall
love, and secondly, because by a strange trick of chance, it is the spit
and image of you.
While Turgenev was writing thus, Mme. Viardot was with child.
It was not her husband who stood between them. She did not
love her husband,—that serious, unchild-like man who was twenty
years her senior. She wrote to Julius Rietz, the German conductor
who enjoyed her violent friendship for three or four years:
I could never give Louis any other feeling [except friendship] in
return for his strong and deep love, in spite of myself. . . . I will con-
fess to you very quietly, in your ear, that these little trips which I made
alone this winter [1859] were a very refreshing holiday for me. On
the one hand, they were a rest for my heart, somewhat weary of the
expression of a love which it cannot share. On the other hand, ab-
sence only strengthened my friendship, esteem, and respect for this
man, so noble and so devoted.
#
Her art did not release her from the moral conventions which
so many who followed the same calling lightly dismissed. She had
character as well as genius. In his "History of the French Revolu-
tion," Michelet, after describing the Fête de la Raison of 1793, at
which the actress, Mlle. Maillard, impersonated Reason, observes:
"The day when the world, grown wise, will restore to women the
priestly office which they held in antiquity, who will be surprised to
see, marching at the head of the national procession, the good, the
charitable, the saintly Garcia-Viardot?”
The prima donna had been born into a Bohemian way of life.
As she matured, she reacted against her environment, and developed
a taste for respectability which she was to carry with her to her grave.
The only thing she claims to have inherited from her gipsy father
was the vagabond spirit. Perhaps because of this, an air of tran-
siency hung about her Paris home, so that after dining with the
Viardots in January, 1856, Dickens wrote that their house looked
"exactly as if they had moved into it last week and were going away
next. Notwithstanding which, they have lived in it eight years.'
Aside from this gipsy habit, Mme. Viardot confessed herself puz-
""
144
TURGENEV
zled as to how she could have been fathered by Don Manoel, a man
who believed in neither God nor devil, and whose whole religion was
love and art. Nor was she like her mother, who, as she remarked,
"united a great deal of Catholic superstition to a total lack of reli-
gion." For herself, Mme. Viardot, while unable to formulate her
faith, believed in the immortality of the soul and in the union of all
lovers after death. This was the credo not of a sensuous but of a
sentimental person. It would seem that the woman's emotional heat
was either drained off by the prima donna's requirements, or trans-
posed into a key which would not disturb her work..
She preferred to give up all thought of love, which could but
destroy her home, wound her self-esteem, and intrude upon a career
which she cherished with the egotism of the artist. How far she
went to preserve her composure may be seen from the fact that the
day after the coup d'état of Napoleon III she received only women,
for the reason, she explained, that women's fears and guesses were
so silly that one never believed them, while men, being more reason-
able, might disturb her with their apprehensions.
In her correspondence with Rietz she makes an obscure reference
to a moment of weakness when she was on the verge of committing
some grave error, but her friend Ary Scheffer, the painter, stopped
her, brought her home, "half mad," and helped her to get the control
over herself which she seems never again to have lost. It may have
been of this dark incident she was thinking when she wrote to Rietz:
"Love kills when it may not flame up. To put it out, ah, that is a
terrible agony, it is painful, frightful, deadly." Running away
from love, she took refuge in friendship. She made a cult of this
"passionate and yet tranquil" relation, exalting it, fondling it,
praising it, lavishing upon it all the fervor of her polyglot vocab-
ulary, treating it as though it were a frail and precious child. And
it was indeed a child, the child of her fear. She wrote to Rietz:
Without sacred friendship I would have died long ago. Through it
alone I was resurrected like Lazarus; without it I could n't live. It is
my salvation, the warming ray of my existence. . I can give as
much friendship, constant, sacrificing, unselfish, firm, tireless friend-
ship, as any human being can give.
:
%
"THE ONLY WOMAN"
145
It was this safe sort of affection that she offered to the men who
loved her to Ary Scheffer, who was her lifelong devotee; to
Berlioz, who at the age of fifty-six surprised her with a sudden
passion; to Turgenev.
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THE SLOUGH OF DESPOND
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CHAPTER XVIII

HIll
a
KLO
129
RAY as his mood was, it be-
came even gloomier when, on
reaching Paris Turgenev was
suddenly beset by his old ill-
ness. It is telling only a half-
truth to describe it as "bladder
trouble." It was not, as his
mother had feared eighteen years
ago, the disease that had been
fatal to his father. It meant
hideous depression and severe
neuralgic pain, but it was dan-
gerous only to his pursuit of
pleasure.
-
Faced with genuine trouble, the hypochondriac sank into a slough
of despond. His friends were accustomed to his periodic despairs.
But in the letters which they now received from "a dead man" there
was a convincing accent. He was no better than a heap of dust that
the housemaid had forgotten to sweep up. He was poisoned.
He rotted like a frozen fish in a thaw. He was squashed like one
of those white mushrooms with green filling that you are always
treading upon in the woods in Russia. He was a wretched
shed, propped up with beams, ready to fall to pieces. He was
as brittle as glass. Old age was knocking at his door. Oh, he
smelled of the corpse. With this snake gnawing at his vitals,
how could he be interested in living? how could he be good for
anything?
The scene of these miseries, the Paris of the little Napoleon,
ANT
146
THE SLOUGH OF DESPOND
147
/
was more than ever distasteful to him. Like so many other Euro-
pean cities in the fifties, it was booming with a spectacular prosperity.
All din and dazzle, it could appeal, he thought, only to the callow
youth or the doting ancient. His reading afforded him various
escapes from the Parisian scene, into Hannibal's Carthage, Imperial
Rome, the opium-eater's den. He liked the last place so well that he
read De Quincey's "Confessions" twice, while dipping casually
into Suetonius, Sallust, Tacitus, and Livy. He told the old Aksakov
that he was living like a hermit, but it was solitude amidst multitude,
for in spite of his ailing state, he met everybody. The author of
"A Sportsman's Sketches" even had a brief encounter with the
author of "Uncle Tom's Cabin," "a kindly, plain, and—imagine!
bashful lady, with her two red-headed daughters in red burnouses
and fierce crinolines; very odd figures." As for the French literati,
-and those whom he knew were legion, he found the younger
men stale, flat, and unprofitable, with provincial notions, substituting
mannerisms for talent and log-rolling for criticism, and with not an
æsthetic conviction among the lot of them. He detested the tremolo
of Hugo; "the sickly whining" of Lamartine; the chatter of his
deposed goddess, the garrulous old Sand; the cold obscenity of
Mérimée; and as for Balzac, his vaunted realism was no more than
a busyness with irrelevant trivialities-he summed him up later as
"an ethnographer, not an artist." Altogether French art was de-
generating. The French were getting the writing they deserved,
for they were a narrow-minded immoral lot, having one passion
only: money.
His dislike of his foreign surroundings went hand in hand with
homesickness. Everything Russian became precious to him, and
he hinted broadly that if it had not been for certain peculiar cir-
cumstances beyond his control, he would immediately have flown
home, "where life is still young and rich in hope." When he wrote
in this strain to his friend Aksakov, he was undoubtedly expressing
sentiments which warmed the cockles of that nationalist's old heart.
Yet there is no reason to question Turgenev's sincerity. It was
simply that for a little while he too succumbed to the fascination
of the nationalist faith in a Russia whose virgin vigor contrasted
so strikingly with the senility of the effete West. He was nibbling
148
TURGENEV
delicately at the worm which his friends Herzen and Bakunin had
swallowed whole. He lost all interest in the bait when a brief
respite from his illness allowed him five weeks in England.
He went to visit the small colony of London exiles of whom
Herzen was the chief. And as Turgenev got there in May, at
the height of the season, he was able to use to good advantage his
letters of introduction. He made many "pleasant acquaintances."
He met Disraeli, perhaps rather in his capacity of novelist than of
statesman. He found Carlyle interesting, in spite of his undemo-
cratic views. He also encountered Macaulay, and Thackeray, who,
upon being regaled with a Russian folk-song, laughed till his
large paunch quivered. He just missed an encounter with Pal-
merston, and if he had not been in such haste to go to the continent
for a water-cure, he might have spoken with the Prince Consort
himself. Before crossing the channel again, he went to Manchester,
where he saw "many marvelous things." Altogether, the English
were an agreeable surprise to him: "truly, a great nation.'
""
But this trip was merely an island of satisfaction in a sea of
discomfort. What further contributed to his trouble was the fact
that his collected tales in three volumes, which appeared toward the
close of 1856, met with a cool reception. His reaction to these ac-
cumulated ills was to decide that he was unfit to hold a pen. His
talent had run dry. His prose was as bad as his verse had been,
and all he could in decency do was to retire. The young Tolstoy,
who was also in Paris, holding his tongue and bulging his eyes, was
the only hope of Russian literature.
"As for me," Turgenev wrote to Botkin, "let me whisper in your
ear, with the request not to repeat it to any one:
'I shall not pub-
lish, or for that matter, write a single line to the end of time.' " He
had then written only the first of his six large novels, and none of
the more famous short pieces. "The other day," he continued, "for
fear of imitating Gogol, I did n't burn, but tore up and threw into
the water-closet all my rough drafts, plans, etc." He felt that he
had sufficient command of his native tongue to work as a translator.
If he kept well enough, he would, he decided, try his hand at turning
"Don Quixote" into Russian (M. Viardot had translated it into
French). "Perhaps you will think that all this is exaggeration,"
THE SLOUGH OF DESPOND
149
Turgenev concluded, "and you won't believe my words. You will
find, I trust, that I never spoke more earnestly and sincerely." Ten
days later he was mailing the second part of "A Trip to Polesye" to
Annenkov, with the request to transmit the manuscript to an editor.
His wanderings ended again at Courtavenel. The family had
meanwhile been increased by the arrival of a new baby. Paul Louis
Joachim was born while Turgenev was on his travels, and he had
responded to the news with a letter containing kisses and congratu-
lations for them all, and requesting a detailed description of the revo-
lutionary day which the little sans-culotte had chosen for his entrance
into the world, also information as to the color of his eyes and the
witticisms he had made. "And the little one's cries-is there," he
asked the prima donna, "any music sweeter than that?" It was
from Courtavenel that Turgenev wrote to Nekrasov in September,
1857, inviting him to his Petersburg apartment a month hence, to
help eat a turkey with rice which he himself undertook to carve.
However, the noble fowl escaped the knife, inasmuch as the follow-
ing month found the novelist in Rome.
The notion of Rome had come to him from Botkin the exquisite.
Surprising as the suggestion at first seemed to him, he was soon
seeing himself there in his dreams. There was again the thought of
escaping his present wretchedness by a change of scene. Rome,
which he had once tasted with an unblunted palate, would, he feebly
hoped, renew for him, if "for the last time, the sense of youth and
beauty." If there was any stuff left in him at all, Rome, out of its
accumulated humanity, would grant him the mood for work. He
did not, like Henry James, fear the distractions of Italy, whose
cities draw the artist, as the American novelist found, "away from
his small question to their own greater ones." No, a winter in Rome
would cure him of his melancholy; would stimulate him with "great
traces of a great life"; would give him solitude without loneliness;
would, in fine, assure him of "that peculiar tranquillity, full of inner
attention and quiet movement," which, as he had written to Coun-
tess Lambert, is essential to a writer, to an artist generally.
Turgenev had also hoped that the Southern climate would benefit
his health. He was deceived. The demon of disease was not to be
exorcised by all Rome's magic. There were still recurrent notes of
-
-
150
TURGENEV
despair in his letters. He was ruined, like an ant-hill poked about
by ruthless children. Or, melancholy rather than bitter, he would re-
mark that the beauty he perceived on every hand was something that
an ailing, aging man could watch but not partake of. Illness, which
is interesting to youth and natural to old age, was especially noxious,
he felt, in the middle years. A black pall had fallen upon him and
wrapped him round.
And yet he was not so wretched as to be completely idle. In fact,
he was able to finish one long "short story," and the sense of ac-
complishment made him feel, as he put it, like another Orion safe
ashore. This tale was "Asya," one of his better-known short nar-
ratives. He concludes an epistolary plaint to Annenkov by saying,
"Still, I try not to let the soot pass into what I do." And indeed,
his wretched humor is not allowed to appear in his writings except
in the anodyne form of wistful sadness. That is the undertone that
fills the pauses of the narrative, both in the case of "Asya" and in
the earlier piece, written under the same stress, "A Trip to Polesye."
The latter, bearing the personal note of “A Sportsman's Sketches,'
is marked by elegaic digressions. Alone in the thick of the virgin
forest, and struck by the familiar panic wrought by nature's in-
humanity, Turgenev views, for one heartbreaking minute, his whole
past life, and sees it reduced to no more than a poor handful of dusty
ashes. Again, watching a sun-drenched dragon-fly poised on the
tip of a twig, he seizes on it as a symbol of that equilibrium of vital-
ity which is the core of life,-that equilibrium, to lose which is to be
doomed. When one does lose it, surely one should meet one's fate
with the instinctive stoicism of brutes and simple men. In “Asya”
the moody interjections are less emphatic. Here he pities the folly
of youth which expects daily bread in the shape of gilded cakes, and
reflects on the faint breath of a withered flower that outlasts the joys
and sorrows of the man who pressed it, and indeed outlasts the man
himself.
-
The background of "Asya" is a small Rhineland town such as the
author had known in his own young days, and in the foreground
move two men and a girl who, unlike in all other respects, are alike
in sharing youth's limitless and objectless expectancy. Every ele-
ment of the story is typical, even to its origin. He was moved to
THE SLOUGH OF DESPOND
151
/
write it by a glimpse of a decrepit cottage with two women leaning
from its windows. Typical, too, are his characters: the well-
intentioned, ineffectual young men; the girl, shy, ardent, all of a
piece. Typical, the chaste blossoming of passion, and the lovers'
abrupt parting. Here, as in so much else of his work, the indefat-
igable hunter is tracking down no less a quarry than youth itself.
A man confirmed by illness in his sense of middle age, he invests this
earlier period of life with the enchantment lent by distance. What he
offers is just the bloom of the fruit, an essence all compact of warmth
and fragrance, something at once impalpable and authentic, like a
melody.
It was fitting that "Asya" should have been written in Rome.
This city, which, to a man nourished on the classics, was full of
togaed ghosts quarreling in the Forum, bargaining at the baths, at
once saddened and soothed him with its vast, historic pageantry.
Whatever else the Roman ruins did to him, they did n't add to his de-
pression. The place, he found, affected him like music, something
in minor, perhaps, but none the less cordial and benign. It could,
he wrote later, replace, in a measure, everything-society, happiness,
-even love. It was not the Rome he had seen in his student years,
nor was he any longer the young blood who had evoked the shade of
Cæsar with a saucy shout. And his companion was not the heavenly
Stankevich, but that elderly connoisseur of art and life, the gourmet,
the dandy, the dilettante, the sybarite, Turgenev's "Don Basilio,”
Vasily Botkin. Botkin, who knew his Cellini as Stankevich had
known his Hegel; who used to teach his friends to find as much
transcendental pleasure in sniffing the aroma of turkey stuffed with
truffles as in listening to Schubert's songs; who could be outraged
almost to the point of violence by an unfashionable waistcoat; who,
finding himself remiss in the history of India, could begin to study
it at the age of fifty-two; who could deeply admire the way Turgenev
painted his radicals, and thank God for the government that sup-
pressed them.
It was not upon Botkin alone that Turgenev relied for company.
There was also a small and select colony of his compatriots, most of
them belonging to the nobility, with whom he occasionally tea-ed and
dined. They were pleasant enough people, but the inquisitive
152
TURGENEV
Grand-Duchess Yelena Pavlovna was somewhat tiresome; at the end
of every one of her sentences he found, he said, a corkscrew. And
here, as in Petersburg, his orbit crossed at once the haut monde and
the confraternity of artists. At the Café Greco, on Via Condotti
near Piazza di Spagna, which had been offering entertainment for
two hundred years, he passed the time of day with some of the Rus-
sian painters and sculptors who had come to Rome to study and to
work. Here he stood up against the young iconoclasts, for the
Italian masters of the Rennaissance, and especially for Raphael.
The most conspicuous person in this group of artists, the one who
most attracted Turgenev, was Alexander Ivanov. After more than
a quarter of a century of work here, this painter had become quite a
Roman, and something of a local celebrity. He was known for hav-
ing spent more than twenty years over a single canvas, which
although not yet completed, he was exhibiting to a select public. He
worked steadily at the same theme-Christ appearing to the people.
He was harried by the baffled desire to paint, with the utmost histori-
cal accuracy in details, his changing conception of the Saviour. His
chief difficulty was that he had lost his faith and embraced the unor-
thodox views of David Strauss. He went so far as to visit Strauss,
with whom he held unique converse, himself speaking Italian, which
Strauss did not understand, while the theologian spoke Latin, of
which the painter was quite innocent. No one will ever know what
the German thought of this squat, elderly Russian, with the broad
white forehead and soft cheeks of a child, the awed eyes of a hermit,
and plump stubby-fingered hands.
M
What Turgenev relished in this earnest soul was the combination
of a boundless naïveté with flashes of searching intelligence. Then
too, he admired the man's work for the intellectual quality which
informed it, and which compensated him for its technical short-
comings. Already he felt that a work of art at its best involved the
artist's rational powers to the full, and that without understanding
there is no æsthetic appreciation. Besides, he sympathized with
Ivanov's passion for observation, which is evidenced in all of the
two hundred and fifty-eight sketches for his main canvas.
a great deal of the painter, and, together with Botkin, took him on
a short trip to Albano. Turgenev's account of the excursion affords
He saw
.
THE SLOUGH OF DESPOND
153
*
a glimpse of the trio as they halted, in the golden light of the fine
autumn day, at Rocca di Papa: he, melted by the felicity of the hour,
and all attentive; Botkin, feeding his senses on the weather and the
ancient stones; Ivanov, squatting on the brink of a well, and biting
at a piece of dry bread which he had taken out of his pocket and
which he was dipping now and again into the water.
All through the winter in Rome Turgenev neglected the doctors,
but by March (1858) he was on his way to Vienna to consult one of
its celebrated physicians. He was leaving Rome with voluble regret,
but in all his subsequent peregrinations he never returned to it. He
stopped off in Florence and spent there ten days which he remembered
to the end of his life. He also visited Venice, and several pages of
"On the Eve" bear witness to the fascination of the city. Looking
back on that time after the lapse of a quarter of a century, he thought
that he had then been "very young." Not that he had then felt so.
"It is useless," he wrote in "On the Eve," "for a man whose life is
over, who has been broken by fate, to visit Venice: it will be bitter
to him, like the memory of the unfulfilled dreams of his young days."
He must have tasted something of that bitterness. In Vienna he de-
clared that he was going home to stay there to the end of his days.
Dr. Sigmund finding some trouble with that part of his system
which had been intermittently affected since his Berlin days, the
patient concluded that he was to spend the rest of his life in that
pathetic effort to postpone the inevitable end which is the whole oc-
cupation of old age. "How soon," he lamented, "the candle has
guttered out!" The candle was to burn another twenty-five years,
and give sufficient light for the writing of his five major novels and
any number of shorter pieces.
Before our weary Ulysses smelled the smoke of home fires in
June, he had touched at several other ports. He went to Dresden
simply to see Annenkov, who was surprised to find, instead of a mori-
bund creature, a man in flourishing health. To account for his con-
dition, Turgenev advanced the theory that a person seriously ill
shows every sign of health during the periods of respite: the disease
allows nature to fatten its victim, so that, returning, it may find food
for a feast. In this state of grace Turgenev traveled once more to
London, and thence to Paris. The trip to the French capital had
:
154
TURGENEV,
-.
been planned months previously. He was to be groomsman for
Prince Orlov. It was apparently his fate, he had written to Foeth
from Rome, always to be groomsman and never to have any of his
own. He expected, as he wrote to Nekrasov, to spend no more than
a fortnight in Paris. "Having read the word 'Paris,'" he continued,
"you will think: 'He's a liar; he 'll stay there.' To this I reply:
a certain person will not be in Paris then, and I shall go only to see
my daughter." In April he was writing to the same correspondent,
"If I am alive, I shall be in Petersburg by the end of May. No
power on earth will keep me here any longer," concluding with a
quotation:
"Enough! Away with you!
You've given Folly all that is her due."
DINNER at Donon's celebrated
Turgenev's home-coming. The
air of the June evening re-
sounded with the noise of drosh-
kies clattering through the court-
yard to the door of the old,
aristocratic restaurant. Cham-
pagne flowed. The mercurial
Nekrasov was there. And Gon-
charov, screening his jealousy be-
hind a retiring manner. And
Ivanov, freshly come to this con-
fusing, unfamiliar, hard-headed
Petersburg, and more dazed than
It was good to be back again in this genial atmosphere.
Turgenev had digested no more than half a dozen less elaborate
dinners before he found himself back at Spasskoye. He spent four
diligent months at home, and when the winter season revived the life
of the capital he went back to his Petersburg friends, carrying with
him the manuscript of "A House of Gentle folk." This piece of
writing bears the impress of the author's surrender to middle age—
resignation without stoicism, bitterness without anger. The story
of Lavretzky's tragically disappointed love for Liza is steeped in
the mournful pigments of the author's mood. For a few incompar-
able hours Lavretzky believes that he can mend, with Liza's help, the
life broken by a worthless woman. He has scarcely realized the
freedom granted him by the supposed death of his faithless wife,
when she turns up again like a bad penny to rob him a second time
of the incredible happiness that he had for a brief moment accepted
as possible.
Dolby
POPOY
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CHAPTER XIX
175
SAVORED MELANCHOLY
My Unity
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JOY
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155
156
TURGENEV
All the minor characters and subsidiary situations are skilfully
made to assist in indicating the secret inception and delicate progress
of the love of Lavretzky and Liza. Their meeting in the garden
piece of writing which gives out fragrance like a wind-shaken
bush. Such a passage makes up for the gossamery quality of the
heroine. For Liza, the Russian Gretchen, is less a flesh-and-blood
woman than a symbol of unattainable happiness and irrecoverable
youth. In the end she takes the veil, that she may atone by prayer,
presumably for the sin of loving a married man, and she begs Lav-
retzky to reconcile himself with his wife, thus performing his duty
as she does hers.
The final glimpse we catch of Lavretzky is when he returns, af-
ter an absence of eight years, to the garden "where for the last time.
he had vainly stretched out his hands toward the forbidden cup in
which the golden wine of delight bubbles and sparkles." And yet,
Turgenev insists, the "lonely, hearthless wanderer" was content; he
had undergone that saving change which alone gives men strength
to endure: "he had really ceased to think of his own happiness."
He had become a capable gentleman farmer and had provided well
for his peasants. Having anchored in the harbor of middle age,
he regarded the new craft that was taking the wave with sadness
but no envy. It is as though Turgenev had cast Lavretzky in the
part for which he was himself the understudy.
In the character of the old musician Lemm, the novelist indirectly
pays homage to the romantic Germany of his youth, to its idealism,
its earnest sentimentality, its genius for that art toward which all
the others move. France, on the other hand, or, more properly,
Paris, is treated with implied disparagement as a depraved, pleasure-
loving, cold-hearted belle. It is in the malicious portrait of Lav-
retzky's wife and the faint sketch of her French maid that all Tur-
genev's distaste for the country in which he was eventually to make
his home is most vividly felt. The novel presents also a vulgar
version of the Westernist point of view. Panshin, whom the author
patently detests, in an argument with Lavretzky declares that the
trouble with Russia is that it is only half Europeanized, and that
it will be cured of its troubles only when it becomes wholly so. All
the nations, he glibly announces, are exactly alike: give them good
SAVORED MELANCHOLY
157
institutions, and the rest will take care of itself. There is an un-
mistakable flavor of Slavophilism in the arguments which Lavretzky
uses to confound the little bounder. He stands up for the cultural
independence of Russia; he insists upon the impossibility of sudden
transitions and unjustified "arrogant reforms"; he demands that the
worth indwelling in the common folk of the country should be ac-
knowledged and reverenced.
Turgenev may have been philandering with notions which were
normally uncongenial to the temper of his mind. He always felt
that cosmopolitanism meant sterility. But that made him no less
of a Westernist. Certainly, as long as the subject was capable of
exciting him, he cordially disliked Slavophilism, which meant to him
nothing but musty churchliness, Pharisaical self-sufficiency, blind
dogmatism. It affected him, as he himself put it, “as a bad smell
or a bad taste." That he could put a distorted expression of his
own convictions into the mouth of the odious Panshin, and make the
lovable Lavretzky uphold ideas which he could not share, argues
that objectivity which he believed to be an essential of the artist's
equipment. He said as much in his Preface to "Fathers and Chil-
dren," in which he accounts for this apparent defection from West-
ernism by declaring that he was obeying the logic of his characters
rather than his private preconceptions.
"A House of Gentle folk," published in the January issue of "The
Contemporary" for 1859, definitely established its author as a novel-
ist of the first rank. It was destined to be the only one of his
novels which everybody read and which opposing camps praised
with equal fervor. According to Annenkov, it inaugurated a lit-
erary "truce of God." The reviewers devoted interminable pages to
it in the bulky magazines, and it was a grateful topic at dinner-
tables and in drawing-rooms. Titled hostesses strove manfully
with one another for the privilege of entertaining the writer. Bold
and awkward young men in the first flush of authorship placed their
manuscripts in his hands as upon the knees of the gods. There were
at least three elements in the book which made for its immense suc-
cess. People felt that here the place and the times were represented
in illuminating terms. Besides, there was the charm of the lyricism
in which the story is bathed: the aura that radiates from a passing
Ge
158
TURGENEV
epoch as from a setting sun. And the spectacle of an intellectual
turning his face from the West and coming home like a prodigal
son to cultivate his acre, was bound to win rounds of applause.
The winter was one of busy if not especially zestful living: din-
ners at Donon's and Dussot's; the establishment of a fund for needy
men of letters; some slight semi-political controversy; an affair,
rather too arduous for a man turned forty, with a person of the
demi-monde. He spent a good many more quiet evenings on Fur-
stadtskaya Street in the delightful drawing-room of Countess Lam-
bert. It was connections of this rank that won him the reputation
of a snob. During this season the malicious Goncharov wrote Bot-
kin that their friend was perpetually calling on countesses and
princesses: "If he does n't pay three visits in an evening, he is
downcast." But even if Turgenev had originally sought the Count-
ess Lambert because he hoped that a lady, who was the daughter of a
Minister of Finance and who had been presented at Court, might
be of service to a writer under police surveillance, certainly their ac-
quaintance ripened into a friendship to whose genuineness his let-
ters richly attest. She was neither young nor beautiful, but culti-
vated, charming, and intelligent, and maintained one of the leading
salons in Petersburg. He was grateful to her for offering him one
of those serene and secure relations which suited the autumn of his
days. Here was a sympathetic ear for his little monologues on life,
and his recitations of Pushkin's incomparable verse, a lap into which
to pour his troubles, another pair of critical eyes to review his
manuscripts.
There were moments, indeed, when this comfortable companion-
ship was threatened by the invasion of a disturbing element. “If I
were your husband," Turgenev wrote to his friend in October, 1859,
"and my wife were in the habit of writing such letters [as I am re-
ceiving from you] I would be rather worried." He wrote to her
fondly too, she said he had the soul of a siren, and probably
talked to her in the same vein as he bent over her hand; but in his
letters at least, he was never unfaithful to Pauline. "I consider it
my duty to tell you that there are only two creatures on earth whom
I love more than you: one, because she is my daughter, the other, be-
cause... you know why." The friendship begun so tardily for
SAVORED MELANCHOLY
159
both of them endured for a dozen years, and then lapsed painlessly.
In March, 1859, he was snowed in at Spasskoye, with his plans
for "On The Eve," his memories, and his dogs. Chief among his
four-legged companions was the old Diana's daughter, Boubout, so
christened by Mme. Viardot, who had known her in her puppy days
at Courtavenel. This creature came about midway in the canine
dynasty that began with Napol, a dappled coffee-colored animal of
French parentage, and ended with Pegasus, in whose veins were
mingled the blood of an English setter and a German sheep-dog.
Boubout was particularly favored, with a mattress in Turgenev's
own room, where she slept under a quilt; if the quilt fell off during
the night she would give him a nudge with her paw, and he would
rise to cover her up again. It was for her that he took the Journal
des Débats. She liked the paper. After a day's hunting she found
it soothing and soporific. It was the only sheet large enough to
cover her completely and protect her from the flies when she wanted
a doze. On his return to Spasskoye this time he found a new medi-
tative gravity in her eye which led him to suspect her of having dug
into German philosophy during his recent absence. Himself, he
had long since lost interest in that sort of thing.
He was still in the country for Passion Week, and at Easter he
attended the midnight mass at the little village church, which smelled
heavily of sheepskins, wax, and incense. His shoulders ached with
the weight of his fur coat, and his heart with the savored melan-
choly of remembering a boy's Easter nights. "Life is poured out
to the last drop," he wrote Botkin of that moment, "but the fra-
grance of the just-emptied vessel is stronger than when it was full.
Addio, vita!”
With the first breath of spring Turgenev was again leaving Rus-
sia. After a short visit to Herzen in London, he suffered a month's
course of treatment at Vichy. The man took his ailing body around
to doctors as he sent his manuscripts to his friends, with an unac-
knowledged faith in the essential soundness of both. Midsummer
found him at Courtavenel. The wild pigeons cooed in the garden.
The children were always hurrying out of doors or calling one an-
other through the corridors. The wheels of the household ran
smoothly in their accustomed grooves. The whole scene was almost
160
TURGENEV
as, a year ago, he had left it, basking in the serenity of Indian sum-
mer. But the waters of the moat had dried up. Were the springs
of his passion drying up as well? He was certainly under no fur-
ther illusions as to what Mme. Viardot desired their relation to be.
She had her own interests, her own home, her own life, to which he
could contribute only as a friend. She wrote to Rietz in July:
Turgenev, the friend I told you about recently, is still with us; he
belongs to the few whom I call friends. . . . We read a great deal to-
gether—that is, habitually. We began Homer only yesterday. . . . I
know nothing pleasanter than to read aloud a good fine book with a sym-
pathetic spirit, a dear friend.
For the first time he was acquiescent. He looked at his happiness
as he looked at his youth, across an unbridgeable divide. Yet his
attachment remained. It was an affection which had sufficient vi-
tality to change, and so to endure. What had died in him, as he
explained to Countess Lambert, was not really his feeling, but the
hope of its being reciprocated.
i
149 180 180 18170
CHAPTER XX
HAMLET AND DON QUIXOTE

MARCO
6006
HILE taking the waters at Vichy,
in the summer of 1859, Tur-
genev began the actual writing
of "On the Eve." The Italians
were then engaged in fighting the
war of liberation, in which Gari-
baldi was to play a leading rôle.
On the day of the battle of Sol-
ferino (June 24, 1859) Tur-
genev was penning one of his
frequent letters to his confidante,
Countess Lambert:
If I were younger, I would give up all work, and go to Italy, to
breathe this now doubly blessed air. So there is still enthusiasm on
earth! So people can still sacrifice themselves, can rejoice, can be be-
side themselves with ecstasy! If I could at least see how they do it!
But I have already grown too sluggish, and I'm too lazy to leave my
accustomed rut. . . . All the fire that's left in me has passed into my
literary faculty. Everything else is cold and quiescent.
He said the same thing in a letter to Annenkov, adding that it was
just as well for a "born spectator" like himself to keep away, be-
cause if he were in Italy he might do something foolish.
ters.
He had done the preliminary work on his new novel in the spring.
A note-book had been filled with brief biographies of his charac-
He went so far as to keep a diary for one of them (Shubin),
as he told an American visitor many years later. Unfortunately,
the manuscript of this diary, no part of which he included in his
tale, and which exceeded in bulk the novel itself, was destroyed
161
162
TURGENEV
about a dozen years after the book came out. The germ of the story
had been planted in his mind in 1855. A friend living on a neigh-
boring estate, about to set off for the Crimean front, had handed him
a manuscript containing the history of his love-affair with a Rus-
sian girl who at first reciprocated his affection, but later preferred
a Bulgarian with whom she left Russia for his own country, where
he soon died.
Turgenev's absorption in his work was complete. He dreamt of
his characters. Their lives were his life, so utterly that he could n't
give his interest to anything in which they had no part. The crea-
tures of his imagination at once stimulated and sucked his energies.
He was too deep in his work to speak of it freely to his friends,
and yet he could think of nothing else. In midsummer, 1859, he
was sitting in his room at Courtavenel, congratulating himself upon
the freedom he had found there to go on with his novel. He had
fled thither from Paris, after a month at Vichy, from where he had
written to Annenkov, “Everything French stinks in my nostrils."
The French capital had been doubly abominable with hundreds of
trains bringing crowds to witness the spectacle of Napoleon III re-
viewing his Italian troops in the borrowed style of imperial Rome.
Turgenev wound up his letter from Courtavenel:
Every military festival is a horror to me, and this one especially.
There will be bayonets, uniforms, shouts, arrogant sergeants-de-ville,
adjutants dripping sweat. It will be hot, close, and smelly-connu,
connu! It's better to sit before the open window and look at the mo-
tionless garden, slowly mixing figments of the imagination with mem-
ories of distant friends and distant Russia. It is fresh and quiet in the
room. The children's voices ring through the hall. The sounds of
Gluck float down from upstairs. What more would you have?
These moods of serenity which always recurred at Courtavenel were
a foil for the melancholy that seized him as soon as he left the place.
That autumn his melancholy weighed on him with peculiar heavi-
ness. He felt more than ever a man without a home; and, besides,
he was haunted by a sense of the futility of existence and the near-
ness of an oblivion for which death was too small a name. With
this went “a turning to God," for the first time in perhaps a dozen
-
HAMLET AND DON QUIXOTE
163
years. And for the last time, too. His brief and vague resort to
religious consolation was, as he confessed to Countess Lambert, "the
final flare of the lamp." In his subsequent letters to his devout
friend he repeatedly concedes that he is not one of the faithful, an
admission which he makes with a humble if not a contrite heart.
"Why do you think that Polinka [Pauline Turgenev] does n't go to
church?" he asks in 1862. "Not only did I not 'rob her of her
God,' but I go to church with her myself. I would n't commit such
an attempt on her freedom, and if I'm not a Christian, that's my
personal affair, perhaps my personal misfortune."
The writing that he was doing at this time was another source of
distress as usual he was uncertain of its quality. In the heat of
battle, he told the Countess Lambert, he could n't guess whether he
was moving toward victory or defeat. After he had returned to
Spasskoye, and was depressed by a cold that he took there, he said
that he was like a man in a quarry, striking away for all he was
worth, yet seeing nothing but dust. The piece was finished by the
end of October and copied in a note-book on the first page of which
Pauline Viardot had inscribed in French the wish: "May I bring
you luck!" Then more than ordinary misgivings assailed him.
For one thing, he recognized that the plot was faulty.
friends would encourage him with a favorable verdict.
ess Lambert, to whom he had promised to dedicate it, declared that
the book was false from beginning to end. He went home and
looked from his contemned pages to the fire snapping in the stove.
Then he sat down at his desk and wrote a note. Annenkov, as so
often, was to be his court of final appeal. The good man hastened
to Turgenev's apartment, where, as he had been forewarned, he
found the fire going. But he also found, very shortly, that Tur-
genev had summoned him in the secret hope that he would restrain
the vandal hand. Annenkov had little difficulty in pointing out to
the author the merits of his work and saving it from the flames.
Perhaps his
But Count-
The countess was too hard on the novel, yet it does suffer from
fundamental defects. The author's avowed purpose was to indi-
cate "the necessity for consciously heroic characters"-tough-minded
men, capable of devoting themselves wholly to a cause at once gener-
ous and practical. Sitting, not quite at ease, in his fauteuil, Tur-
►
164
TURGENEV
genev watched the social drama with an attentiveness which allowed
him to divine its course. He was sensible then, that the type he pur-
posed to show, the idealistic man of action, was in the making in
Russia, but had not yet emerged. Not finding any such man among
his compatriots, he took for his protagonist a Bulgarian, against the
usual Russian background. This Insarov remains, however, a lay
figure, draped in the heroic, if to-day scarcely modish, garments of
insurgent nationalism. Turgenev is unable to interest the reader in
the destiny of this excellent and wooden creature. Besides, the story
revolves less about Insarov's activities in the service of his oppressed
people than about his love-affair with a Russian girl, Yelena Stahov.
As a critic of the day observed, the only part of Insarov's Odyssey
that the novelist actually chronicles is the visit to Calypso's Isle.
When the moment for action approaches, Turgenev kills him off.
True, for contemporary readers, the novel's center of gravity lay
nearer to Yelena than to her lover. She is one of those poised, pas-
sionate virgins whom he never tired of drawing; the complete per-
son, capable of making a brave choice and holding to it, welcom-
ing danger, loneliness, and hardships as incidental to the great pur-
pose to which she pledges herself when she accepts her lover. Al-
though Yelena deserts her country, this inert Russia that breeds only
frivolous Shubins and inconsequential Bersenyevs, the liberal part of
the Russian public saw in her a symptom of hope for themselves.
They felt that the mere existence of such a person between the cov-
ers of a book suggested a fermentation, a rising sap, the stir of
young life, impatient of old evils and schooling itself to rectify them.
The girl was the better able to impress the audience because Tur-
genev managed to endow her with the vitality that he failed to give
her Bulgarian.
The secondary characters, with the exception of Shubin, who is
almost the Philistine's picture of an artist, are drawn with Turgen-
ev's accustomed skill in handling his familiars. It is with a half-
friendly malice that he touches off Yelena's parents and that vast
gluttonous sphinx of a man, Uvar Ivanovich. The complacent pet-
tiness of their lives, as well as the helpless uneasiness of the two
young men who are Insarov's rivals, set off the strenuous ideal to
which Yelena and Insarov cling. It was Russia's tragedy, Tur-
HAMLET AND DON QUIXOTE
165
genev seems to have felt, that she bred no fit mate for such a
woman.
"There is no one, as yet, among us; there are no men, look where
you will," runs a passage from one of Shubin's speeches. He goes
on to say that there are none but dark, earthy minds, triflers, or little
Hamlets, consuming their own vitals. Shakspere's distracted hero
furnished Turgenev with a fundamental term in his classification of
character. About the time when his horizon was filled with "On
the Eve," he was elaborating his concept of the Hamletic type by
contrasting it with its extreme opposite, in a paper which belongs
with the most solid and stimulating essays in the Russian language.
Mankind, he contends here, can be divided into the Hamlets and the
Don Quixotes, although in the fewest the type comes pure. The
knight of la Mancha embodies faith in, and selfless devotion to, an
ideal. He is the man of action, whose blind single-mindedness may
make him ludicrous, and often makes him great. The prince of Den-
mark is the skeptic, spoiled for action by too much thought, and wryly
cherishing his own ego, for want of anything better to cherish. The
one is the complete enthusiast, the other the complete ironist. Don
Quixote is belabored by the shepherds; Hamlet flagellates himself.
Turgenev sympathizes with the Dane's tragedy, but, himself too
much the Hamlet, gives his admiration to the comical, noble knight
Don Quixote, idealizing Dulcinea, refuses to believe his
eyes when she appears to him in the guise of a slattern. "We our-
selves have seen such people, and when their like shall cease to ex-
ist, let the book of history be closed forever: there will be nothing
in it to read." True, he fights windmills, but who knows exactly
where reality ceases and fantasy begins? "It seems to me, therefore,
that the principal thing in life is the sincerity and strength of our con-
victions; the result lies in the hands of Fate. It alone can show us
whether we have been contending with ghosts or with real enemies,
and with what armor we covered our heads. Our business is to arm
ourselves and fight." When Don Quixote comes to die, he lays
aside all his pride, declaring that as in the old days he is now simply
Alonzo Quixano the Good, and Turgenev comments: "All things
shall pass away, everything shall vanish-the highest rank, power,
all-embracing genius, everything shall crumble to dust, but good
errant.
166
TURGENEV
deeds shall not vanish as smoke: they are more enduring than the
most resplendent beauty. 'Everything shall pass,' the Apostle says;
'love alone shall endure.'" In many of his works, he indicates the
respect and affection he bore the type to which he was a stranger.
"On the Eve" failed of the unanimous applause accorded its
predecessor. The liberals welcomed the book with reserve, while
the conservatives were shocked and disgusted by the way in which
Turgenev condoned the conduct of his wilful young heroine. This
aspect of the novel deprived him of many admirers, and on quite an-
other score it cost him a friend, whom he had met through Belinsky,
years back, and who had since become famous as the author of
"Oblomov"-Goncharov. The two had been rather intimate, read-
ing their manuscripts to each other, and confiding to each other their
literary plans. At Goncharov's instance, Turgenev omitted from
"A House of Gentlefolk" a conversation between Liza and her old
aunt which resembled a scene in a projected work of the older nov-
elist's. Turgenev was lacking in the professional jealousy by which
Goncharov's entire career was poisoned. With more than his usual
solicitude, he urged his friend on, wishing that he himself were a
pretty woman, so that he might more effectively prod his laggard
confrère.
When "A House of Gentle folk" appeared simultaneously with
"Oblomov," and scored a far greater success, Goncharov was mis-
erable. He had always considered this Turgenev a literary trifler,
capable of turning out agreeable sketches, but certainly not one to
sustain the herculean effort entailed by a novel. He was particularly
envious of his rival's facility. The world of his own fancy, Gon-
charov explained on one occasion, would unroll before him like a
broad expanse of land-field and forest, town and village-glimpsed
from a mountaintop, and it was a slow, laborious process to come
down from the height, to note the details of scenes and characters,
to enter into each separate life, and to recombine all into a chosen
pattern. Turgenev's imagination worked rapidly with simpler ele-
ments. It seized upon an individual, or a group of individuals, and
invited them to act in a self-revealing manner.
When the irritated Goncharov tried to put Turgenev in his place
by writing him that, whatever his talents, he was incapable of truly
HAMLET AND DON QUIXOTE
167
plumbing character, or of constructing a sound fable, the latter
replied:
I can't go on scribbling "Sportsman's Sketches" ad infinitum, and I do
not want to give up writing. So all that's left for me to do is to com-
pose narratives in which, without laying claim to unity or strength of
characterization, or deep penetration into life, I can express what pops
into my head. Who looks for a novel in the epic sense of the word,
need n't come to me. I no more think of the construction of my novels
than I do of walking on my head: no matter what I write, it will always
be a series of sketches. È sempre bene. . . . However, enough of this.
E
All this fuss leads nowhere. We shall all die, and stink after we are
dead.
In his reply Goncharov reiterated that while his friend was only
scratching life's surface, he himself, serving art like “a yoked ox,”
was plowing a deep furrow. Turgenev accepted these remarks
with the consenting silence of one inclined to agree with his critic.
Nor was he surprised to find Goncharov at the dinner given him be-
fore he again left for western Europe in April, 1859, and to re-
ceive his God-speed. Privately, the author of "Oblomov" was tell-
ing himself that the spoiled darling would no sooner cross the
frontier than he would dismiss from his mind all his friends at
home, to greet, with the same faithlessly jovial countenance, his
friends abroad. At least, so Goncharov wrote plainly to Annenkov.
When, nine months later, "On the Eve" appeared, Goncharov was
plunged into fresh torments. Again he wrote a letter of sullen in-
sinuation to Turgenev, making the covert suggestion that this pro-
lific rival had plagiarized his own novel, "The Precipice," frag-
ments of which he had read to Turgenev, after their friendly cus-
tom, from the manuscript. Again Turgenev was too kind or too
lazy to engage in controversy. But one day Goncharov, meeting a
mutual acquaintance, and hearing that the man was dining with the
author of "On the Eve," said with the energy of intense hatred:
"You tell Turgenev that he's giving dinners on my money." The
reference was to the four thousand rubles which the novelist had
received for his book. Turgenev was indeed told, and shortly de-
manded satisfaction, with the alternative of having the case arbi-
trated by a committee of literary men. The arbitration took place
·
168
TURGENEV
in March, 1860. Turgenev was completely exonerated, the judges
declaring that any likeness which might exist between the published
and the unpublished novel was due to the fact that the two authors
were rooted in the same soil.
Turgenev left the room swearing that he would have nothing
further to do with Goncharov, but he buried the hatchet four years
later when they met at the grave of a friend. Yet while his resent-
ment was fading, he was too temperate for a sustained enmity,-
Goncharov's morbid jealousy was growing steadily stronger, until
it took the unmistakable form of a persecution complex, with Tur-
genev in the rôle of his arch-enemy. Fifteen years after the arbi-
tration took place, he composed a circumstantial memoir, setting
down for posterity the history of their relations. These pages,
which were only published in 1924 by the Leningrad Public Li-
brary, make Turgenev the villain of a piece staged in a madman's
mind.
In 1855, we learn, Goncharov confided to Turgenev in great de-
tail the plan of his novel "The Precipice," at which he had been
working for six years and which did not appear until thirteen
years later. "He listened without stirring," writes Goncharov,
"holding his breath, with his ears nearly glued to my lips, as he sat
near me on a small divan in the corner of the study." Out of the
information then imparted to him, Turgenev had carved "A House
of Gentle folk," "Fathers and Children," "On the Eve," and
"Smoke." What he could n't use himself, he turned over to for-
eigners, and that was how Germinie Lacerteux, Das Landhaus am
Rhein, Madame Bovary, and L'Education Sentimentale came to be
written. Having thus robbed his friend, the conscienceless wretch
organized an immense conspiracy designed to keep him informed of
whatever Goncharov wrote or planned or uttered, with a view to
interfering with the latter's work at every turn. The unhappy vic-
tim could never be sure that during his absence from home, his
manuscripts were not being copied by one of Turgenev's thousand
agents; moreover, his conversations were reported verbatim, and his
letters regularly perlustrated. Indeed, it was to these very letters
that Turgenev's minor works owed their existence. Turgenev was
living abroad, first, in order to conceal his literary impotence from
HAMLET AND DON QUIXOTE
169
his compatriots, and then, in order to be able to dispose of the stolen
goods, as well as to see that nothing by Goncharov should be trans-
lated into a Western language.
The document is one to interest psychiatrists, and the literary critic
may well give thought to the paradox whereby Goncharov's diseased
mind was the matrix of the sanest novels in the history of Russian
literature, not excepting Turgenev's.
I J
197
Mula
CHAPTER XXI
MN
*ME
FREEDOM

to
HE other day," Turgenev wrote
from his wintry Paris
Countess Lambert, "my heart
died." The letter bears the date
December 10, 1860. "You un-
derstand what I want to say.
The past dropped completely
away from me, but having sep-
arated from it, I realized that
nothing is left me, that my whole
life dropped away with it."
The reference is obviously to an
unexplained crisis in his rela-
tions with Pauline Viardot.
"It was painful," the letter continues, "but I soon turned to stone.
And now I feel that thus I can still go on living. But should the
least hope ever again spring up in me, I would be shaken to the roots
of my being. This is not the first time that I have known the ice
of numbness under which grief silently hides. Let the crust thicken,
and grief must die." Indeed, already during the previous summer
he had watched "a sad mist" envelop his connection with Mme. Viar-
dot. "In the old days," he had then written to another friend,
"how my heart beat, how obstructed my breathing was, when I ap-
proached it [Courtavenel], and now it has all quieted down-and
it's high time. I intend to spend some ten days here no more.
(These two words speaks of new times.)" Now he felt as though
the tie had "not so much broken as melted away." He had the sense
of being a contemporary of Sosostris, who had by some miracle re-
170
FREEDOM
171
mained among the living, and kept an impersonal love for the good
and the beautiful. "If a man knows that he 's dead," he continued,
with a flippancy hardly to be relished by his correspondent, Countess
Lambert, "that's a sure proof of the immortality of the soul."
The tie was not broken. He remained attached to Pauline and to
all that was Pauline's until he died in the rural retreat he shared with
her and her family. For better or worse he came to accept, like her
other devotees, the rôle of a friend. The strength of his feeling
for her must have led him to exalt her ideas, so that he came to
find a charm in the notion of a platonic friendship, for all his peri-
odic excursions into more carnal and less permanent liaisons. On
the other hand, the very vehemence with which she was wont to pro-
test her amity must have stirred at odd moments the hope, that had
seemed altogether quenched, of a closer bond.
""
At this moment he believed that it was not Pauline Viardot who
kept him from going home, but her namesake, his daughter. He
had been forced to take her away from the Viardots when she was
fifteen because she was unable to get on with them. He established
her in a Paris apartment with an elderly English governess, saw to
it that she took music lessons with the prima donna, and did all he
could to make an attractive jeune fille out of the plain-featured girl.
He did this out of a sense of duty, rather than affection. "For me,
he wrote, "she is, entre nous, another Insarov; I respect her, and
that is little." She had turned out to be a shrewd, strong-minded,
unimaginative, church-going person, exactly the opposite of her
father, and with the makings of a good wife, mother, and house-
keeper. She looked so typically Russian that her father's compa-
triots, strangers to her, instinctively addressed her in her mother-
tongue, of which she did not understand a syllable. If only he
could discharge his obligations by marrying her off to some decent
fellow! He confided to Countess Lambert that there was little in
common between him and his daughter: "She loves neither music
nor poetry, nor nature, nor dogs,-and I love nothing else. That's
why it's hard for me to live in France, where poetry is trifling and
wretched, nature positively unbeautiful, the music makes you think
of puns and vaudeville, and the hunting is abominable."
His dislike of France at this time was overpowering. The very
2
:
172
TURGENEV
...
sounds of its "finical" language made him twitch. He begs Countess
Lambert to write in Russian.
You will see that although it does not have the boneless pliability of
French, for the expression of many thoughts, and indeed the best
thoughts, Russian is wonderfully fine, because of its honest simplicity,
freedom, and strength. Strange-these qualities: honesty, simplicity,
freedom, and strength, are not to be found in the people, but they are
present in the language. . . . Consequently, they must some day appear
in the people, too.
As was so usual with him, his distaste for the foreign scene
served to sharpen his nostalgia for Russia, and vice versa. In
November, 1860, he thanks Foeth for his letters, which carry with
them the sounds and scents of autumn at home: the smell of plowed
ground, when the air is touched with chill, the smoke that hangs
about the grain-kiln, "the honest odor" of the steward's sheepskin,
and the pleasant creaking of his boots in the hall. As the months
of 1861 draw on, and Turgenev is still in Paris, he thinks wistfully
of spring in the Spasskoye park, with the nightingales fluting amor-
ously among the new leaves. The next year, in which he was to
have only two months at home, he again complained to Foeth about
his homesickness. He felt as though his soul had left him, to haunt
his native ravines. By this time some of his friends had begun to
suspect that he cared less for his soul than for his aging, ailing body,
which relished the creature comforts afforded by western Europe.
The novelist protested, and with reason, that the charge was ground-
less. Certainly a viveur would have avoided a place as hateful to
him as Paris was to Turgenev.
What especially rankled in him was that he found himself stay-
ing on in the French capital while Russia shook from stem to stern
with the great news of the emancipation of the serfs. By an irony
of fate, even when the first definite step toward abolition had been
taken by the Government, Turgenev had not been on deck. This
was in the winter of 1857-58, while he was wistfully idling in
Rome. If he had been at home during that season he, like the rest
of the gentry, would have been invited by his emperor to help organ-
FREEDOM
173
ize one of the committees on ways and means of effecting the great
reform.
Here was
Here was something to rouse the most sluggish blood.
a topic to set agog the small colony of Russians gathered in the
city of the Cæsars. Turgenev attended their meetings, and listened
to the speeches with interest. He had things to say on his own ac-
count. He knew the gentry—a stupid, prejudiced, chicken-hearted
lot. They were certain to put spokes in the wheels of progress.
He believed in the force of public opinion. If only the landowners
could be made to understand that the Government would do nothing
to hurt them! If only the emperor could realize that there were
gentle folk who understood his intentions, and were ready to lend a
hand! Perhaps if there were a new review devoted to just these
questions, an organ which would speak to the gentry on behalf of
abolition—a periodical that could be a clearing-house of information
on all the problems connected with the reforms! Turgenev went as
far as to draw up the plans for such a review, but his memorandum
on the subject was the end of it. In those days he could not take his
mind from the enigma of Russia. "Is this Leviathan,” he was writ-
ing to Countess Lambert, "going to stir and take the waves? Or is
it going to get stuck midway?"
.
While the terms of emancipation were being debated in the pro-
vincial committees, Turgenev proceeded to prepare against its com-
ing by introducing a new régime on his own estates. The summer
of 1858 he went home with the firm intention of making an ar-
rangement with his peasants whereby he would till his land with
hired labor only, his serfs paying him an annual quit-rent in money
for the use of the acres portioned off to them for cultivation, and
being free to dispose of their time as they chose. With the aid
of his Uncle Nicholas, he largely succeeded in carrying out this in-
novation, which went far toward facilitating the readjustment ne-
cessitated by emancipation. It is the arrangement on which the lib-
eral landowner Kirsanov in "Fathers and Children" prided himself.
Turgenev expected to lose about a quarter of his income as a result,
but he hoped that eventually hired labor would prove so advantageous
as to make up for the loss; and, besides, he was glad to think that the
174
TURGENEV
U.
peasants were by themselves, and he was by himself; and he liked to
feel that, although he had not legally freed his serfs, he was in fact a
landowner, not an owner of "souls"!
On February 19, 1861, the emancipation manifesto was made pub-
lic. Annenkov telegraphed the details to Turgenev in Paris.
"God bless the Czar!" Turgenev wrote back. Even the most stiff-
necked and suspicious of Alexander's subjects shared this emotion
at that moment. Here was something to have lived for. If only he
could have been at home! When Herzen reproached him for living
abroad at this time, he replied: "Why turn the knife in the
wound? What can I do if I have a daughter whom I must marry
off and on whose account I must willy-nilly sit in Paris? All my
thoughts, my whole being, is in Russia." He did n't care much
about seeing how Moscow and Petersburg received the news; but
if he could have stood for a bit in some local village church, unob-
served and observing, while the peasants listened to their priest read
the words that gave them freedom! There were phrases in the
manifesto, however, that would, he was sure, make the serfs
scratch their poor silly heads: the piece, which, as a matter of fact,
was composed by the Metropolitan of Moscow, looked to him as
though it had been originally written in French, and translated into
Russian by some German. At any rate, there it was, and when he
attended a thanksgiving service in the Russian church in Paris,
his lashes were wet. He saw an old Decembrist in the congrega-
tion, and another Turgenev, an ancient émigré, stood in front of
him, and wiped his eyes with the rest.
But one could n't just be emotional about it. One had to go home
and settle things. It was n't a business to look forward to with
pleasure. He had already had a taste of what it meant to deal
with the peasants. You might come to terms with them about a
quit-rent arrangement, but then you could whistle for your money.
The work they did for you was sure to be botched. A landowner
had best sell his timber-land before the peasants, what with van-
dalism and thievery, had left it bare. No decree could give them
overnight the sense of civic responsibility, confidence, and fair play
which centuries of slavery had crushed in them. Turgenev retailed
the difficulties that must have been reported to him by his manager,
FREEDOM
175
when he described in "Fathers and Children" the vexations of
Nikolai Kirsanov.
His troubles with his hired laborers became unendurable. Some gave
notice or demanded an increase, others left after they had received their
earnest money; the horses sickened; the harness wore out as though it
had been burnt; the work was done carelessly; the threshing-machine
ordered from Moscow turned out to be worthless because of its weight;
another was ruined the first time it was used. . . . The peasants who
had been placed on a quit-rent basis failed to bring the money on time,
and stole wood from the forest. . . . To crown it all, the peasants be-
gan to quarrel among themselves; brothers demanded separate shares,
their wives could not get along together in one house. . . . It became
necessary to examine the conflicting claims, to shout oneself hoarse,
knowing in advance that no correct decision could be reached. There
were not hands enough for the reaping: a neighboring peasant-proprietor,
with the most dignified appearance, had contracted to furnish reapers at
two rubles a desyatina, and had cheated in the most unconscionable man-
ner; his own peasant women demanded unheard-of wages, and mean-
while the grain was dropping out of the ear onto the earth, and then,
the mowing could not be managed, and meanwhile the Trustees' Council
was threatening and demanding full payment of interest on its loan at
once. •
In spite of his preliminary measures, Turgenev had trouble enough
when it came to determining the size of the holdings, and the amount
of the redemption payments for the land assigned to the peasants.
To his own serfs-mostly illiterates, of course-he was not the
author of a book which had worked for the granting of their free-
dom, but merely the helpless, kindly son of their stern old barinya,
Varvara Petrovna,-the Kingdom of Heaven be hers!-an absentee
landlord whom they could bully and fool to the top of their bent.
They kept on hemming and hawing, refusing to put their mark on
the paper that would obligate them definitely and bring the settle-
ment to a conclusion. The law declared the person of the serf free,
without compensation to his owner, but the land, including the
peasant holdings, nominally remained the property of the gentry,
so that the peasants had either to buy their strips, or pay a tax for
the use of them. When the full meaning of this dawned on them,
-
176
TURGENEV
they had a cheated feeling. They struggled darkly with the notion
that the gentry, having lost their serfs, had no further right to the
land. In temporising and delaying they were moved by the hope
that a new and complete "freedom" was bound to come, and it was
some time before they accepted the situation as inalterable.
Turgenev was one of the first to reach a settlement with his
peasants. He ceded them one fifth of his land, and at Spasskoye
presented them with the ground on which their houses stood, as a
gift. He thought he was being generous "to the point of rascality."
He had no illusions about the ungracious spirit in which his kind-
nesses were accepted. The muzhiks behaved as might be expected of
freedmen, more conscious of their rights than of their obligations—
a shrewd and anti-social lot. What was needed in dealing with them
was patience and pedagogy. But if he was not surprised he could n't
help, frequently, being disgusted. As often as not he looked with
doubting eyes at the new order. Yet his faith in the promise held
out by the reforms, though severely tried, was not defeated. He
summed up his feeling about the situation when he wrote in his
novel "Smoke": "The new was slow in taking root; the old had
lost all strength. Incompetents jostled against knaves; life, shaken
up, quivered like a quagmire, and only one great word-Freedom—
moved, like the spirit of God, on the face of the waters."
Not seldom he found his former serfs troublesome neighbors.
They remained obsequious enough, so that he wrote to his steward
begging that when he came to Spasskoye they would not poison his
existence by a continuous kowtowing. But at the same time he had
to see their horses browsing freely over his flower beds. In spite of
their attitude, he continued to consider them in a more or less paternal
way, presenting the Spasskoye villagers with pieces of land, from
time to time; and it is a matter of record that on one occasion he
gave them a strip of woodland which they promptly sold, only to
get drunk on the proceeds. His welfare work included the erection
of a hospital, a home for the aged and a school. He had a chapel
built near a village pot-house to get rid of the latter-the law pro-
viding that a public house could not stand within a given distance of
a house of worship.
The emotional tone of his personal life was not raised by the
FREEDOM
177
momentous reforms with which the sixties opened in Russia. These
three or four years of hope could buoy up only momentarily an un-
happily Laodicean spirit, heavy with self-distrust and a skepticism at
war with his sentimentality. It was now that he quoted appreci-
atively Mme. Viardot's remark that he was le plus triste des hommes.
He felt, as he confessed to Countess Lambert, that he was losing
touch with the world: his inner tissues were still fairly soft, but on
the periphery they were hardening into a shell. And this at a time
when he was writing his great novel, the one which above all others
showed him to be deeply and exquisitely in contact with the core
of the life around him.
When he was not at his desk, he was balancing between the pleas-
ures of a vegetable existence and a mood of what he called "indiffer-
ent dejection." It seemed to him that the days were melting away
"imperceptibly as ice in the sun," or flowing on "like a rusty swamp
river among reeds and grasses," or, again, were being clicked off
quietly "like beads on an abacus"-a fact which he dismissed with
his favorite phrase: "È sempre bene." There were occasional
bright spots: a masquerade ball, a rout in Petersburg, amateur the-
atricals,―he had preserved the talent exhibited in the "Potato The-
ater," the novelty of delivering a public lecture, for the benefit of
the Needy Authors' Fund. For the rest, there was the usual Ger-
man water-cure, a little chess, and much music, the last during the
long stays at Courtavenel and in Paris, and, too, there were sea-
baths at Ventnor. In the little museum there he came upon an ob-
ject which he never forgot: the broken prow of a galley, covered
with the rust of centuries, beneath which was decipherable the ship's
name-Giovane Speranza: Young Hope.
Philandering was part of the routine. There was, for example,
the erratic, shrewd, spendthrift Southerner, Marya Markovich,
whom he described as a Sphinx continuously flashing riddles in the
shape of incomprehensible telegrams. He wrote a preface to one of
her volumes of tales; he escorted her on a few journeys; and he sent
her melancholy letters in which he assured her gallantly of his de-
votion. He spoke of a strange feeling which made him wish to
have her near him, and referred vaguely to certain things that had
happened in his "small Paris room," where they had had long talks,
178
TURGENEV
adding that he did not quite know what to make of it all, but had
worked out an explanation not flattering to himself.
""
So often life presented itself to him as "substantially a disease,”
for which philosophy, science, ethics and art were nothing but ano-
dynes. He was passing, as he wrote Foeth on July 16, 1861,
through the "difficult twilight period of impulses all the stronger
that they are not justified by anything, the period of quiet without
rest, hopes that resemble regrets, regrets that resemble hopes." He
liked this last phrase so well that he saved it for his next novel. "A
little more patience," he went on, "and we shall land in the peaceful
haven of old age, and there we shall find old men's activities and old
men's joys.
By his forty-fourth birthday he had almost
persuaded himself that he had reached that haven. Virtually his
whole life, he considered, lay behind him. And now truly he was
without regret, as he was without hope. He felt himself to be in
the grip of “immutable inhuman laws. . . . The small squeal of my
consciousness," he pursued, "avails here as little as if I were child-
ishly gabbling I, I, I, on the shore of an eternally moving ocean.
The fly is still buzzing, but in a moment it will cease,-thirty or
forty years is also a moment,—and another fly, only with a different
nose, will begin to buzz. And so on, forever and ever.”
龍
​}
CHAPTER XXII
mr
THE NIHILISTS

Vaj
ings, but in "The Russian Her-
ald," a rival review. Financial
considerations probably had lit-
tle to do with his defection, al-
though his health, his travels,
and his growing daughter all put
a strain upon a purse of which he was no more careful than when he
had depended upon an erratic mother's bounty. During the last few
years, his influence if not his prestige with his friends on "The Con-
temporary" had been lapsing. The offices of the publication were in
the house which Nekrasov shared with Panayev, as he shared the
ownership and editorship of the review and also the favors of Pana-
yev's wife. Here friends and contributors came to see Nekrasov at
odd hours, often to discuss tea and literature with him as he lay late
of a morning.
N the Eve" marked for its au-
thor a decline of old associations.
Unlike most of his previous
work, it made its first appear-
ance not in "The Contempo-
rary," with
with which he had
contracted in 1856 for the pub-
lication of all his future writ-
Radoop
Turgenev had felt very much at home in this house, which was
something of a literary inn, until lodging was found there for a
young consumptive critic, one Dobrolubov, whom Nekrasov had dis-
covered and whom Mme. Panayev at once took under her wing.
It was some time before the established contributors became aware
of the new-comer. It was hardly to be expected that when Tur-
179
180
TURGENEV
genev did notice him, he should treat him as an equal. But this
stiff-necked, unfeeling boy was indifferent to how he was treated!
Mme. Panayev, who wasted no affection on Turgenev, takes pleas-
ure in relating how the obscure young reviewer refused the great
novelist's off-hand invitation to dinner along with a distinguished
and eager company, and how the host lamented the lack of enthusi-
asm on the part of the younger generation. He recalled how he
himself had hung breathlessly about for a mere glimpse of Pushkin,
and how he had danced attendance even on Koltzov.
The young man distressed Turgenev in several ways. He had no
patience with his senior's urbanity, he dismissed harshly the latter's
diffuse humanitarianism, he was disgusted by his expansiveness and
by his feminine softness. When an editorial dinner brought them
together at the same table the novelist remarked to his neighbor that
Dobrolubov's eye turned the soup cold and frosted the window-panes.
Nevertheless, Turgenev sought the society of the unfriendly youth
and plied him with talk, until Dobrolubov himself begged him to de-
sist, announcing calmly: "Ivan Sergeich, you bore me." Dobrolu-
bov was equally explicit to another new and like-minded member
of the "Contemporary" staff, Chernyshevsky, to whom he said that
he found Turgenev intolerable.
*
Both of these young Puritans saw literature as a means toward
the end of political and social emancipation. Chernyshevsky had
said something of the same sort in a dissertation on æsthetics the
year that "Rudin" was published. The thesis of this materialist
was that art is a substitute for life, as margarine is a substitute for
butter, and that if life were beautiful, art would lose its raison
d'être. Turgenev's first impulse was to call Chernyshevsky's dis-
sertation worse than a bad book—a bad act. Later, he came to see
that the acuteness of the man's understanding of the times in which
they both lived made up for the bluntness of his literary taste. Yet
Turgenev was naturally displeased to see the growing influence of
this writer on the policy of the review with which he himself had
been so intimately connected. Chernyshevsky's tact, dictated by the
desire to hold a priceless contributor, could only postpone the in-
evitable break. It was not long before the men grouped around
"The Contemporary" were divided into two hostile camps. On one
THE NIHILISTS
181
side of the fence were the older contributors, men, like Turgenev, of
established reputation, genteel connections, exalted, liberal senti-
ments; on the other were Dobrolubov and Chernyshevsky, upstarts,
meanly nurtured commoners, with democratic instincts, radical
views, and a strong utilitarian bias.
Between the two groups were all the barriers of age, and tempera-
ment, and class. "Having been raised on lenten fare," Mme. Pana-
yev credits Turgenev with saying, "these young men are envious of
those more easily reared, and that is why they want to erase from the
face of the earth poetry, the fine arts, all æsthetic pleasure.
They are literary Robespierres. The Frenchman did n't hesitate,
did he, to guillotine Chénier?" Whether Turgenev actually said this
or not, he was n't beyond applauding a friend's remark to the effect
that Dobrolubov's set were a lot of lousy seminarists (both Dobro-
lubov and Chernyshevsky were sons of priests and had attended
divinity school) in whose presence the lamps burned dimly, and who
always left behind them a smell of linseed oil. Chernyshevsky's
manner, he confessed, turned his stomach, and the characters the
man invented simply stank. The senior group preferred to see the
pen wielded by fingers that could manage a fork properly at a gen-
tleman's table.
-
There were moments when Turgenev's friends naturally suc-
cumbed to the notion that they were the guardians of the nation's
light, and at all hazards must prevent its being snatched away from
them and quenched. In a letter written January 4, 1858, Tolstoy
(the moralist not yet having pecked open his shell) asked Botkin:
What would you say if now, when the filthy stream of politics is try-
ing to swallow everything, and to soil, if not to do away with, art,-
what would you say about the people who believe in art's independence
and its immortality coming together, and demonstrating this truth both
by deed (the practice of art) and word (criticism), and trying to save
what is eternal and independent from the accidental, one-sided and all-
pervasive political influence? Why should n't we be those people?
That is, Turgenev, you, Foeth, I, and all those who share our opinions.
Our tool could be a review, a miscellany, what you please.'
Fortunately for this review, it did not materialize, for it would
have been dedicated to a lost cause.
""
182
TURGENEV
"The Contemporary" did not long remain a house divided against
itself. Nekrasov left things pretty much in the "seminarists' "
hands and allowed the others to drop out. Of course he was anx-
ious to retain so distinguished a contributor as Turgenev, and was
very glad to publish in the January issue for 1860 his paper on
Hamlet and Don Quixote, which had originally been delivered as a
public lecture. At the same time, the novelist was being perpetu-
ally chilled and discomfited. Chernyshevsky was given "Asya" to
review. Turgenev disliked his tone. Dobrolubov discussed at
length "On the Eve," using the novel, in his wonted manner, as pre-
text for a discourse on the needs of the time. Turgenev, seeing the
piece in proof, was so offended by the opening paragraphs, which
vilified æsthetic criticism, that he demanded they be stricken out.
The article appeared intact. Then came an anonymous review of
a Russian translation of Hawthorne's "Wonder-Book" which con-
tained a covert allusion to "Rudin" that Turgenev could not stom-
ach. The implication was that he had caricatured a man of heroic
caliber who happened to be penniless, in order to please his rich
friends, to whom poverty was synonymous with roguery.
In October, 1860, Turgenev asked to have his name stricken from
the list of regular contributors to the review. But Annenkov, who
was the go-between, omitted to deliver the letter, in the hope, shared
by the editors, that a peace would be patched up. In the meantime
the quarrel became a matter of public knowledge, and in the June
issue of 1861 Chernyshevsky published a statement that the separa-
tion was due to a difference in political and social views. Turgenev
was outraged by the implicit suggestion that he had been dropped,
when the truth was that he had been the one to withdraw, in spite
of repeated requests and inducements to remain with the magazine.
As a matter of fact, in January, 1861, Nekrasov had tried to enlist
Annenkov's help in winning back the novelist, and when that failed,
he wrote a pleading letter to his old stand-by. But this was one of
the few occasions when Turgenev was not to be shaken. His name
never appeared in "The Contemporary" again except as the object
of a snub.
This "tempest in a glass of water," as he called his quarrel with
"The Contemporary," had at least one serious consequence. It
THE NIHILISTS
183
injured his standing with the younger generation, for whom the
great radical review (in 1861 it had all of six thousand eight hundred
subscribers) was a beacon and a banner. And then there was his
personal loss, the defection of his old friend, the editor. He had al-
ways disliked the man's civic poetry, with its dull didacticism. But
up to now that had in no wise affected his attachment to Nekrasov.
Nekrasov, whom his memories associated with Belinsky himself,
Nekrasov, who had sponsored "A Sportsman's Sketches," Nekrasov,
with whom he had had no reserves, even on the subject of Pauline
Viardot. Well, that was done with. As late as April, 1861, Nekra-
sov commissioned Turgenev to buy him a rifle in Paris, and for a
time the two men remained on speaking terms. But soon all contact
ceased.
Turgenev had, generally speaking, a large tolerance for the moral
lapses of those to whom he was attached by the bonds of habit or
common work. For years he had overlooked Nekrasov's failings,
and ignored, if he did not wholly discredit, the ugly stories that
had circulated about him. But now that he himself was a victim
of the editor's double-dealing, his forbearance gave out. The man
was really as bad as his reputation. Turgenev told Herzen that
he had broken with the editor of "The Contemporary" because he
was dishonest. Herzen had broken with him years before for the
same reason. His close friend Ogarev and that gentleman's first
wife (whom Turgenev evocatively called "the bald-headed Bac-
chante") had been involved in a complicated lawsuit which ended
in the loss of their fortune. Herzen, believing with so many others
that Nekrasov had had his fingers in that pie, made no bones of
calling him, in writing to Turgenev, a scoundrel, a card-sharper,
and a thief. Nekrasov was only whitewashed, and that not en-
tirely, in 1917, many years after all those concerned—including the
chief culprit, Mme. Panayev, the mistress of the suspect-were in
their graves.
Turgenev made peace with Nekrasov only when the latter was
ready to descend into his, in 1877. A suggestion of what the
meeting was like is caught in one of the nondescript brief sketches
included in his "Poems in Prose." One sees the sick man, with his
yellow skin and scant gray beard, his bare chest heaving, difficult
184
TURGENEV
tears in his inflamed eyes, at the moment when he places his hand,
lean as a picked bone, in the large well-kept hand of his horror-
stricken visitor. To Turgenev it seemed as if there were a third
presence in the room, a tall, quiet, wraith-like woman, with deep,
pale, absent eyes and stern, pale, silent lips-Death. "That woman
joined our hands. . . . She reconciled us forever." In the presence
of "the fell sergeant" Turgenev was always ready to exchange for-
giveness: how could he bear ill-will toward any man about to suffer
the unanswerable insult of extinction?
Turgenev's rupture with "The Contemporary" naturally put an
end to his traffic with Chernyshevsky and Dobrolubov. It would
have been terminated shortly in any event, as the former was soon
to pay for his radicalism by imprisonment and twenty years of
exile, while the latter died in 1861 of the same disease that had
carried off both Stankevich and Belinsky. Turgenev remembered
both young men with anything but enmity. His interest in Do-
brolubov had been partly an expression of his self-dissatisfaction.
Here was one of those whole-hearted, rigorous, disciplined men, so
enviably different from himself. Moreover, the novelist came to
recognize in him the signs of an emerging type. Even his prefer-
ment of spectacles to eye-glasses and a sack-suit to a frock-coat
came to be symbolic of the rebel order. This was that new man for
whom he had been looking in "On the Eve." Alternately repelled
and attracted by him as a personality, he studied him as a model,
and, when he came to cast a hero of iron, found good use for the
metal that was in him.
In his essay devoted to "On the Eve," Dobrolubov had remarked
that the youth of the day was facing problems and cherishing ideals
radically different from those which occupied the heroes of Tur-
genev's first two novels. Such a beautiful-souled idealist as Rudin,
for example, was a superannuated figure. "It is clear that the
kind of people we need now are not men who would raise us above
our surroundings, but rather men who would raise our surroundings
to the level of the rational demands of which we have become con-
scious." Turgenev could not fail to realize the justice of these ob-
servations. The complexion of the educated classes was obviously
undergoing a change. "On the Eve" had, as a matter of fact, re-
THE NIHILISTS
185
i
flected the expectant temper of the years that came on the heels of
the Crimean War. Great things happened in the decade that fol-
lowed it (1856-66). The ten millions of serfs were freed. Trial
by jury became a fact. There began to be something like repre-
sentative local government. The universities received a meas-
ure of autonomy. Democratization of the army was initiated.
Tongues were loosened, and minds released, if only temporarily, for
the practical tasks of reconstruction.
Radical democrats like Chernyshevsky and the other leaders of the
"Contemporary" group championed the peasant masses, denounced
the bureaucracy for the manner in which it was carrying out
the reforms, and awaited the coming of a vaguely conceived com-
munism. To the right of this group was a set of gentle folk who,
for one reason or another, were nursing the notion of persuading
the czar to grant a constitution on the English model. To the left,
appearing on the scene about the middle of the decade, were the
young idol-breakers who had no political ax to grind, but lifted
their hands against all the wooden images of virtue around them.
These Nihilists (the term was to be raised from obscurity to a
byword by Turgenev, who caught the type in statu nascendi) were
intent upon freeing the individual from the restrictions imposed by
outworn modes of thought and behavior. They took upon them-
selves the noisy, dusty, exhilarating job of house-wrecking.
"What can be smashed," wrote one of them, "must be smashed.
Whatever stands the blow, is good. What flies into smithereens,
is rubbish. At any rate, hit out, right and left, there will be, and
can be, no harm from it." Their fathers, in their youth, had
sought truth and beauty, so as to attain harmony with a divinely
ordered universe. These young men regarded truth with Pilate's
eyes. They were suspicious of beauty. To them, the marbles and
the canvases they were called on to admire smelled of the peasant
sweat that had purchased these exquisite things. And what was
the sense of beauty anyhow, but a matter of spinal irritation? As
for the universe, they had nothing to say about it until, with the
help of exact instruments, they could learn what it was really like.
Like the French Encyclopedists before them, and the Bolsheviks af-
ter them, they used the brooms of a ferocious materialism and a
186
TURGENEV
self-confident rationalism to clean out the Augean stables of tradi-
tion.
Nihilism was a characteristic if extreme expression of an awk-
ward, earnest, bold, and dissident age; an adolescent age, traces
of whose spirit are to be found even, perhaps especially, in post-
revolutionary Russia. It was a time when children were taught to
address their parents familiarly, and to "thou" them. Young peo-
ple protested against the hypocrisies of social intercourse by af-
fecting rudeness in company. Verses were written, but were con-
sidered a shameful weakness even by those who perpetrated them.
Women gave recalcitrant males, whether fathers or husbands, what
Sir James Barrie calls "the twelve-pound look," bobbed their hair,
put on plain dresses, and went to study midwifery or stenography.
Ill-assorted couples separated with unprecedented frequency (di-
vorce being extremely difficult) and formed new ties without bene-
fit of clergy but with a measure of social approval. Army officers
retired from their wicked profession to open book-shops. Every-
thing, down to the desirability of swaddling babies, became a prob-
lem to be debated in the public prints. People swore by Buechner
as they used to swear by Hegel, and as they were destined to swear
by Marx. All interest in the irrational elements of human nature
was anathematized. The useful was declared to be the sole cri-
terion of morality and the corner-stone of æsthetics.
Throwing overboard, as they did, all established values, the
Nihilists used the gesture with especial zest when it came to the
fine arts. Chernyshevsky and Dobrolubov granted that literature,
for example, had its uses in an imperfect world. Art is justified
in the measure to which it promotes the good life. The writer can
create nothing to surpass reality, or, for that matter, to equal it,
but if he is a keen middleman trading in the ideas which scientists
and philosophers have produced, and if, above all, his fictions make
society conscious of its deformities, and lead to their correction, he
has done a creditable job.
The Nihilists went farther. Pisarev, their chief spokesman,
looked forward with satisfaction to a day when the arts would be
He undertook an assault upon æsthetics as the Bolsheviks
have undertaken an attack upon Heaven, proceeding with the same
no more.
THE NIHILISTS
187
lack of humor, and adhering, but with a more glaring obtuseness,
to the same rational and naturalistic ideal. Pisarev could see some
virtue in a painter: he might sketch a grasshopper to illustrate a
manual on insect pests. But was there any man more useless than
a musician? He expressed his pleasure in the thought that "not
a single man of our generation is likely to waste his life in piercing
sensitive hearts with deadly iambs and anapests." There was per-
haps something to be said for art as a means of recreation. But
even this was doubtful because of the enervating effect of beauty.
Had it not always, like another Delilah, sapped men's fighting
strength?
These ideas are echoed in our day in Russia by a group of critics
who claim to speak in the name of the social revolution. They too
call art in question and seek to deport beauty. But where the atti-
tude of the Nihilists was, as their name implies, mere negation,
their descendants, more wise in their generation, have worked out
a novel æsthetic credo, which reinstates the artist as artisan. As
Trotzky puts it, the imagination of the artist of the future will
"be directed toward working out the ideal form of a thing as a
thing, and not toward the embellishment of the thing as an æsthetic
premium to itself."
Turgenev's temperament, his associations and his opinions all in-
clined him toward the liberal group. The story of his falling out
with "The Contemporary," when the review came into the hands
of the radicals, has just been told. Yet his quarrel with these young
men did not prevent his being influenced by the essence of their
bluntly expressed ideas. After all, Dobrolubov was only saying to
the novelist: "You have your work cut out for you. Study the
times in which you live. Give us recognizable types of men and
women. Show us how they affect and are affected by our immedi-
ate social problems. We don't want fantasies that will take us
away from the harsh realities we have to face. Nor can you afford
to deal with psychological imponderabilia, or to experiment with
form. If you can't help us with our affairs as citizens, you had best
hold your peace." The substance of Belinsky's preachment fifteen
years previously had been virtually the same, except that he had in
addition something to say about artistic truth and formal perfec-
188
TURGENEV
tion. It is plain enough that this insistence on the writer's civic
responsibility worked upon the diffident and malleable man that
Turgenev was. It led him to fasten his attention upon the social
and contemporary aspect of life with greater concentration than if he
had followed the promptings of his own unpolitical mind.
That the invasion of the citadel of culture by the irreverent tough-
minded crew of Nihilists was distasteful to most members of his
set, goes without saying. Men like Botkin and Foeth would have
been glad to have these rowdies locked up. Turgenev's tolerance
balked at such notions, at the same time that all his habits of thought
and feeling inclined him to revolt against the outlook of a Pisarev.
For one thing, while he had long since abandoned many of the
sentiments of his youth, he clung firmly to those that remained,
and one of them was that art is an absolute good. He fed upon
the contemned music, and to the end of his days, Pushkin, who
was worth less to the Nihilists than a fraction of a chemist, acted
upon him as a physical stimulant. Twenty lines by that king of
poets, he said on one occasion, were enough to ease him of his de-
pression, to lighten his spirits, to excite him; not even great and
generous acts could fill him with the glow of admiration which Push-
kin kindled. Literature alone, he said, had the faculty of giving
him a rare serenity, whose coming he recognized by a peculiar phys-
ical happening, an agreeable sensation in his cheeks. And yet these
young radicals, hostile to everything that he cherished, exercised a
certain fascination over him. He felt that they were nearest to
the heart of the age, whose chronicler he considered it incumbent
upon him to be. Besides, here were men, who in spite of their
puerile aberrations and shortcomings, possessed a single-mindedness
and a vitality which he missed in himself, envied in others, and
created in his characters.
yu
LWAYS ill at ease when it came
to traffic with abstract ideas,
principles, opinions, Turgenev
felt sure of himself only when
he was dealing with what is vis-
ible, audible, tangible. Such
matters as division of fractions
or the mechanism of a watch
were, he confessed, quite beyond
him. "When I don't have to do
with concrete figures," he wrote,
"I am entirely lost and I don't
know where to turn. It always
seems to me that exactly the op-
posite of what I say could be asserted with equal justice. But if I
am speaking of a red nose and blonde hair, then the hair is blonde
and the nose red; no amount of reflection will change that.”
Mellidum
KA, BAND
WHAQUE
Bon t
läs
17'x
CHAPTER XXIII
"FATHERS AND CHILDREN"

MEID!
ཡ་ལ་
Belinsky had said at the outset of Turgenev's career that while
he was extremely observant, he had no imagination. The young
author had agreed with this judgment whole-heartedly. To the end
he was possessed by a self-distrust which would not allow him to
rely upon his inner consciousness and led him to lean heavily upon
the world. George Moore went to the root of the matter when he
said that Turgenev had the illuminative rather than the creative
imagination and that he "borrowed" his stories, leaving them, as
far as structure went, much as he found them.
Turgenev confessed that he envied the English their secret of
making a successful plot, an ability which he found lacking in
himself as in so many Russian writers. He had a prodigious mem-
189
190
TURGENEV
ory, which served him well. He liked to insist that his characters
were not invented, but discovered. He stalked them with the pa-
tience, the eagerness, and the skill with which he pursued his wood-
cock and his partridge. Indeed, it appears that he almost invari-
ably drew from living models and that his fictions were fathered
by experience rather than by fancy. He told a friend that it was
his custom, after meeting a stranger, to set down in his note-book
any peculiarities he had observed. He studied Lavater's work on
physiognomy from cover to cover. Drawing-rooms, railway car-
riages, and reading-rooms were his favorite observatories. He did
not hesitate to incorporate verbatim in his story, "The Brigadier,"
a private letter which he found among his mother's papers. If
he had had his choice, he once remarked, he would have been a
writer like Gibbon. The novelist had the historian's need for docu-
mentation. He proved his artistry by digesting his documents and
turning them into flesh and blood.
In the case of "Fathers and Children," as in most of his writ-
ings, the germ came to Turgenev not in the form of a situation
or an idea, but in that of a person. Chancing to meet in a railway
train a provincial doctor who, talking shop, had something to say
on the subject of anthrax, Turgenev was struck by the man's rough,
matter-of-fact, candid manner. It flashed upon him that here was
a representative of an emerging and significant type. He relates
in his Reminiscences how he began to look about him for other signs
pointing to the rise of this type. He could find no effigy of his
traveling companion in any work of fiction. But as he attended
literary dinners in Moscow and read the Petersburg reviews, it
seemed to him that he was always just on the edge of tracking down
his quarry. And yet the traces were so faint and unfamiliar that
he sometimes thought he was "chasing a ghost."
The notion of building a novel around this figure occurred to
him during his stay at Ventnor, where he had gone in August,
1860, for the sake of the bathing. When he confided his project
to one of his literary friends there, he met only discouragement,
and with his usual suggestibility dropped the idea forthwith. Later
in the summer when he was back in Paris again, the thought re-
turned to him with renewed strength, and he found himself in-
==
"FATHERS AND CHILDREN"
191
creasingly absorbed in it. In October he was writing to Countess
Lambert that the stuff for his new novel was all in his head, but
that "the spark which must kindle everything had not yet blazed up.
""
It was presumably about this time that he began to get up for
his characters the "dossiers" without which he could not begin work
on a novel. He was in the habit, as he told Henry James among
others, of setting down "a sort of biography of each of his char-
acters, and everything that they had done and that had happened to
them up to the opening of the story." As in the case of "On the
Eve," he kept a diary for one of the characters, but this time it was
not the journal of a minor figure, but of the protagonist, Bazarov,
whom he was modeling partly on his railway companion, partly on
another man who was later exiled to Siberia. He was drawing his
people, by his own account, as he might have sketched "mushrooms,
leaves, trees," things that he had seen until, in the Russian phrase,
they had "calloused his eyes." In the winter he was at work on the
first chapters and by July 19 of the next year he was telling Countess
Lambert that in about two weeks he expected to taste his "only
joy in life," that is, "writing the last line." The next six months
were given over to revision. In later years he asserted that he
had written the novel seemingly without volition, almost surprised at
what came from his pen.
In September the manuscript went to the judicative Annenkov for
a first reading. He swallowed it in two days. Then it went the
rounds. Turgenev, who at first had been buoyed up with confidence
in his book, became more and more doubtful of it as he received his
friends' comments. Katkov, the editor of "The Russian Herald,"
in which it was to make its first appearance, disliked it for what
he considered its outrageous adulation of the radicals. Others
condemned it as an attack upon the younger generation. Countess
Lambert had nothing good to say for it. In the distress and con-
fusion that seized him, Turgenev had an impulse, which he did not
obey, to feed the manuscript to the flames. What increased his
perplexities was the news of student riots in Petersburg. Should
he, in such circumstances, allow a work which had a bearing, how-
ever remote, upon the political situation, to appear in type? Tur-
genev's hemmings and hawings went on until the exasperated An-
192
TURGENEV
nenkov, who as usual had taken it upon himself to see the manu-
script through the press, was ready to wash his hands of it. The
author wrote to Countess Lambert that he finally published the
book only because Katkov insisted on having it and because he him-
self needed the money.
When that delightful period was over during which the figures
for his novel floated like nebulæ through his mind, and he once had
a good grasp of his characters, Turgenev's final move, according to
James, was the arduous business of devising the action which would
lead them to reveal their inner natures. In "Fathers and Chil-
dren" the novelist put Bazarov through his paces by taking this
brusque commoner on a visit to a house of gentle folk; by leading
him into arguments with his two middle-aged, cultivated hosts; by
making him fall in love with a beautiful, ineffectual, frigid lady;
by involving him in a stupid, almost comical duel with one of his
hosts, because he had been caught kissing the mistress of the other;
by engaging him in talk with his earnest, apish, pliant disciple; by
sending him home to see his pathetic old parents; by bringing upon
him an untimely death, the result of an infection contracted at a
rural post-mortem.
One might perhaps wish that the author had seen fit to show
Bazarov in the urban setting in which a man of his type was more
likely to be found, rather than against the manorial background
with its lax, gracious, somnolent atmosphere. Then, too, the mod-
ern reader is inclined to resent Turgenev's awkwardness in dealing
with the natural sciences, to which his hero is devoted. But these
are only minor flaws. Turgenev gave to this work all that was in
him: the fruit of his contacts with men and women, his knowledge
of Russian social history, his lyric sensitiveness to the natural
scene and to the fine vibrations of the human mood, his penchant
for satire, his little faith overlaid by a composed despair.
From the moment when we first see Bazarov taking his time
about offering his bare red hand to his host, and turning down the
collar of his nondescript coat to show his long, thin face, with its
sandy side-whiskers and cool green eyes, to the moment, a few
months later, when the dying agnostic raises one eyelid in horror
as the priest administers the last sacrament, we are in the presence
.

"FATHERS AND CHILDREN"
193
of a torso modeled, if not quite with the elemental energy, yet with
all the sure skill of a Rodin. Turgenev believed that to be a
novelist was to be "objective." He meant that novel-writing was
an art which could be practised only by one who was concerned
with representing the world about him, rather than in rendering
its effect upon him; an art which required an interest in and a
cumulative knowledge of other people's lives, as well as an under-
standing of the hidden forces that shaped them. He himself did
not quite answer to this description of a novelist. Alert as he was
to every aspect of the sensible world, his mind nevertheless was a
mind that was turned inward. He lived, like a character in one of
his early works, in a room walled with mirrors, and created most
of his heroes in his own image. Bazarov would seem to be the
magnificent exception to this rule. This hard-headed medic, with
his plebeian pride, his contempt for the finicky gentry, his scorn of
the fine arts, his disgust with all accepted values, this cynic, this bar-
barian, this "Nihilist" is at once an extraordinary example of what
objective insight can achieve, and in some respects a fulfilment of
Turgenev's day-dream of the self he vainly longed to be.
An hour and a half after finishing the novel, he noted in his diary
(July 30, 1861) that while writing the book he had felt "an involun-
tary attraction" toward his hero. A few months after the book
appeared, he wrote to Foeth that he did n't know whether he liked
Bazarov or not. Seven years later he stated publicly that he agreed
with all of Bazarov's views, except for nis ideas on art. On the
other hand, we have the author's word for it that Nikolai Petrovich
Kirsanov was something of a self-portrait, and Nikolai Petrovich is
one of the two men who symbolize the older generation where Ba-
zarov is the epitome of the younger. It is certain that the admiration
he felt for his hero went hand in hand with regret for the traditions
the man was bent on smashing.
One of Bazarov's sentiments was undoubtedly shared by his cre-
ator-dislike of the gentry. Indeed, Turgenev's treatment of them
in this novel afforded him the strange satisfaction of the flagellant.
He spoke of the book, shortly after it was published, as having been
directed against the class into which he was born. Look at these
gently nurtured Kirsanovs, both young and old, and what do you

194
TURGENEV
1
ง
find? "Weakness, flabbiness, inadequacy." And these were gen-
tlefolk of the better sort. "If the cream is bad, what can the milk
be like?" How well he knew these people-their good intentions,
their feeble achievements, their sensibilities, so readily touched by
the glow of a setting sun which makes the aspens look like pines,
or by enchanted memories of a dead love, or by a line of verse, or
by a point of honor! But the knowledge which made him contemp-
tuous of them, stirred his pity, too, and Nikolai Petrovich, at least,
is a lovable fellow. When it came to the drawing of Bazarov's
parents, Turgenev bathed them in an atmosphere of such tenderness
and burdened them with so cruel a tragedy, that these passages are
among the most moving in literature. As he wrote the last lines,
in which the old couple are shown visiting the grave of their only
son, Turgenev had to turn away his head, so that his tears would not
blot the manuscript, and even in such a dry-eyed age as ours, few
readers will finish the paragraph without blinking.
Throughout the novel, the writing is on an extraordinarily high
plane. What is not perfectly expressed, is perfectly suggested.
The description of Bazarov's illness gave Chekhov, a physician as
well as an artist, the sensation of having "caught the infection from
him." It is true that the plot, while plausible enough, has not the
strength of inevitability. But, without question, Turgenev achieved
his intention. (The method used here is his habitual one—realiza-
tion of the characters not by analysis of their consciousness, but by
exhibition of their behavior. Like so many of his fellow-craftsmen,
he exalted into a dogma his way of working. When he was brood-
ing over the plan for "Fathers and Children" he set down for a
literary protégé one of the few precepts that should be weighed by
every practitioner of the novelist's art: "The writer must be a
psychologist, but a secret one: he must sense and know the roots of
phenomena, but offer only the phenomena themselves, as they
blossom or wither." Ten years earlier he had said, in the course
of a critique, much the same thing in other words: "The psy-
chologist must disappear in the artist, as the skeleton is concealed
within the warm and living body, for which it serves as a firm but
invisible support."
"Fathers and Children" made its appearance in the second num-
""
"FATHERS AND CHILDREN"
195
Ung
ber of "The Russian Herald" for 1862, and shortly afterward was
published as a separate volume. When Turgenev returned to
Petersburg from Paris, in the spring of the year, he found the
capital excited by a number of conflagrations, which rumor put at
the door of revolutionary incendiaries, students and Poles. An ac-
quaintance, meeting him on the Nevsky, exclaimed: "See what
your 'Nihilists' are doing! They 're setting Petersburg on fire!"
Turgenev had not invented the term, any more than he had invented
the type, but his employment of the word and the character alike
made for the vogue of both. A girl wanting a new frock was likely
to face her parents with the threat of becoming a Nihilist, if they
did n't come round. Where, as in Russia of the sixties, literature
has great prestige, the novelist is peculiarly able to become the ar-
biter of fashion in personality. Besides, the novel was read by
everybody, from the empress down to people who had n't opened a
book since their school-days, and before long one discovered at
least a dash of Bazarov in nearly every young man of independent
spirit.
Not that the general public understood Turgenev's intention in
the novel. The conservatives applauded him for having "carica-
tured" and shown up these dreadful Nihilists. The radical youth,
placing the author's sympathies where the conservatives did, was
ready to burn him in effigy. Some few recognized themselves in
Bazarov, and acknowledged the book to be an honest objective
study of "the children," by a fair-minded representative of the
older generation. Most of them, however, saw in it a slanderous
attack. Some of his young compatriots in Heidelberg, he said,
wrote to him threatening to descend upon him in Baden to settle
accounts. It was a disconcerting reception. Turgenev wrote bit-
terly to a friend: "I was struck by hands I wanted to clasp, and
caressed by hands from whose touch I wanted to fly to the ends of
the earth." Fortunately for his peace of mind he never knew the
worst: a secret police report for 1862, which only came to light re-
cently, commended the author for a novel which shook the doctrine
of materialism and "branded our revolutionists with the biting name
of Nihilist."
It was the greater blow to him to find that he was at odds with
196
TURGENEV
the younger generation because, aside from the disagreeable busi-
ness of being considered an old fogey, if he had n't made his public
see that he admired Bazarov, then he was a failure as a novelist.
"If the reader does n't love Bazarov," he wrote to a friend soon
after the book appeared, "with all his coarseness, heartlessness, piti-
less dryness, and brusqueness, it's my fault. I have n't achieved my
purpose. I envisaged a somber figure, savage, huge, half-
imbedded in the soil, strong, honest, a man of wrath, and yet for
all that doomed to perish, because he was only on the threshold of
the future." This giant a caricature! And yet Turgenev could
find only two men who knew at what he was aiming: Botkin and
Dostoyevsky, a strange pair. And perhaps a third, the poet Maikov,
to whom he wrote: "Now I can say to myself that I could n't have
written something altogether absurd if such people as you and Dos-
toyevsky pat me on the head, and say, Very good, my boy, I'll give
you eighty per cent. on that!" For his own part, he was as nearly
content with his book as he ever could be. He told Annenkov as
much, saying that he was "for the first time . . . seriously satis-
fied" with his work, although sometimes he felt as though it had
been written by a stranger.
Some half a dozen years after the appearance of the book, a Ger-
man friend, Ludwig Pietsch, being about to write a critique on it,
was urged by Turgenev to express astonishment at the attitude of the
Russians toward it. Certainly Pietsch as a clear-sighted outsider
could see the absurdity of taking Bazarov as a vicious lampoon
against the younger generation. Turgenev went on:
Do rather show that I conceived the fellow entirely too heroically, too
ideally (which is true), and that the Russian youth is altogether too
thin-skinned. Because of Bazarov I was (and for that matter, still am)
so spattered with muck and filth; so much abuse and opprobrium, so
many curses, have been heaped upon my head (Vidocq, Judas, lout, ass,
poisonous toad, spittoon—this was the least that was said of me) that it
would be a satisfaction to me to prove that other nations look at the
matter in a different light.
What kept the young people from accepting Bazarov as a por-
trait of themselves was the fact that, aside from his lack of a
"FATHERS AND CHILDREN"
197
political program, he had no interest in bettering the lot of the
masses, which became, as the years passed, their fundamental con-
cern. On a hot afternoon Bazarov and the young Kirsanov are
lying in the shadow of a haystack and philosophizing. The Nihilist
is in a mood for metaphysical speculation. Talk turns upon Russia,
and he observes to his companion in a deliberate tone:
“Here, for instance, you said to-day, as we passed the cottage of your
steward, Philip,-it's such a fine, white one,-you said that Russia
would attain perfection when the last peasant would have such a house,
and every one of us ought to help to bring this about. . . . But as you
spoke I hated this last peasant, Philip or Sidor, for whom I am to wear
myself out, and who won't even say thanks to me. And what do I
want with his thanks, anyway? He'll live in a white cottage, and bur-
docks will be growing out of me. Well, and what next?”
•
To the advanced youth such unsocial ideas were simply abomi-
nable. And yet it was not out of character for Bazarov to speak in
this fashion, because what Turgenev was representing was not so
much a revolutionist as the stuff out of which revolutionists came
to be made. It is conceivable that he meted out to his hero a pre-
mature death precisely because his denying and denouncing was
merely preliminary to a more constructive phase of social criticism.
In saying that Bazarov was "doomed to perish because he was only
on the threshold of the future," he may have meant just this. But
looking at the novel in the light of the author's personality, it seems
more likely that he killed off his hero in obedience less to a law
of that man's nature than to a law of his own nature. Turgenev
was inclined to accept the idea of an ironic fate, smiting the strong
with the weapons of chance, and passing over the nullities, and more-
over, he could never quite bring himself to crown the work of his
characters with success, or to grant them that sense of accomplish-
ment which he had never fully tasted, himself.
:
!
MATORKUTERUS
IGHTEEN hundred and sixty-
one should rightly have been a
red-letter year for Turgenev.
There was the Act of Emanci-
pation. There was, on the
personal plane, his work on
"Fathers and Children." But
whatever satisfaction both may
have offered him, was tainted
by a number of unpleasant-
nesses. A publisher who had
undertaken to get out a collected
edition of his writings, in four
volumes, went bankrupt, and
left him out of pocket. Early in the year he quarreled with Nekra-
Before the year was over he was twice on the verge of a duel
with Tolstoy.
SOV.
11
CARGARD
{{
CHAPTER XXIV
In
DIFFERENT CLAY

Cutie
SA 3 PRESSE) »
INSTEIN.
sallin
MELLEM
The history of the relation of these two is the record of the con-
flict between a man whose conscience was active chiefly where his
writing was concerned, and who was too weak to cling to any rigid
standard in his personal life, and, on the other hand, a magnificent
artist, whose deepest, if at first unconscious interest, was not good
writing, but the good life. They had been hearing of each other,
through mutual friends, and admiring one another's work, for
some time previous to their first meeting. Tolstoy, months in ad-
vance of their actual encounter, commissioned a young relative who
knew Turgenev, to embrace the novelist for him, and a few weeks
before they came together Turgenev wrote to Tolstoy, then on the
Crimean front, hoping he would be spared by the bullets, for the
198
DIFFERENT CLAY
199
Muse. "A Sportsman's Sketches," Tolstoy placed with Rousseau,
Dickens, the Gospels, Prescott's "Conquest of Mexico," as a book
which deeply influenced him in his teens. When his own sons were
growing up, he recommended it to them as better than any of Tur-
genev's novels. As for Turgenev, he cried hurrah over Tolstoy's
"Sebastopol Tales," and drank a glass of champagne to the author.
Three years earlier, while confined at Spasskoye, he had discovered
in "The Contemporary" an anonymous piece, called "Childhood,”
which he was moved to read aloud to a group including Tolstoy's
sister, who recognized the life portrayed, but did not suspect that
her brother Leo was capable of such writing.
By the time the two men were finally brought together, Turgenev
was already the leading literary figure in Petersburg, and, at thirty-
seven, was beginning to assume his rôle of the middle-aged man.
Tolstoy, ten years his junior, was an army officer, with more than
one published narrative to his credit, and a strong taste for wine,
cards, and gipsies. They had no sooner met, on November 21,
1855, than Tolstoy became Turgenev's guest, or what Varvara Pe-
trovna, who allowed a "guest" only three days, would have called a
"resident." A friend of Turgenev's, coming into his Petersburg
apartment one winter morning, saw a saber on the hatrack, and
was asked by the servant to be quiet, as its owner, the young Count
Tolstoy, was asleep in the drawing-room. The young man was
sowing his wild oats with an abandon impossible to his elder, who
took both his vices and his virtues more easily. On December 9,
1855, Turgenev was writing to Annenkov: "Just think of it!
Tolstoy has been staying with me over two weeks. . . You can't
imagine what a fine and remarkable fellow he is, although, because
of his savagery and buffalo-like stubbornness, I've nicknamed him
the Troglodyte. I've conceived a strange affection for him, which
has something paternal about it.”
This affection was soon tried, and sorely. The count had as
many spines as a hedgehog, and Turgenev never knew where to
have the discomfiting creature, who was alternatively proud and
humble, reserved and effusive, earnest and frivolous, simple and full
of snobbish affectations. Tolstoy's behavior in the "Contemporary”
circle was a constant source of irritation. He seemed to take pleas-
200
TURGENEV
ure in stepping on every one's toes. He came uninvited to a dinner-
meeting of the group, held in memory of Belinsky, and inquired of
the company how they knew that Belinsky was n't "a son of a
b." They revered George Sand. Tolstoy sneered at her. In
the hearing of Mme. Panayev, who practised what the lady novelist
preached, he would remark that George Sand's women should be
tied to the wheels of a chariot and dragged through the streets of
Petersburg. When they spoke warmly of Herzen, he made dis-
paraging comments. And he loathed their Shakspere. In his diary
he noted: "The editors of 'The Contemporary' repel me. A
meeting of litterateurs and learned men is repulsive." He thought
that these luminaries with whom Turgenev was then on such good
terms, were incapable of the generous self-surrender which he de-
manded in human intercourse-demanded, but himself refrained
from, except for sudden embarrassing outbursts of affection.
Turgenev found himself involved in futile arguments with his
young friend, which only ended in sullen tiffs. Foeth's memoirs
offer a glimpse of two such squabbles, which took place at Nekra-
sov's. Thus we hear Tolstoy shouting, with a flash of his madden-
ing steel-gray eyes:
"I stand in the doorway, with a dagger or a saber, and I say, ‘As
long as I live, no one shall enter here.' That I call conviction!
And you you're trying to hide your real thoughts from each
other, and you call that conviction!"
Turgenev, in the thin falsetto of rage, (he retained the shrill
voice of adolescence late in life) gasps irrelevantly:
"Why do you come here? This is n't where you belong. Go to
Princess So-and-So."
"I don't have to ask you where to go, do I? Anyway, idle talk
won't turn into conviction because of my coming."
And then there is the scene in which Turgenev, his hand at his
throat, and "with the eyes of a dying gazelle," squeaks: "I can
no more; I have bronchitis," whereat Tolstoy grumbles: "Bron-
chitis is an imaginary disease; bronchitis is a metal," and forthwith
retires to the next room, where he curls up in glum silence on the
divan. Turgenev strides up and down in despair.
"Darling Tolstoy," says a friendly witness, trying to make peace,
DIFFERENT CLAY
201
"do calm yourself. You don't know how he esteems and loves
you."
But Tolstoy, with dilating nostrils, growls:
"I won't stand for it! He does it to tease me.
It's on purpose
that he's pacing up and down and wagging his democratic
haunches."
In the beginning, at any rate, absence acted as a counter-irritant,
and when they were apart Turgenev felt that their differences were
due to an unfortunate set of circumstances, which would have no
power over them when they met again. "In a word," he wrote, "I
love you, that's certain." Turgenev was in Paris in February,
1857, when Tolstoy came there to free himself from a sentimental
entanglement. The two saw a good deal of each other. Turgenev
carried the newcomer off with him when he went to be doctored at
Dijon, and they sat inside the hearth to warm their bones, each of
them working on a story. Returning to Paris, they went together
to cafés, churches, and concerts. They spent pleasant evenings
before the fire over a bottle of wine. They were bored with each
other. They quarreled. They made up. Turgenev was hardly a
jovial companion, what with his black melancholy and raving hypo-
chondria. He found his comrade more reasonable than heretofore,
although still at odds with himself and so unable to put others at
ease.
Tolstoy's diary for these weeks reflects his shifting attitude to-
ward his friend. Turgenev is a bad man, Turgenev is not really
bad; Turgenev is lively, Turgenev is dull; Turgenev is a child (this
on the occasion of a visit to a shooting-gallery); Turgenev is going
to pieces; Turgenev is vain, Turgenev is cold, Turgenev is swim-
ming in his unhappiness; Turgenev is intelligent, Turgenev has no
faith in intelligence, Turgenev does not believe in anything. Tol-
stoy admires Turgenev, Tolstoy avoids him, Tolstoy loves him.
But "Turgenev does not love, he only loves to love." When the
younger man left for Geneva in the spring he made this entry in
his journal: "Went to see Turgenev. On leaving him, I cried.
I don't know just why. I love him very much. He has made-he
will make a new man of me." Later in the year Tolstoy was writing
to Foeth: "Turgenev went to Winzig to take the waters for his
202
TURGENEV
bladder, and will stay until August. The devil take him! I'm
sick of loving him. He won't cure his bladder; he 'll only deprive
us [of his company]."
It would appear that this period of intimate contact only served
to bring out their essential incompatibility. Tolstoy noted in his
diary that neither of them had any real sympathy with the other.
During their stay in Paris Turgenev was writing to Annenkov:
"In spite of all my efforts, I can't get close to Tolstoy. He's built
too differently from me. Whatever I love, he does n't, and vice
versa. In his presence I feel embarrassed, and it is probably the
same with him. . . . He will develop into a remarkable person,
and I shall be the first to admire and applaud him, at a distance."
He had long since given up the notion of playing the mentor to this
extraordinary youth. He had realized with complete humility that
when it came to writing, Tolstoy had nothing to learn from him.
Already the previous year he was telling the young author: "We
have nothing in common except literary interests, I'm convinced.
Your life is moving toward the future, mine is built upon the past.
I cannot follow you. You cannot follow me, either. You are too
remote from me, and besides, you stand too firmly on your own feet
to become any one's follower. . You are too astute not to know
that if either of us is to envy the other, it will have to be I."
As a matter of fact, envy was utterly foreign to Turgenev's nature.
From the very beginning to the very end of their relations, he
never ceased to appreciate and extol the genius of the artist, how-
ever much he was vexed by the vagaries of the man. "When this
young wine ripens," he wrote of Tolstoy in 1856, "it will be a
drink fit for the gods," and not long afterward he made bold to
declare the young man "the only hope" of Russian literature.
Although Turgenev knew very well that it was impossible to put
leading-strings on such a skittish fellow, he could not refrain from
advice and remonstrance. With more insight than efficacy, he
warned Tolstoy against locking himself into "a system," a rigid
set of ideas. "Truth is like a lizard," he wrote, "and a system is
its tail, but Truth will leave its tail in your hand and escape; she
knows that she will soon grow another." And he urged Tolstoy
to read Shakspere, whom he himself had by heart. Above all, Tur-
DIFFERENT CLAY
203
genev demanded that the man should stick to literature, for which
he was so obviously cut out, and that, being a writer, he should not
try to be anything else. Hearing that Tolstoy thought of going in
for forestry, he wrote to Annenkov, "What a man! Though he
has excellent legs, he insists on walking on his head." (December
1, 1857). Just a month earlier Tolstoy had himself written to
Botkin: "Thank goodness that I did n't listen to Turgenev, who
tried to persuade me that a litterateur must be nothing but a littera-
teur. That was n't in my nature.
What Turgenev feared
was that a "conviction," such as Tolstoy was ready to defend with
the sword, was likely to limit an artist's field of vision. Could he
have failed to see that the vitality which is apt to produce adherence
to a "system"-intense allegiance to a way of thought and a way
of life is the compulsion back of great art?
Not that Tolstoy had by that time achieved a coherent "system.'
In his own words, his mind was then a cage in which a cat and a
dog kept unwilling company. The cat was a jungle creature, at
home in the wild, innocent alike of reason and conscience, beautiful
and happy in its natural brutality. The dog was a Christian, teach-
able, reflective, thirsting for moral sanctions, dedicated to the hu-
man habitation, and treading with a somewhat sad obedience the
path of brotherly love. The wranglings of these two tenants of
Tolstoy's spirit filled his inner life. They were at the root of the
unpredictability and contrariness of his temper, which, added to a
proud, intolerant, independent manner, rendered intercourse with
him so trying.
ور
It was impossible to get on with this difficult genius who so often
acted like a wrong-headed prig, this self-righteous Puritan who
behaved like a rake, and, with little originality, called Paris "Sodom
and Gomorrah," only to leave it for the gaming-tables and cocottes
of Baden! If Turgenev bent to pat the dog, he was likely to be
scratched by the cat; if he stroked the cat, the dog would show his
teeth. How could one not be vexed with a man who so closely
identified the good life with the natural life, that he would have the
race throw culture to the winds? To exalt Nature, who knows
neither justice nor reason, neither good nor evil; to dismiss culture,
which is man's sole refuge from the horror of the natural universe!
204
TURGENEV
How could one bear with a man who condemned consciousness (in
1851 Tolstoy wrote in his diary: "Consciousness is the greatest
moral evil that can befall a man."), and who, contemptuous of
humanity's experience, was inclined to erect his own findings into a
universal law?
And yet Turgenev could not but admire one who did not, like
so many educated Russians, content himself with the intellectual
spoils of Europe, but was trying to earn his ideas in the sweat of
his brow. At the same time it was easier for Turgenev to deal
with a plebeian Dobrolubov, who would make art the handmaiden of
social reform, than with this young count, who, while saying that
art was supremely worth while and indeed the chief hope of a
perfectible world, actually distrusted the power of art, and was al-
ways on the verge of interrupting the artist that was in him-to
do a little open preaching. Turgenev found Tolstoy writing stuff
that seemed to him like "a compound of Rousseau, Thackeray, and
the Shorter Orthodox Catechism."
The fact that they had one social background and the same train-
ing and traditions, only served to emphasize their differences. Tur-
genev refused to understand a man who was "a mixture of a poet,
a Calvinist, a fanatic, an aristocrat; something reminding one of
Rousseau, but more honest than Rousseau, a highly moral and at
the same time unattractive creature." Tolstoy, for his part, could
not stomach a man who was a mixture of a poet, a skeptic, a jester,
a well-born democrat; a highly reasonable and at the same time
womanish creature. A person of Tolstoy's make-up was bound to
see in Turgenev's urbanity mere insincerity; in his moderation, the
despicable temper of a Laodicean; in his partiality for the intellect,
a chilling aloofness from what is vital; and in his whole outlook
and attitude what another friend condemned as "meek cheerful
indifference."
As an old man, looking back across the years, Tolstoy complained
that Turgenev had never understood him, but had only valued in
him what he did not prize in himself, whereas he had been disgusted
by his senior's overweening æstheticism and lack of convictions on
every subject but literature. In the conflict between these two per-
sonalities there is not a little that recalls the relations between the
DIFFERENT CLAY
205
Dutch humanist, Erasmus, the first man of letters in modern times,
and the young zealot who began by admiring and ended by berating
him-Martin Luther.
The discovery of their incompatability was far from putting an
end to their intercourse. In the beginning Turgenev blamed him-
self for their failure to get on together. "I was awkward in try-
ing to get close to him," he thought, "and too hasty in withdraw-
ing." Attracted to each other in spite of themselves, they repeatedly
tried to fraternize, only to rediscover, as Turgenev wrote to Foeth
in 1859, that they were "made of different clay." The same year
he announced in a letter to Botkin: "I am through with Tolstoy:
as a man he no longer exists for me. I wish him and his talent
everything good, but as for me, no sooner have I said how d'you do?
to him than I want to say good-by. We are at opposite poles. If
I like the soup, I am certain Tolstoy will abhor it-and vice versa.
And yet the dislike that they felt for each other was not of the
kind that makes for mutual avoidance. They were drawn to each
other as though what they really felt was that ambivalent emotion
which excruciated Catullus. If we are to believe Turgenev, it was
Tolstoy who sought him out, to plague and madden him. Tolstoy
probably viewed the matter otherwise. Be that as it may, a great
deal of irritation must have accumulated on both sides when, one
May morning in 1861, a furious quarrel flamed up between them
at the house of their friend, Foeth.
"
Their host's account of the clash, combined with the reported
remarks of Turgenev himself, admits us to the scene. The conver-
sation turning on the up-bringing of Turgenev's daughter, he said
that her English governess had asked him, with British punctilious-
ness, to name the sum the girl should spend on charity.
"She insists," he went on, "that my daughter should visit the
poor, and take their worn clothes home, to mend them with her own
hands."
"You think that's a good thing?" asked Tolstoy.
"Yes," said Turgenev. "The girl gets in close touch with actual
want."
"And I think," Tolstoy shouted, "that a starched miss stepping
squeamishly into a poor man's lodgings is an abomination. A
206
TURGENEV
dressed-up girl holding dirty stinking tatters in her lap takes part in
an insincere theatrical scene."
Turgenev's nostrils dilated: "I beg you not to say that."
"Why should n't I say what I think?" from Tolstoy.
"So you think I'm bringing up my daughter badly?"
"I meant what I said and without being personal I simply ex-
pressed my thoughts." At this point, to go by Turgenev's re-
ported story, Tolstoy blurted out: "If she were your legitimate
daughter, you would educate her differently."
Foeth, discreetly passing over this remark, omits also Turgenev's
retort: "If you keep on talking like that, I'll slap your face!"
Turgenev dashed from the room, returning shortly to apologize
definitely to his hostess, but only vaguely to Tolstoy. The two of
them left the house forthwith, to go their separate ways. The sub-
sequent history of the affair is a tangled one. From a way-station
Tolstoy wrote a letter to Turgenev, asking for a written apology
which he could show the Foeths. A reply failing to come at once,
and his rage mounting, he wrote again, challenging the offender to
a duel, and proceeded to send for his pistols. Turgenev had an-
swered the first letter promptly, but a mistake of his messenger had
delayed Tolstoy's receipt of this reply. It contained a straight-
forward apology, which he said Tolstoy could show the Foeths.
Tolstoy wrote an acceptance of this apology, to which Turgenev
answered:
I say in all sincerity that I would gladly stand under your fire in order
to wipe out my truly insane words. That I spoke as I did is so foreign
to my habits that I cannot ascribe it to any other cause than irritation,
due to the extreme and constant antagonism of our views. That is why,
in parting from you forever I consider it my duty to repeat that in
this matter you were right and I was wrong.
For several days a duel had seemed inevitable to him. Now he felt
that everything was over for good and all.
Some six weeks after the quarrel, Tolstoy's diary contains this en-
try: "Final break with Turgenev; he is a perfect scoundrel. But
I think in due time I will surrender, and forgive him." Three more
DIFFERENT CLAY
207
months go by, and in an access of virtue such as now and then
made the "troglodyte" brim over with loving-kindness and filled
him with the desire to start life afresh with the day, he writes to
Turgenev that he is sorry their relations are hostile, and begs his
forgiveness. While Tolstoy is penning this humble letter, which
fails to reach its destination, the addressee hears that his own
apology is being shown around by Tolstoy, who is telling every
one that he is a coward. And now it is Turgenev's turn to call
out Tolstoy. Just at this time, by an ironical chance, Turgenev
was revising "Fathers and Children," in which the gentry's dueling
mania is held up to ridicule. Tolstoy's reply was conceived in a
spirit of Christian humility:
Gracious Sir: In your letter you call my conduct dishonorable; be-
sides, you personally said that you would slap me in the face, but I ask
your forgiveness, acknowledge myself guilty, and refuse the challenge.
This letter too was delayed, so that in January, 1862, Turgenev,
writing to Foeth about this sequel to the story, declared that Fate
in the person of the post-office was obviously against them, and
continued:
I conclude that our constellations move in the ether with decided hos-
tility, and it is best, as he [Tolstoy] himself suggests, that we avoid
meeting. But you can write to him or tell him when you see him that
from a distance I love him very much, respect him, and follow his
career with sympathy, but that at close range everything assumes a dif-
ferent aspect. What's to be done? The two of us must live as though
we existed on different planets or in different centuries.
•
This solution was scarcely practicable. Each of them was pub-
lishing books which had some interest for the other, and the gossip
of their mutual friends made vicarious contact unavoidable. Thus,
in 1865 Turgenev learned that his sudden departure from Spasskoye
had been ascribed by Tolstoy to a desire to avoid an encounter.
He
wrote to his informant that Tolstoy played too small a part with him
to influence his movements, and that there would probably have
been no danger of a meeting in any case. He disclaimed any ill
feelings, but expressed the fear that Tolstoy was the same disagree-
208
TURGENEV
able person as before: what sort of man was it who made friendly
inquiries about you of one acquaintance, and told another that he
hated you more than ever? For seventeen years this indirect give-
and-take was their nearest approach to a personal relation.
ง
CHAPTER XXV
SE
"I AM A EUROPEAN”

W
DogDe
162
HEN Turgenev fell into the
habit of taking an annual trip
abroad, as he did from 1856 on,
he omitted to cross the English
Channel perhaps once in eight
years.
Doubtless one great rea-
son for his visits to London was
the fact that his exiled friend,
Herzen, after a tragic Odyssey,
had been settled there since 1852.
For his compatriots this man
was as much a London attrac-
tion as, for other tourists, the
Tower or the Cheshire Cheese.
Turgenev was a not unfamiliar figure at Park House, beyond Put-
ney Bridge, and at the more spacious five-story Orsett House, occu-
pied by Herzen, his children, and Mme. Ogarev, who was his
mistress, and Ogarev himself, her nominal husband and his own
lifelong friend. A stream of visitors came to pay their respects to
the redoubtable editor of "The Bell" (Kolokol), smuggled copies of
which came even to the studies of officials in Petersburg and to the
emperor's desk.
Turgenev had disliked the notion of Herzen's launching a political
journal when he was capable of such magnificent writing as was to
be found in his memoirs, "My Past and Thoughts." However,
when the paper became a fact,-"The Bell's" first peal sounded
from the banks of the Thames in 1857,-he heartily applauded, to-
gether with the other liberals, its brilliant campaign against serfdom,
209
210
TURGENEV
censorship, and the bureaucracy. He was too often discontented
with himself, and too uncertain of his own road, to find the world as
it was a satisfactory place. Such men do not make conservatives.
"Where should conservatism come from in Russia?" he asked Her-
zen in a letter written January 8, 1857. "You can't go up to a
rotten fence and say, 'You are not a fence, but a stone wall against
which I shall build.'" He could not but sympathize with a peri-
odical which stood for freedom against oppression, reason against
superstition, science against prejudice. For all his radical views,
Herzen, in the matter of the Emancipation, took the moderate stand
which was that of the liberal gentry.
He offered "The Bell's" editor aid and comfort by giving him the
news that could not be printed in Russian newspapers, and forward-
ing manuscripts for publication. But he was apt to plead leniency
and to counsel moderation, and on one occasion was indirectly ap-
proached by a grand-duke whom Herzen had threatened to expose,
and who hoped that Turgenev would allay the storm. Herzen ac-
knowledged Turgenev's assistance and such lesser favors as half-
pound packages of the best French snuff, with a stream of affec-
tionate letters. When the exile gave Turgenev a note of introduc-
tion to his friend Garibaldi, it was so complimentary that he sealed
it, to spare the novelist's modesty.
After the serfs were freed, "The Bell" swung to the left. This
was not merely a reflex of the growth of radicalism in Russia. On
a December evening in 1861 Herzen was embracing the ebullient
Bakunin, who had escaped from his Siberian prison and reached
London via Yokohama, San Francisco, and New York. He had
learned nothing and forgotten nothing during the blank decade of
his confinement. He had, he said, the instincts of a stormy petrel
and was now impatient to make up for the years of silence and in-
activity by getting to work at the destruction of Austria-Hungary
and the establishment of a federation of free Slav peoples. Be-
tween the urgings of this unquenchable rebel and the proddings of
the socialistically-minded Ogarev, Herzen found himself turning his
paper, somewhat half-heartedly, into an organ of revolutionary agi-
tation, and preaching a communism supposedly indigenous to the
Russian peasantry. When Turgenev thought of such extreme doc-
"I AM A EUROPEAN"
211
trines at all, it was with distaste. He was willing, and even glad, to
contribute annually, for an indefinite period, fifteen hundred francs
toward Bakunin's support, in the name of their old comradeship.
His generosity would have prompted him to do so, even if Bakunin
had not made a personal appeal to him. But he was sorry to see
that, under the influence of Bakunin and that heavy-handed pedantic
writer Ogarev, the ideas which Herzen had been entertaining for
some years were becoming an obsession with him, and were turning
him into a dangerous fool.
The two aired their differences in 1862 in a series of heated yet.
amicable missives. Herzen conducted his side of the debate pub-
licly in "The Bell," in a series of letters entitled "Ends and Begin-
nings,”—it being an open secret to whom these undirected communi-
cations were addressed. Turgenev, however, heeding an unoffi-
cial warning not to allow his writings to appear in this underground
sheet, prudently confined his replies to private letters.
The burden of Herzen's song was that Western civilization was
becoming a silver sty for a swarming, unctuous, mean-spirited,
property-worshiping middle class, to whose vulgar standards both
the lower and the upper classes were rapidly conforming. Faintly
adumbrating Oswald Spengler's thesis, he pointed out that the civi-
lization of the West had completed its vital cycle, and was approach-
ing a state of senility. But while European culture was declining
graveward, a rough music, as of spring freshets, was rising in the
East. There, on the Russian plains, lived a young race of barbarians
whose wholesome sunburn showed under all their face-paint, and
who carried on their debauches with healthy ardor. Herzen hinted
that Turgenev, in retreating from their leaky tents and the shriek-
ings of their lusty young, to the grandfather's corner by the Euro-
pean hearthstone, was merely obeying the impulses of a middle-aged,
tired, and chilly Epicurean.
Turgenev denied this impeachment. Even if he were twenty-
five, he said, he would give his allegiance to Western ideas and in-
stitutions. In his responses he was attacking not merely what
Herzen wrote in his "Ends and Beginnings," but the peculiar com-
plex of socialist aspirations and Slavophil sentiments which the pub-
licist had been developing for over ten years. The antithesis of East
212
TURGENEV
and West, flattering to the Orient, had always annoyed Turgenev.
He felt that Herzen was idealizing his native land with the senti-
mentality natural to one who had been sixteen years in exile. Poor
Herzen! In his distress and fatigue he was trying to manufacture
out of whole cloth the faith he required. On the other hand, he was
grossly unfair to Europe. Yes, the nations of the West were hor-
ribly infected with philistinism, but Russia was n't free from it,
either. "She is like her older sisters . . . and she will be a slut like
the rest. Of course, she's not as pretty. Look into your Schopen-
hauer again, into Schopenhauer." Herzen forthwith accused Tur-
genev of Nihilism. But the novelist, repudiating the charge, de-
clared that there was at least one principle to which he held firmly:
"I am a European," he wrote, "and I love the banner, I pin my
faith to the banner which I have carried since my youth." And as
for Russia, the main fact was that she belonged to the genus Euro-
peum. She was bound to follow the development of the European
nations.
To this Herzen replied that the fact that a people belonged to the
European family did n't mean that it had to make all the old mis-
takes and land in the same cesspool with the rest. Why should a na-
tion like the Russian, with a history of its own, repeat the blunders
of its Western neighbors? Was not a new soil enough, as in Amer-
ica, to create a nation apart, out of the off-scourings of the old peo-
ples? (At the time he was rather out of humor with what he called
"the Disunited States": the Civil War was playing ducks and
drakes with his six per cent. United States bonds.) What would
save Russia, and perhaps the rest of the world as well, from middle-
class degeneracy, was the socialism inherent in the agricultural com-
mune (obshchina or mir), with its periodic redistribution of land,
and the artel (workman's gang), the two institutions evolved by the
Russian masses.
Herzen was thus expressing the belief in Russia's unique and
Messianic destiny which was an obsession with the Slavophils and
to which even the most dyed-in-the-wool Westernists were some-
times irresistibly drawn. Chernyshevsky himself had once said,
speaking of his native land: "History, like a grandmother, loves
her youngest grandchild best. To the late-comers she gives not
"I AM A EUROPEAN"
213
the bones, but the marrow of the bones, in the breaking of which
Europe has bruised her fingers badly." And one of the earliest doc-
uments of the Russian revolutionary movement contains this pas-
sage: "Why cannot Russia arrive at a new order, unknown even
in America? There are principles in our life entirely unknown
We are a belated people, and therein lies our
to Europeans.
salvation."
The belief that a saving grace was inherent in Russian popular
institutions made no appeal to Turgenev. He told Herzen that he
and his adherents did not know the people they deified:
•
Your god loves what you hate, and hates what you love. . The
masses whom you worship are conservative par excellence and carry
within themselves an embryonic middle class, wearing a tanned sheep-
skin, living in a stuffy, dirty hut, filling its belly to the point of heart-
burn, and having an aversion to all civic responsibility and activity-
such a middle class as will beat hollow the Western bourgeoisie which
you have so aptly characterized in your letters.
If to Herzen the mir, with its common ownership and cultivation of
land, was the precious dowry of that Cinderella among the nations,
Russia, to Turgenev this institution was a grave obstacle to the
development of the country. "Whatever may be said," he wrote as
early as 1856, "the rights of the individual are destroyed by the
mir, and for those rights I am fighting and shall fight to the end."
As for the artel, where Herzen opposed it to the privilege-seeking,
exclusive guilds of the West, and rejoiced in it as a free union of
men working on a job together, Turgenev came to quote cynically
the remark he had heard from a member of such a gang: "If
you have n't worked in an artel, you don't know what a noose is."
It was useless to look to the Russian peasant for salvation, and ab-
surd to think that he was in any sense unconsciously a socialist.
Socialism to Turgenev meant in any case a bizarre irrelevancy, de-
nying the energies and the rights of the individual, and distracting
men from the immediate necessities of political action. He liked
to think of himself as a liberal of the good old English school, a
believer in gradual social development, in amendments granted by
the authorities and not forced by the mob. His ambition for Rus-
+
214
TURGENEV
sia was to see her a constitutional monarchy on the English pattern,
with a parliament to crown the edifice of reforms.
There was a moment in the debate when his opponent, instead of
answering to the point, observed with irritation that Turgenev was
not a politically-minded person-a remark which the novelist had
made about himself fifteen years earlier. He was quite ready to
agree, but added that it was better to be a non-political like himself
than to be a political after Bakunin's fashion. For some time now
he had regarded coldly this man from whom he had once thought
even death would not divide him. Looking at his old friend in
these latter days, he saw in the grizzled, shaggy giant, who ate and
worked and idled hugely, who argued, borrowed, and sweated per-
petually, nothing but a played-out agitator, a flighty, irresponsible
demagogue, a Rudin not lucky enough to have met death on a
barricade.
Bakunin's opinions offended him at every turn, particularly the
notion, to which Herzen too was partial, of the rottenness of the
educated classes. Such an idea was abhorrent to Turgenev. In the
enlightened minority reposed the sole hope of progress. At home
especially this group had a tremendously important part to play: that
of transmitting Western civilization to the people. Conscious of
their rôle, the intellectuals were in a position to carry out a revolution
in Russia; certainly it would not come from the masses.
In speaking of revolution thus, Turgenev used the term loosely.
At no time had he wished for an abrupt and violent overturn. He
liked to quote a saying of Pushkin's: "God save us from seeing
a Russian uprising-senseless and ruthless." He pinned his faith to
the slow but sure advance toward the good life, which was the fruit
of education, without asking himself how such educative processes
could be conducted under a régime hostile to their intent. For the
ills of society he knew no other remedy but what he was later to call
"the homeopathy of science and civilization." The only attempt
at practical social work which he ever made was his effort to or-
ganize a society for the spread of literacy. This project was de-
bated in the hopeful year of 1860, on the Isle of Wight, where a
large colony of Russians, so large that he suggested they conquer
the island, had gone to enjoy the sea-bathing. The projector
"I AM A EUROPEAN”
215
drafted tentative statutes for the society, and there the matter rested.
It was one of life's little ironies that just after he and Herzen
had agreed to disagree, the Government should step in and prefer
charges against him, along with dozens of other suspicious char-
acters, for traffic with "the London propagandists," as Herzen,
Bakunin, Ogarev, and their associates were officially styled. The
affair is known as "the trial of the thirty-two," this being the num-
ber to which the accused were finally reduced. The solicitous and
well-posted Annenkov warned his friend, who was then in Paris, of
what he might expect. Turgenev was surprised. Neither the new
Russian ambassador, to whom he had recently been introduced, nor
his predecessor, with whom he had lately dined, had breathed a word
of such an eventuality. But Annenkov was right. It appears that
Turgenev's name occurred several times in letters from Bakunin and
Herzen to friends in Russia, which were found on the person of a
suspicious character arrested on the Russian frontier, and early in
1863 he received an official request to appear before the Senate to
answer the charge of dealings with the London exiles.
-
cern.
There is no doubt that Turgenev grew panicky. He held counsel
with his friends. Should he write an open letter to a Paris daily
in order to forestall the possible accusations? He could say that
Herzen and Bakunin were the companions of his youth, that he was
not in sympathy with their ideas, and that politics was not his con-
The letter was not written. Instead, he petitioned the em-
peror to excuse him, on the grounds of ill health and important bus-
iness, from appearing in person, and to have a questionnaire sent to
him in Paris. He pointed out that he was a writer, who must be
judged by his works, and that these clearly reflected the moderation
of his views. Referring to the act of emancipation, he wrote:
"When you, Sire, have immortalized your name by accomplishing
the great deed of justice and humanity, it is difficult to understand
how a writer can be held suspect who, in his modest sphere, as far as
in his power lay, sought to promote the same high ends." He
begged the emperor to believe the sincerity of his words, and con-
cluded: "Personal gratitude is added to the loyal sentiment which
I am in duty bound to entertain for the person of your Majesty."
Having written thus to the czar, he sent off a letter to Herzen,
216
TURGENEV
the outlaw, saying that he had asked the emperor for a questionnaire,
and that in any case he had no intention of appearing before the
Senate let the Government do its worst; it would only cover itself
with shame. To Annenkov he had previously written that if he
were summoned, he would of course appear, with a clear conscience.
He reminded his correspondent that the latter had been in the habit
of calling him the Government's "secret adherent." The note of
defiance that it was natural to use with a firebrand like Herzen was
simply out of key with a respectable fellow like Annenkov.
The emperor graciously granted Turgenev's request, and on
March 22, 1863, the reply to the questionnaire was sent to the Sen-
ate, together with copies of letters from Herzen and Bakunin illus-
trating the disagreement between them. The document contained
among other things a history of his relations with Herzen. He
stated that he had become increasingly estranged from this man, not
because of any change in his own convictions, but because "Herzen
turned republican and socialist, Herzen fallen under the influence
of Ogarev, certainly had nothing in common with any right-minded
Russian who does not separate the people from the Czar, and the
honest love of reasonable freedom from the belief in the necessity of
the monarchical principle." He had not seen Herzen for nearly
a year, and he hinted that there had been a definite break on the oc-
casion of their last meeting. "His opinion of me," Turgenev pur-
sued, "as a cold Epicurean and a backward and superannuated per-
son he expressed in his letters entitled 'Ends and Beginnings.' I
answered him with ruthless frankness." He wound up with a dig-
nified protestation, to the effect that all manner of darkness, includ-
ing the darkness of conspiracy, was abhorrent to him.
matter.
The written replies did not satisfy the Senate. But as time went
on, Turgenev became sufficiently reassured to joke about the whole
He imagined how he would be cast into jail; how Botkin
would "whine," and "his ladies"-Mme. Viardot and her daughters
―shed tears; how "The Contemporary" would hint that the editors
had always been on excellent terms with the martyr; how, like Dos-
toyevsky or Silvio Pellico, he would write his prison memoirs; how
Viardot would translate the book, and Europe would read it, but re-
frain from interceding for him through diplomatic channels; how
"I AM A EUROPEAN"
217
"his ladies" would then send him a steel saw in a knitted scarf and
he would escape; how, meanwhile, the government would discover
that he was innocent and appoint him Governor-General of Bokhara.
After one or two postponements due to illness, he appeared before
the Senate in January, 1864, to depose in person. He was kept on
his feet for an hour by six old gentlemen who were nevertheless very
gracious and who dismissed him politely. He had not been really
troubled about the outcome of the affair. Attending a rout at the
Italian ambassador's, he had been cordially spoken to by Prince
Dolgoruky, chief of the empire's police force. Prince Suvorov, too,
was amiable to him. "All this proves," he wrote to Mme. Viardot,
"that they do not see a conspirator in me. Besides, one of my
judges, the fat Venevitinov, told me my case was a trifling one."
Meanwhile an issue of "The Bell" appeared, containing this shaft:
"A correspondent mentions a gray-haired Magdalene of the male
persuasion, who wrote the Emperor that she had lost sleep and ap-
petite, white hair and teeth, being overcome by the fear that he did
not know of her repentance, in virtue of which 'she had broken
off all relations with the friends of her youth.'" Turgenev re-
sponded with an indignant letter. He said that he could believe
Bakunin capable of such mud-slinging, but not Herzen. He in-
closed the text of his letter to the emperor and as for his replies to
the questionnaire, he said he was proud of them: "If I could show
them to you, you would probably be convinced that without conceal-
ing anything, I did not insult, let alone repudiate, any of my
friends.. Herzen replied in a tone which made further cor-
respondence impossible, intimating that he was not deceived into be-
lieving that Turgenev had kept his nerve.
One of the things that he held against Turgenev was the latter's
attitude toward the Polish insurrection of 1863. Herzen himself
had espoused the lost cause of the rebels with an ardor which out-
shines that of the few Englishmen who fought for a free Ireland.
Turgenev did not deny the Poles a right to a separate existence.
Still, Russia's historic claims were certainly to be considered in a
situation which was far from simple. What he would have liked
would have been to see the two peoples living in peace and amity,
presumably under the wing of the Russian eagle. He had a nat-
39
218
TURGENEV
:
ural aversion to violence, which made the very idea of an armed up-
rising dreadful to him. He wrote to Herzen that "The Bell's" ap-
peal to the Russian army officers to show special consideration to-
ward the new Polish conscripts (it was the irregular recruiting of
the Poles that had caused the rebellion) brought tears to his eyes.
He wrote to Annenkov, at the same time, that he hoped "this in-
sane insurrection" would be put down for the sake of both countries.
He wrote to Aksakov, who was editing a Slavophil journal, that he
shared his notoriously jingoist views on the Polish problem.
Seeing at least two sides of the question, he found himself in his
usual uncomfortable position on the fence. This was a tragic con-
flict, as the Greeks conceived it: there was some right on both sides.
Herzen could have put up with his unpolitical friend's failure to pro-
test against the crime of the Imperial Government, and he could
even sympathize with a man's contributing money for the relief of
the Russian soldiers wounded in suppressing the rebellion. But
when Turgenev attached his name to his donation, thus seeming to
sanction the crime, Herzen retired in unforgiving disgust. One
after another they withdrew from Turgenev, the old familiar faces:
first Goncharov, then Nekrasov, then Tolstoy, now Herzen and
Bakunin.
??
CHAPTER XXVI
AN UNOFFICIAL MARRIAGE
mu
"r

KRALIT
O see "Fathers and Children" in
print, Turgenev had to borrow a
copy of "The Russian Herald."
The author had been in Paris the
winter during which the work
was prepared for the press, and
he was still there when it was
published in Katkov's stout
monthly. Between the vagaries
of the post-office and the Rus-
sian habit of procrastination,
he found himself, not for the
first or last time, temporarily cut
off from Moscow and Peters-
burg, receiving neither letters, nor books, nor remittances.
In May he came home, but by August he was already abroad again.
He was to remain a voluntary exile from his country for the twenty
years of life that were left him, and though he went home more or
less regularly, on an average, once in every eighteen months,—it
was Russia that he visited and Western Europe that he lived in.
Previously, for all his long stays abroad, it had been Europe that he
visited and Russia that he lived in. Out of his last two decades, it
was in all only two years that he spent in the country of his birth.
Not that he had deliberately chosen expatriation. It simply hap-
pened. As usual, he was the victim of that adventitious fate which
was synonymous with his character. After summering in Russia in
1862, Turgenev left the country in a pet. He had the feeling that
"Fathers and Children" was facing a blank wall of misunderstand-
219
220
TURGENEV
ing. Besides, his nose sniffed the first breath of that gust of reac-
tion which was shortly to chill the anæmic liberalism of the upper
classes, and to leave the masses rooted in darkness. He seemed to
see, too, the bubbles of a revolutionary ferment which would have
pleased Bazarov, but from which his creator shrank. It looked to
him the evil product of the long years of repression suffered by a
brutalized nation. "I've done my bit," he told himself and his
friends, "to set the wheel of Russian progress moving; just now
I'd rather not watch it jolt over the boulders and sink into the native
mud." This was the sentiment of an old man, who felt out of his
element in a country which appeared awkwardly to be entering upon
a new era. And was n't age actually upon him? He could not
recognize himself in this old carcass: he was forty-three!
Yet was he such an apathetic ancient? Certainly he was as re-
sponsive as he had ever been to the pull of one strong sentimental
leash. Fifteen years previously he had left Russia, in order, by his
own account, to attack serfdom from the European vantage-point.
One suspects that actually he was beckoned abroad by the exquisite
hands of Pauline Viardot. Now he was peevishly withdrawing
from Russia because, he thought, there was at present nothing for
a man of his sort to do there. His chief reason for settling abroad
seems to have been the same that had driven him there before he was
yet thirty. Turning his back on obtuse critics, on the thinning
ranks of his friends, on the torpor of the Sphinx-like masses and the
giddy somersaults of the educated classes in his native land, Tur-
genev went to be comforted by Pauline Viardot.
She was then staying in Baden-Baden, a town not unfamiliar to
Turgenev. The family, and he along with them, were to make
their home for eight years in this resort, until the fall of the Second
Empire reconciled the republican Viardot with France. It was the
spring of 1863 when Turgenev found himself in Baden, and a year
later he was writing to Annenkov that he had settled there for a good
while to come. A few months pass and he tells Countess Lambert
that he sees no reason why he should not establish himself there
permanently, and build himself "a nest . . . in which to await the
inevitable end." As a matter of fact, on September 19, 1864, just
four days before this letter was written, work was begun on the villa
AN UNOFFICIAL MARRIAGE
221
which he was having built for himself next to that of the Viardots.
And a twelvemonth later, having ordered five hundred trees and
shrubs for his grounds, he was looking forward to the shade they
would cast over the constitutionals of his declining years.
At this period his relations with the woman whom he had not
ceased to address as "Madame Viardot" were at last seen by both of
them to be inalterable and secure. The attachment had survived the
frosts of 1860, which at the time Turgenev had darkly reported to
Countess Lambert as fatal. It was a hardy plant and now it bloomed
like a sunflower. "I assure you," he wrote to her, "that my feeling
for you is something the world has never known before, something
that never before existed and that will never repeat itself." Allow-
ing that this protestation belongs to the undisciplined language of the
heart, it is nevertheless true that Turgenev's sentiment for Pauline
Viardot does not fall readily into any of the categories which man
has devised for his emotions. It was neither the passion of the
lover for his mistress, nor the routine ardors of the married, nor yet
the discarnate affection of comrades. To a degree it combined the
elements of the three, yet to all intents and purposes, he had come to
accept, like the other devotees of his lady, the rôle of a friend.
His home came to be where his heart was. Occasionally he had
to leave Baden, to consult a physician in Heidelberg, to go to an art
exhibit in Munich, to see his brother in Dresden. He also had to
visit his estates and his publishers in Russia, or his daughter in
Paris, and once, as we know, he was summoned to Petersburg by
the Government. Away from the pleasant valley of the Oos, he
counted the days till his return. He felt as though he were living
in a dream: people moved about him, things flashed by him, but
no one, nothing seemed to touch him. The Russian sphinx might
have been made of air: a phantom, a vision, a ghost. He heads his
letters: "Baden-alas, no: Petersburg!" He feels that he will
be happy and contented only when he returns to "the blessed land"
where he has left "the better part" of himself. This is in 1864.
Three years pass. He is in Moscow, as in prison, and his "longing
for Baden" makes every day "endless and heavy." The sigh of re-
lief that he will heave when he finds himself back home again, "will
make all the mountains and the Black Forest tremble." He leaves
··
•
··
222
TURGENEV
the dull skies and snowy streets of Moscow, and finds a green and
golden world spread out below his window on Schillerstrasse: sun-
shine, the smell of lilac, and the song of blackbirds on leafy boughs.
In June, 1868, he writes wearily from Petersburg: “Oh, Baden!
oh, valley of the Thiergarten! where are you?" And a few days
later he repeats what he had said four years back: "I shall be
happy only when I return to Baden." The vaunted white nights of
the North worry his nerves, and he is dogged by a vague, sweetish
odor of dampness, which nauseates him. A dreadful place to live
in-this city, but it has one pleasant site: the house in which Pauline
Viardot had stopped, and which he cannot pass without being flooded
by a wave of tenderness.
During his absences he writes to Mme. Viardot almost daily,
with the assiduity of earlier years, filling his pages, as he did then,
with minute accounts of his doings. He describes the visits to his
old friend, the inquisitive Grand-Duchess Yelena Pavlovna; a din-
ner to honor the memory of the lately deceased Druzhinin, at which
he over-ate; a costume ball, with the details of the newest fashions;
the dull evenings at the theater, which is so poor that he wanted to
sit under the chair: a visit to the Hermitage where he stood a long
time before a little figurine which would please Louis Viardot. If
he finds it chilly, he begs her not to walk by the pond. She should
pad the windows of her little salon with felt against the cold. If
only it is as warm in the Baden house as he finds it in his Petersburg
apartment! Above all, he is busy with the topic of chief interest to
the recipient of his letters-music. There are accounts of operas,
concerts, song recitals, criticisms of singers and conductors, dis-
cussions of new compositions, snatches of musical gossip. He
speaks on the great subject with competence as well as concern.
Needless to say, when Mme. Viardot goes on tour, he follows her
triumphs as he used to do when he and his passion were twenty
years younger.
The note of deathless adoration struck in those early letters, is
repeated here with fresh force, and in the same slightly formal key.
"I constantly feel on my head the sweet weight of your dear hand,"
runs a German passage in a letter of 1864,-as of old he falls into
the language he loved next to Russian when his heart dictates,-
AN UNOFFICIAL MARRIAGE
223
"and I am so happy to feel that I belong to you that I could swoon
in continual worship! When will the minute finally arrive when it
will be vouchsafed my eyes to look once more into yours? Endure,
my heart, and be patient!" A Russian lady who met Pauline Viar-
dot that year on the promenade, found her large black eyes the only
beautiful feature in her long, yellow, equine face. There must have
been kind words in the mail he received from Baden, for he con-
fesses that he is "ashamed to be loved so much." It seems to him,
when he is forced to absent himself from her to satisfy the fussy
bureaucrats of Petersburg, that separation was never so difficult.
On February 24, 1864, he tells her, "Last night I shed bitter tears."
The passing years multiply the points of contact between the two,
and strengthen the bond. "Oh, my friend," runs a German pas-
sage in a letter dated February 6, 1867, “I am so happy at the
thought that everything in me is so intimately bound up with your
being, and depends upon you. It is as if I were a tree, of which you
are both the roots and the crown.” This is written from Baden,
while Mme. Viardot is on her way to Berlin for a concert. He
plans to follow her to the Prussian capital, on his way to Petersburg,
but a severe attack of gout lays him low. If he could only be
brought to her in a perambulator!
Letters succeed one another rapidly. He tells her that his whole
being is sloping toward her like a funnel; the comparison is one
he has heard her make, and it fits him so well that he cannot forbear
using it. Then he falls at once into the German tongue and the
language of a smitten adolescent: "Oh, my ardently loved friend!
I am always thinking of you, day and night, and with what bound-
less love! Whenever you think of me, you may be comforted:
'My picture stands before his eyes, and he worships me'-this is
literally true." He always carried her picture with him, and his
study in Baden, a few blocks from her villa, held a photograph, a
portrait, and a bust of Pauline Viardot. Six days later he writes,
again in German: "I can't tell you how I long, every night, for
your dear presence. And all through the night I dream of you."
Did his own words echo in his ears? Did he recall that he had said
virtually the same thing nearly twenty years previously? “And
now I can't work any longer," he continues, "as all my thoughts
224
TURGENEV
constantly revolve about you, and everything else melts like snow
before your dear image.
The invalid recovers just in time to meet her in Berlin and spend
all too brief a time with her there before proceeding to Petersburg.
From the inhospitable shores of the Neva he writes (again the pas-
sage is in German):
""
Dearest friend, sole adored creature! I cannot tell you how measure-
lessly sad I was. Those days in Berlin, that sudden marvelous glimpse
of you again,—all that, and then this bitter parting,-that was really too
much for me. And the weight of the unforgettable impressions utterly
broke me. Ach, my feeling for you is too great and powerful! I can
no more I cannot live far from you. . . . The day when your eyes
have not shone on me is a lost day. But enough, enough, or else I shall
lose control of myself. . . . Lock yourself in well for the night every
evening.
The following day he writes, "The Prussians would love me if they
knew with what tenderness I write and pronounce the name of
their capital. . . .” Then, falling into German: "Dearest, dear-
est, never has a human breast cherished a feeling like mine toward
you. Adoration, that is the least name to call it by. May God bless
you a thousand times. .. Lock your doors carefully." Her
springtide letters, with their inclosures of grass and flowers as in
the old days, are to him, imprisoned by the Russian weather, messen-
gers of liberty.
Three more years go by. The fervor of his attachment is not
tempered by long association. On the contrary, habit seems to have
added to its strength. "Your absence," he writes to her on Decem-
ber 5, 1870, "causes me something like physical fear, as though I did
not have enough air. . . . When you are with me, I experience a
tranquil joy, I feel at ease, at home. I need nothing more." Their
relation is twenty-seven years old. He must guard this treasure
carefully. "It will go the same with us," he concludes, "as with
Burns's John Anderson my jo. We shall totter down the hill to-
gether."
A German friend who frequented the Baden house spoke of Tur-
GREE

PAULINE VIARDOT IN 1859
From a self-portrait
UNIL
OF
MICH
AN UNOFFICIAL MARRIAGE
225
genev's love for Mme. Viardot as being purely platonic ("reine Min-
nedienst"). As one reads these glowing fragments of his part of
the correspondence,-Mme. Viardot's letters not being available,—
one is sometimes tempted to doubt this. Yet all the evidence seems.
to point to the fact that this "unofficial marriage," to apply a phrase
used by Turgenev in another connection, was not a physical one.
Like Descartes in his relations with Elizabeth of Bohemia, Turgenev,
whose temperament much resembled the philosopher's, managed to
make a compromise between friendship and love. He was, like the
woman in the case, essentially a sentimentalist, not a sensualist, in
love. Besides, this incomplete and wistful liaison gave him the
satisfaction of self-pity, and allowed him to nurse his sense of
unfulfilment and frustration.
Nevertheless, their relations had all the solidity of an unequivocal
union, as Turgenev's friends very well knew. It happened that a
false rumor of Mme. Viardot's death got into the papers in 1871.
Flaubert, on reading the notice, observed that he pitied Turgenev
deeply and would write to him at once. M. Viardot, who was very
much alive at the time, was not mentioned. Flaubert did write,
and Turgenev replied very gracefully. To a Russian friend who
aiso sent him a message of condolence, he wrote: "Thank you sin-
cerely for your friendly thought, which I deeply appreciate. There
is no doubt that if that [rumor] were true, all interest in life would
have ceased for me. Fortunately, her health is very good, and
of course she will survive me.
""
Turgenev's affection was generously extended to all Mme. Viar-
dot's household, including her husband, and there were even crumbs
for the cats. He must have the happiness of seeing "them all" at
the station when he returns to Baden. He will telegraph from Ber-
lin. His heart will leap in his side. The joy of the thought is so
great that he must put it from him, not to be tormented by the fear
that the meeting will not take place. "But no!
He will be pleased to see a man mad with joy."
wide enough to include "toute la maisonnée."
dies, Turgenev writes: "Death is great and terrible, and if she
could hear what one says to her, I would implore her to leave me on
God is good, and
His embraces are
When Druzhinin
226
TURGENEV
earth a while longer. I still want to see you, and for a long time
Oh, my dear friend, live long, and let me
yet, if that is possible.
live beside you all.”
Even before the close association of the Baden period, Turgenev
had become virtually a member of the Viardot family. To Louise,
the eldest and least lovable of the children, to Claudie, his darling, to
the thin little Marianne, to Paul, the baby, he was as familiar as
their father. As for the excellent Viardot himself, Turgenev col-
laborated with him on translations from the Russian and was his
faithful companion on hunting trips. To Mme. Viardot he offered
himself as a staff and a shield whenever it was a question of getting
her villa ready for the winter, of marrying off her daughters, or of
running to the chemist's to have a prescription filled in a hurry.
And all this was over and above his affection for her person and his
interest in her art. He was always there, ready with advice, eager
with assistance, solicitous, equable, and somewhat impractical. The
large, lolling bulk of the old bachelor belonged to the evening scene
in the Viardot drawing-room as much as Viardot dozing by the fire,
the girls bent over their sketch-books, or the lady of the house at her
piano.
He was sufficiently in the confidence of the "iron-faced" Louise
to carry her a proposal from a hopeful suitor. When she came to
Baden in 1864 for her confinement, Turgenev, little as he liked her,
surrendered his flat to the young woman who was making Mme.
Viardot a grandmother, and moved into two rooms in the same
house. He was fond of little Marianne, and devoted to Claudie.
Her he singled out for special evidences of his affection. To force
himself to get down to the tedious job of writing his reminiscences,
-a piece he has promised his publisher for a new edition of his
works, he makes a vow that when he returns to Baden (being
then on a visit home) he will deny himself Didie's kiss unless he has
worked at the confounded thing that day. The girl has a talent for
painting, and for his birthday she draws a Descent from the Cross,
"really," he exclaims, "a wonder!" When, later on, they all move
to Bougival, a suburb of Paris, he will reserve a light corner of his
study for the young artist. He sends a picture of her to his poet
friend Foeth, with the injunction: "Here's the person to write
AN UNOFFICIAL MARRIAGE
227
verses for!" She had thick hair over a fine brow, and a mouth like
a bow, her large blue eyes contrasting oddly with her Southern face.
At the German Court she was compared to Sakuntala. In a turban
she has fashioned for herself, she makes him think of "a young god-
dess, still untamed, out of some mythology of the future."
In the summer of 1870 he informs a friend, in whose keeping he
had left some shares of stock, that they had been bought for his
"dear Claudie Viardot," and that should he "suddenly croak," they
must be delivered to Mme. Viardot, in Baden. Two years previ-
ously he had rejoiced in the "pretty round sum" he had gotten to-
gether, what with selling a piece of woodland during a visit to Spass-
koye, because it would put him in a position to start laying by money
for Didie's dot, and he added tenderly: "I positively adore this
fascinating creature, so pure-hearted and graceful. Seeing her with
my mind's eye, I am deeply moved, and I trust Heaven has reserved
for her the happiest of lots. But her health," he continued with
transparent guile, "does not satisfy me. A month at Spasskoye,
fresh food and black rye bread-that's what she needs."
It has been suggested that Turgenev's warm affection for Didie
was literally a paternal one. But the evidence is all to the contrary.
Mme. Viardot's second daughter, as is plain from a letter of his,
dated March 24, 1869, was born on May 21, 1852, and it is a matter
of record that during the previous two years he had been in Russia,
separated from Didie's mother by a thousand miles. These unim-
pugnable facts are given additional weight by the following pas-
sage from a letter which he wrote to Annenkov on September 9,
1867: "So now you are a father! Father of a child given you by
a woman whom you love. Such happiness I
Such happiness I never experi-
enced.
It was also rumored that Turgenev was the father of
Marianne, who later seems to have superseded Didie in his affec-
tions. A letter which came to light in 1923 contains this bit of
gossip: "It is suspected that Mme. Duvernoy [Marianne] is Tur-
genev's daughter. She is a beauty of the Spanish type, like her
mother... but there is something suspicious, something of Oryol,
about the nose." This rumor has no more foundation than the
other.
Yet if Turgenev could not love himself in Didie and Marianne,
""
:
228
TURGENEV
he worshiped in them the traces of their mother. He kisses Didie's
hand because it reminds him of Mme. Viardot's. He notes, affec-
tionately, her "dry smile," as, twenty years before, he had remarked
the twisted smile of the prima donna. He writes Mme. Viardot that
he has erected, beside the great altar in the temple of his heart, an-
other smaller one, dedicated to Claudie. He once told the two girls
that he was happy to know that he would never live to see their
young faces lose their bloom; "we must regenerate ourselves," he
reflected in that connection, "through the youth of those we love."
The girls were to him the miraculously renewed image of Pauline
Viardot, two naiads from that fountain of youth which he sought,
like a perennial Ponce de Leon.
Wand më 201
DAACADELES
Hiley
ก
CHAPTER XXVII
THE BADEN NEST

1
******
AAQ.
Ledrego.
SAMEZ
ITTLE Mother Wednesday, be
like Tuesday, just as little Fa-
ther Tuesday was like Monday":
there were seasons when the
Baden days flowed so placidly
that Turgenev could ask no more
of the gods than that no breath
of change should threaten the
serenity that had come to him
with the autumnal rains. Hav-
ing alighted in so friendly a val-
ley, and in the most congenial
company, he knew moments
when he wished to arrest the
wheel of time. The velvet lawns, set with nicely spaced trees, under
which shawled and bonneted ladies promenaded, the quiet waters,
the roll of gentle hills, dark and bright with plowland and fallow,
was a setting that he loved both for its own mild charm, and, chiefly,
because he saw it, like a landscape behind the head of one of Peru-
gino's Madonnas, as the background for the rarest of women.
True, on the human side, the town itself had its drawbacks. It
had changed little since the summer of 1857, when he had first
visited it. At that time he had been depressed by the place. A
friend of his who had also been stopping there had called it "a
diminutive Babylon," and described it as a town of hotels and
summer cottages, where luxury and vice rubbed elbows, ladies from
the Russian capitals paraded their extravagant changes of costume,
and an “angel" could be purchased for five hundred francs. Sixty
years ago Baden during the season was infested with gamblers
229
230
TURGENEV
who came from every corner of the world to swarm about one of the
few roulette boards allowed in Europe, and with pompous Russian
generals gulping waters from springs once resorted to by gouty
Romans; a meeting-place for the dandies and diplomats of Paris,
Vienna, and Petersburg; a hunting-ground for French lorettes, Ru-
manian adventurers, indigent Italian counts, and opulent American
occultists.
Yet before the classic portico of the Konversationshaus and on
the shaded paths beside the Oos, one could also meet people of real
distinction, who cared as little as Turgenev for the continuous rout
that the watering-place offered. Artists, especially musicians, were
attracted to Baden both because its air and its natural scenery were
grateful to fatigued nerves, and because it afforded them a brilliant
and appreciative audience. Some, like Pauline Viardot and Clara
Schumann, came to settle; others came to summer or on a flying
visit. Turgenev had seldom found a circle more to his taste than
the colony that centered around the Viardot house. His craving
for music had never been so exquisitely and generously satisfied.
The Viardots' exodus to Baden in 1863 coincided with Pauline's
retirement from the operatic stage. With that tact which was one
of her chief graces, she withdrew without waiting for any sign of
the decay of her powers, concluding her career with a superb tri-
umph in Gluck's "Orpheus and Eurydice." Charles Dickens was
among those who heard her in this opera shortly before she quitted
the operatic stage. "Last night," he wrote on November 30, 1862,
"I saw Mme. Viardot do Gluck's Orphée. It is worth a jour-
ney to Paris to see, for there is no such art to be otherwise looked
upon. Her husband stumbled over me by mere chance and took
me to her dressing-room. Nothing could have happened better as
a genuine homage to the performance, for I was disfigured with
crying." It is told that M. Viardot brought Dickens up to her with
the words: "Permit me to present a fountain.”
After her retirement from the opera, Mme. Viardot devoted her-
self to the concert stage and to teaching. And of course it was not
only her pupils who were heard in the little music salon next to her
villa. At forty-four, when she was celebrating her silver-wedding
anniversary,—if her marriage was without love, it was not without
THE BADEN NEST
231
honor, she moved Turgenev with wonder at her ability to be at
once very well, very cheerful, and very active. He was pretty well
himself, but not particularly active, and, for all his serenity, he could
hardly be said to be cheerful. At the musical matinées, given for
personal acquaintances, and such distinguished outsiders as that
fine, friendly lady, Queen Augusta of Prussia, Mme. Viardot sang
as richly and beautifully as ever. It was not only so prejudiced a
listener as Turgenev who held that while other artistes were mere
singing birds, her voice carried the rush of eagles' wings. There
was one Lied in her repertoire which brought tears to his eyes and
sent a chill down his spine, Der Doppelgänger. Heine's weird
lyric and Schubert's grave melody, borne upon the dark current of
this voice, shook him to the core. Had n't he, more than once,
watched an anguished stranger aping the gestures of his lovesick
youth, only to have that stranger confront him with his own ghostly
face?
"C
Turgenev was not content to be Mme. Viardot's most eager audi-
tor. When the retired prima donna tried her hand at composition,
he did everything possible to encourage her. He found a publisher
in Petersburg for three albums of Russian songs which she had set
to music, and when there seemed to be no market for a fourth, he
quietly paid the publisher to issue it. He even stooped to request
Annenkov to insert a favorable notice of the books in some journal,
adding: "I've never troubled about publicity for myself, but there
is one person for whom I am willing not only to write advertise-
ments but to do almost anything.
To make her go on com-
posing, he promised to set to work himself again. 'Pass me the
cassia, and I will pass you the senna.' A story for a sonata-is it a
go?" That he should end by sticking his finger into the Viardot
musical pie was only natural. During 1867-68 he collaborated with
Mme. Viardot on four operettas, writing the librettos for her in
French. Although the pieces were performed many times before
the choicest audience that Baden could offer, the music has never
been printed, and of the books only the second, "Craquemiche or
The Last Sorcerer," has been published, and that only partially, in
a German translation. These are the only pieces which Turgenev
ever wrote in a language other than his own. He was extremely
,,
232
TURGENEV
sensitive on the subject of his writing in a foreign language—a
matter about which he knew his compatriots liked to gossip-and
could not mention it without irritation. "I never in my life," he
wrote in answer to a formal inquiry in 1875, "published a line not
written in Russian; otherwise I would have been not an artist, but
simply a good-for-nothing." He told his friend Pietsch, the Ger-
man critic, that a fellow who wrote in anything but his own mother-
tongue was, in his opinion, "a scoundrel and a wretched swine with-
out talent."
"Craquemiche" has to do with the struggle of the Elf-Queen
against a once powerful magician, and her triumph in freeing her
enchanted forest from his wicked spell. The title seems to be a
take-off on one of Offenbach's light operas, which were then in
great vogue, and which Mme. Viardot's operettas are said to re-
call. The obvious intention of the piece was to poke fun at Na-
poleon III, who was the pet abomination of Turgenev, as well as
of M. Viardot. Clara Schumann, writing to Brahms from Baden
on October 3, 1867, says that she heard this as well as the first
operetta, Trop de Femmes, three times, and "always with equal
pleasure." They were "so cleverly written, so dainty, so light, so
finished, and with all that, so full of humor." The great German
pianist found in them fresh confirmation of her opinion that Pauline
Viardot was "the most gifted woman" she had ever known.
"When I saw her sitting at the piano," she continued, “and man-
aging everything with such perfect ease, my heart melted within
me, and I could have clasped her in my arms." Turgenev could not
have been less moved.
The première of "Craquemiche" took place September 24, 1867,
in the large drawing-room of his villa, which he was not yet oc-
cupying. The audience was more than usually illustrious, includ-
ing, in addition to the elderly King and Queen of Prussia, many of
the queen's ladies-in-waiting, a cabinet minister, an ambassador,
and a countess. The queen was usually one of the earliest to
arrive for a performance, and sat in one of the front rows. Her
husband, on the contrary, who was not musical, preferred to slip
in quietly and to sit near the door, so that he could easily escape.
Sometimes the royal pair would be accompanied by guests, such as
THE BADEN NEST
233
Bismarck, and on one occasion they brought their little grandson,
not yet ten years old, who was to be the last German emperor. At
this particular spectacle there were present also the daughters of one
of the first women to stir Turgenev's imagination as well as his
pulse-Bettina von Arnim, now dead, like those Berlin days of his
in which she had figured.
The cast was made up of the children and pupils of Mme. Viar-
dot, who herself took no part, but accompanied them at the piano.
Turgenev's histrionic talent stood him in good stead and allowed
him to play the leading rôle in Craquemiche, in spite of the fact that
he had no voice. The only other male member of the company,
between whom and Turgenev there was a difference of forty years,
was Mme. Viardot's son, Paul. The performance went off splen-
didly. The male star of the piece, writing to Annenkov the next
month, noted that Craquemiche's throne speech, which parodied
the orations of Napoleon III, called forth "thick laughter" from the
King of Prussia, who was, by the way, to become the first ruler
of the German Empire. Could anyone have heard the chuckle of
Fate in that laughter, or foreseen how, three years later at Sedan,
the Emperor of France was to surrender his saber to the general of
that Prussian king?
The dress rehearsals of the next operetta, "The Ogre," also took
place at Turgenev's house. He found it overrun with girls, laugh-
ing, singing, trying on costumes, and making a huge racket to the
accompaniment of hammers, the shuffle of scene-shifters, and the
curses of the ballet-master from Karlsruhe, who, as Paul was to
recall in his memoirs, scolded the Swiss girls for their heaviness,
the Swedish girls for their awkwardness, the Germans for their
slowness, and the French for their chatter. And all this in a May
heat that rose to seventy-two degrees. Turgenev himself swag-
gered jovially through the rehearsals in a false beard, a ruff, and a
plumed crown surmounting a red wig which he had bought in
Paris, and exhibited the proportions if not the ferociousness of a
proper ogre. Queen Augusta kept on sending messengers to find
out when the affair, for which these immense preparations were
being made, would finally come off.
Usually, the operettas were put on in the special structure built
234
TURGENEV
for the purpose in the garden of Mme. Viardot's villa. The hall
was the successor of the Potato Theater, but it took itself some-
what more seriously. It was in fact a workshop for her pupils.
But something of the jolly informality of the Courtavenel days per-
sisted. After a performance a supper of cold meat and potato
salad was regularly given for the actors at the Viardot villa, and if
the performance took place at Turgenev's, they would form a torch-
light procession to march across the park which separated the two
houses.
He was naturally enthusiastic over Mme. Viardot's new achieve-
ment. Nor was he the only one to think highly of these pieces.
In 1869 the Grand-Duke of Weimar put on "Craquemiche," in a
German translation, at his own theater. The production was an
affair of importance for Mme. Viardot, as it was to decide the
question of whether or not she should begin a new career as a
composer. Her friends, including Liszt, did all they could to
insure a triumph, but she, realizing that her success on this occa-
sion was due chiefly to their efforts, determined to confine herself to
teaching and concerts. Turgenev could console himself with the
thought that, on his part, he had done all he could.
This "saddest of men" had entered whole-heartedly into the
comic parts of the operettas. He had not lost the taste for acting
which he had had since he was a boy. It was always somewhat of
a relief for him to shed his own unsatisfactory self, and lease for a
while the tenement of another existence. Rarely he felt a mis-
giving as to the appropriateness of this silly mummery on the part
of a Turgenev, an eminent novelist, and an aging man. Once
when he lay on the floor in a scarcely dignified pose, impersonating
the Pasha in Trop de Femmes, he caught a contemptuous smile.
slowly twisting the lips of the Crown-Princess Victoria, the mother
of the future Emperor William II. "Although, generally speaking,
I have n't much respect for myself," Turgenev commented in a let-
ter to Pietsch, "this was a little too much for me. Still," he went
on, "these spectacles have been something altogether charming and
worth while."
Besides the pleasures which were dearer for being bound up with
Mme. Viardot, Baden offered him in more civilized form than Rus-
THE BADEN NEST
235
.
sia could present them, the active joys of the hunt, for which he was
as keen as ever. When autumn approached, he could think of
nothing else, even if his gouty foot could not stand the pressure of
a boot. During the season he went off to the woods as often as
three times a week, and foxes, hares, pheasants, partridges, and
boars figure in the hunting statistics with which he furnished his
friends. His most faithful companions on these trips were Louis
Viardot and Pegasus.
"L'illustre Pégase," as the latter was known, was more famous
in the duchy than the novelist, who wrote a touching eulogy of
him. He was, like his master, generously proportioned, and like
him wore his wavy hair long; it was black, dappled with yellow. A
cross between an English setter and a German sheep-dog, he in-
herited from gifted forebears a nose that became the hero of a
thousand legends. In addition to being an incomparable retriever,
he was a shrewd strategist. His family had been known for the
severity of its morals. He never lied. Nor did he betray that
he noted a compliment, not by so much as an over-modest look. He
had only one fault: not having received a strict English education, he
did not wait for the word of command before dashing to pick up the
game. Another failing of his was that he frankly disliked Mme.
Viardot, he who was generally so gracious with the sex, although,
as his master once observed, he had suffered much at their hands.
Could it be that he was jealous? Otherwise he was impeccable.
But alas! the gods are envious of the great. Age came fast upon
this magnificent creature and turned him into a slobbering moron.
His master, who had refused fabulous sums for Pegasus in his
heyday, now had on his hands a pensioner. The poor fellow was
like an artist grown old, a singer who had lost her voice.
Gout was a serious obstacle to these hunting excursions. It
made its first appearance two years before Turgenev reached the
half-century mark, and remained the greatest of his afflictions until
the coming of the illness that was to end them all. In the winter
of 1866 he suffered from muscular rheumatism, and recalling that
three or four years earlier when he had had a node on his foot, a
commissionaire of the Hotel St. Petersburg in Berlin had given him
a salve which helped him with wonderful rapidity, he asked Pietsch
រ
236
TURGENEV
Pietsch was
to find the man, get the magic salve, and send it on.
obliging, so was the commissionaire, and all was well.
Just before he settled in Baden, he had had real cause for alarm
on the score of his health. A Paris celebrity had discovered in
him the seeds of a fatal ailment, of whose exact nature we are ig-
norant, and on New Year's Day, 1863, Turgenev was writing to
Annenkov: "I cannot take my mind off this incurable disease,
which deprives me of strength, has aged me, and has in store for
me the saddest future." The diagnosis proved false. What con-
tinued to worry him every now and then was his old complaint, and
when those pains attacked him he fell back into his familiar despairs.
He assured his friends that he could quite understand the feelings
of a suicide whom he once saw dragged from under the wheels of
an omnibus, and who, before expiring, explained that he had been
driven to this act by neuralgia, and though all his bones were broken,
kept on murmuring: "Ah, what a relief!"
"Ah, what a relief!" As a matter of fact,
Turgenev's disease, if sometimes acutely painful, was not at all
serious, and was soon to disappear except for an occasional twinge.
The air of Baden positively agreed with him. He suffered less
than usual from the colds, grippes, laryngitises, bronchitises which
so easily secured lodgment in this leonine head and chest. Cer-
tainly he did not again wear the "muzzle,” as he called the respira-
tory mask which he had been forced to don whenever he went out
into the frosts of 1860; his sputum was free from the blood that
had frightened him then, and he dosed himself with no more cod-
liver oil. He persisted, however, in the habit of bundling himself
up, what with mufflers, comforters, knitted vests, flannel shirts, and
the like. This giant from the land of snow was as sensitive to
cold as any Southerner. He must often have longed for the Dutch
stoves of home, the hermetically sealed double windows, the padded
doors. His mother's large wooden house in Moscow had been
extremely warm. However remiss the Russians might be in other
matters affecting creature comfort, they certainly knew how to
secure heat and how to keep it. He was particularly distressed
when he had to leave Baden in winter for some neighboring town.
The end of 1869 found him in Weimar. He went to arrange
accommodations there for the family, and of course for himself,
*
THE BADEN NEST
237
since they had decided to give Didie two months at the town's
excellent art school. Weimar received him chilly. He complained
that the houses were made of old cardboard, pasted together with
stale spittle, that the cold was intensified by the metallicity of the
two bronze figures in front of the theater, that when he woke up at
night he discovered icicles in his beard, and that everybody wore
everything to keep warm. In such circumstances no one was to be
found on his Olympus but Jupiter the Cougher, Juno of the Quinsy,
Apollo the Sneezer, and Venus de Bronchitis.
One thing which showed no signs of improvement was his hypo-
chondriac temper. He was subject to fits of irrational, uncon-
trollable fear: he imagined that he had been bitten by a mad dog
or had himself taken a bite out of a poisonous piece of fish. He
laughed at himself when the fit was over, but that did not prevent
its recurrence. Cholera remained his chief phobia. Turgenev, so
Annenkov says, at one time, could n't see a pharmacy in Moscow,
Petersburg, Paris, or London, without going in to ask for stomach
drops. He claimed that when the disease was raging in the French
capital, he smelt it in the air: it reeked of dampness, toad-stools, an
old abandoned foul place. "I am like a madman," he said once.
"I go as far as personifying cholera; I see it as a decrepit, yellowish-
green, malodorous old hag." A sign of indisposition on the part
of a fellow-traveler in a railway train was apt to throw him into a
panic. "Perhaps it's cholera," he would whisper, and producing
a bottle of Eau de Cologne would proceed to douse himself, his com-
panion, and the seats, and even sprinkle a few drops in the direction
of the puzzled stranger. His mother, once she had lost the as-
surance that cholera would not dare to attack her, had been more
thoroughgoing in her precautions. Legend has it that on the occa-
sion of an epidemic in Spasskoye she was conveyed about her
estate in a glass sedan, all but air-proof, and it is told that a
peasant, meeting the palanquin containing his mistress, mistook it
for a traveling icon, touched the ground with his forehead, and
placed a groat on the step as the gift of his piety.
Just around the corner from the Viardots, and under the wing of
Frau Anstett, who kept his furnished rooms at 277 Schillerstrasse,
Turgenev felt as secure as was possible for him. Frau Austett had
238
TURGENEV
for her "childish" boarder a maternal affection, which changed to
adoration when he got her husband to make his will in her favor.
The good soul, Turgenev sighed, was the only woman who had ever
conceived a true passion for him, and in consequence she was con-
tinually pressing upon him indigestible dishes, so that it was only
by dint of the most subtle diplomacy that he saved himself alive.
It was not until the spring of 1868 that he occupied the house which
he had been preparing for himself for so long, and which was more
fit to be the home of a man who grew up in a Russian manor. A
spacious garden was attached to the villa, which was built in the
style of Louis XIII, and it would seem as if Turgenev aimed at
making the place a smaller version of the estate at Spasskoye, even
to the fish-ponds. When he moved into the villa he had the sensa-
tions of "a bride who had just gotten her trousseau," and at first
the house made him feel "a little too grandiose and Sundayfied,"
but he had never been more comfortable. On returning to Baden
from his excursions into France and Russia, he felt that he was
coming back to his "nest," over the edge of which he could peer,
with what passed for contentment, into the world.
1
DaGRAARSo
VEN at its best, the contentment
which Turgenev knew as he
looked out upon the world from
his Baden window was a poor
thing. It was a shallow seren-
ity, easily ruffled by the thought
of decline and death, and per-
manently tainted by the unease
which comes of a sense of frus-
tration. What happiness could
he have, when the writer in him
felt unfulfilled? His letters of
the years just before and after
he became a Baden burgher be-
speak the fatigue as well as the indolence which invites inaction.
The ink is no sooner dry on the manuscript of "Fathers and Chil-
dren" than he announces that, to judge by his apathy, this is
probably the last work from his pen: "It is time to pull the
covers over my head and sleep." He reads nothing, does nothing,
even thinks little. His literary vein is giving out. He is inacces-
sible to new feelings. The vague and traceless play of fancy alone
is left to one in whom all desires are dead, and whose activity is
dying. His song is done. He is a finished man. He lives tamely,
having grown into the bodily and mental habits of senility. He
vegetates, busied only with warding off small ailments. He has
hung up his rusty pen as a veteran does his sword.
This last statement he made in a letter to Countess Lambert,
dated March 10, 1865. That very year he said the same thing to
his public, more elaborately, in a fragment suggestively entitled
J008
CHAPTER XXVIII
TAMMISO
THE EXPATRIATE

indigoo
COL
239
240
TURGENEV,
:
"Enough." This experimental, nondescript composition, in which
the prose poem and the essay are happily married, contains, among
other things, the rationale of his abdication as a writer. The piece
conveys the idea that he desires to give up, not because he is played
out, but because nothing seems quite worth while. The terrible
thing about life is just that it is not terrible, but flat, monotonous,
and petty. One who has unlearned self-deception has nothing to
hope for. In the brief moment between two giant oblivions, the
only dignity in which man can clothe himself is the stoic acknowl-
edgment of his own nothingness The great principles to which
men cling in their weakness are so many windle-straws. Where
now is the worm that gnawed the tongue of the lover who so lately
protested the eternity of his passion? Justice, liberty, beauty-
these urges and allegiances are fine irrelevancies in a brutal world.
Nature, admitting none of the human values, feeds to the rat the
most precious lines of Sophocles as readily as an old cheese, and
chaos rears on the very hem of the lighted circle in which man
Art is no less futile than anything else. What is the use
of the perishable images which we shape as we crouch on the edge
of the empty dark? How can an artist view his own work as any-
thing more than a striving after wind? What heart can he have
for producing his wares to be displayed in the ghosts' bazaar,
that market-place where seller and buyer are equally cheated?
Enough...
. . enough !
moves.
•
7
This is the logic of the heavy heart rather than of the intellect,
for certainly the quality of life must be assayed apart from its
duration. What Turgenev does in "Enough" is vent a black mood
which he knew too well, and, more especially, rationalize his recur-
rent impulses to throw down his pen. His friends were used to these
accesses of despair, to these periodic gestures of withdrawal. So
many times he had been done with writing for good and all.
Had n't the author of "A Sportsman's Sketches" declared himself,
at thirty-five, “a literary invalid in retirement"? But this time the
situation looked serious. In the four years that followed the ap-
pearance of "Fathers and Children" he gave his public only three
rather trifling pieces.
Besides, a new and alarming note had crept into the laments that
THE EXPATRIATE
241
issued from his Baden haven. He made the disquieting discovery
that he was cut off from his own country. Russia, he told Countess
Lambert, in the letter referred to above, had become alien to him,
and he did not know what to say about it. "In such cases, as the
adage goes, silence is golden." A year before he made this dis-
astrous confession he had already been sufficiently troubled about
the results of his living abroad to try to justify the fact. "There
is absolutely no necessity," he had protested to his old correspondent,
"for a writer to remain in his own country and try to seize upon
its changing life, at any rate there is no need to do it continuously."
As far as his own work went, how did she know that he was n't about
to attempt something that left Russia out of the picture, something
that possessed a universal, human significance?
As a matter of fact, the rabbit at which he hinted never hopped
out of his hat. Indeed, it would have been sheer magic for him to
produce a living piece of work unrelated to what was native to him.
Six months previously he had, it is true, published a tale, "Phan-
toms," which had but scant bearing on the Russian scene. It is
concerned with a ghostly vampire who, in exchange for a man's life-
blood, carries him in nocturnal flights through time and space. Such
passages as those which convey his disgust with the pettiness and
vanity of life on this despicable planet, and which evoke the fearful
image of death, are distinctly impressive, but the heavy-footed fan-
tasy renders the piece as a whole unconvincing. When, seventeen
years later, he again attempted themes unrelated to any element of
his native background, as in "A Dream" and "The Song of Tri-
umphant Love," the results were notoriously unsuccessful.
No, the idea of divorcing his writings from Russia was a snare
and a delusion, and indeed he never seriously entertained it. For
better or for worse, his art was wedded to his country. He must
find his material in the lives of the men and women with whom he
had grown up; he must explore the landscape that depressed him with
its familiarity, and the mentality that had the fewest secrets from
him; he must interpret, as he could not interpret the utterance of
more voluble creatures, the silence of the Russian sphinx. Tur-
genev the lover could feel at home at Courtavenel, at Baden, in Lon-
don, and Paris; but Turgenev the novelist could be at ease only in
242
TURGENEV
.
his native atmosphere. Is it that the exercise of the artistic faculty
demands a greater measure of intimacy than love?
That he exaggerated the degree of his alienation from his own
country may be inferred from his novel "Smoke." The scene is
laid in Baden, but the foreign background is merely a foil for
the Russian characters and the Russian interests which, here as al-
ways, are the novelist's main concern. As early as 1863 he spoke
vaguely of a large work, and two years later, not so long after he
had said that his pen was "hung upon a nail," he wrote to a friend
that he had a big novel by the horns. He had been so long idle,
he told Annenkov, that he could say with Hugo that laziness had
restored his virginity, and he felt as awkward as a novice. Less
than six months after the letter containing this admission went off,
the novel appeared in print, in the third issue of "The Russian
Herald" (Russki Vestnik) for 1867.
"Smoke" is primarily a love-story, in which the hero, Litvinov, a
thoroughly decent Russian gentleman, is involved with two women.
One, his fiancée, is a wholesome, whole-hearted girl of the sort
Turgenev could appropriately place against the background of an
old garden, with the shingle roof of the wooden manor-house peep-
ing through the silver poplars; the other, a general's wife, is an old
flame of Litvinov's, more seductive, more passionate, more wilful
than when she had first dizzied his senses, and now of an easier
morality. This lady goes out of her way to recapture Litvinov,
and succeeds, but he has the strength to refuse the part of a secret
lover, which is all she is willing to offer him, and after some water
has flowed under the bridges, he returns to his patient fiancée, and
the novel is served up with what Henry James calls "the time-
honored bread-sauce of a happy ending." As usual, Turgenev
shows us the brief consummation of a violent love. Amorousness
he presents either in its shy beginnings or at its moment of climax;
of love as a durable relation, as an every-day give-and-take, he has
no more to say here than in any other of his novels.
Litvinov's private difficulty has for its context a larger predica-
ment, that in which articulate Russia found itself in the years im-
mediately following the emancipation of the peasants. In "Smoke"
Turgenev resumes the record and analysis of his time at the point
THE EXPATRIATE
243
where he dropped them in "Fathers and Children." Dovetailing
roughly into the passional theme indigenous to the novel, is the
socio-political thesis demanded by the mid-century Russian concep-
tion of self-respecting fiction. The novelist clarifies this thesis
by opening the pages of his hospitable book to two distinct groups
from among the Russians who swell the crowd of Baden's transients.
One is aristocratic and reactionary, the other, composed of the
lesser gentry, is radical. Both are caricatured with the skill and
biting malice of a Daumier. Both equally disgust Turgenev.
What a flow of gall from so temperate a man!
His pen drips with venom when he touches off the titled set:
these well-fed, perfumed, arrogant generals, who look back longingly
to the blessed days of serfdom; these half-witted princes with their
insipid jokes and vulgar snobbishness; these mummied beauties
and dully malicious gossips, these condescending nonentities who play
at art and love and politics with equal dilettanteism, and whose in-
terest in spiritual matters is exemplified in an abortive effort to
hypnotize a lobster. Russia has nothing to hope for from such
men and women, having no generosity, no understanding, no devo-
tion to any large and selfless purpose, but only shrewdness in the
service of an illimitable egotism.
If the indignation of a Juvenal fashions Turgenev's lines when
he has to do with blue-blooded reaction, it is with grieved contempt
that he describes the radical bedlam let loose in a Baden hotel room.
The mir, the artel, the natural sciences, socialism, feminism, revolu-
tion, the People, the future of Russia-all these subjects are bandied
about by a smoky, beery, noisy, furiously gossiping crowd of enthu-
siastic parrots, presumptuous sheep, and well-intentioned donkeys.
Turgenev even begrudges them the virtue of constancy: within the
three years which the book covers, Gubaryov, the great revolutionary
leader, the idol of the doctrinaire tribe, reverts to his natural state,
which is that of a bully and a "dentist," the name given to such
gentry as knocked out the peasants' teeth with their own fists. The
polished reactionaries and the unkempt fire-eaters are brother bar-
barians under their skins. These novices of radicalism were another
sign of Russia's childish sloppiness in cultural matters.
Culture, or, to use Turgenev's own word, civilization, is indeed
244
TURGENEV
the star to which he would hitch that great, creaking, antediluvian
wagon, his country. The word civilization is constantly on the
tongue of Potugin, a character dragged in by the hair so far as
the plot is concerned, but playing an effective part as the author's
mouthpiece. What Russia needs is schooling in the orderly ways,
in the rational methods, in the habits of diligence and efficiency
which had been elements of the discipline of western Europe for
centuries. One thing is certain: to look down upon the West from
the mystic height of an ignorant and pompous nationalism, as the
Slavophils do, is folly as outrageous as to worship, like the radical
set, the peasant's armyak, and to expect sweetness and light to
stream from his cockroach-infested hut. The Russian might as
well face the unpleasant fact that, culturally speaking, there is
nothing either in his country's past or in its present to be proud of.
Potugin, in hammering on these ideas, was merely repeating
publicly and with emphasis what Turgenev had privately been con-
tributing to similar discussions for years. Indeed, Potugin's
speeches contain passages which are lifted almost bodily from the
novelist's correspondence with Herzen. His advice to his com-
patriots-they turned naturally to their novelists for counsel
amounted to this: give up vaporizing, lay aside your grandiose
schemes, and learn your own trade well. The perennial spectator
had never ceased to exalt and extol the man of action.
Turgenev had no illusions about the probable reception of
"Smoke" by his public. And indeed the breach between him and
his readers caused by "Fathers and Children" was not at all lessened
by the appearance of this new novel, with its galling caricatures and
its unpatriotic recital of Russia's faults and failings. "It seems
to me," he was writing on June 4, 1867, to the faithful Annenkov,
"that no one was ever so vilified as I for 'Smoke.' Stones from
every direction." His discomfort was relieved by a measure of
satisfaction. It befell that the book came out just when an
ethnographical congress, to which representatives of the several
Slav nations had been invited, was being held in Moscow. This
gathering was less a scientific convention than what Turgenev called
"a pan-Slav fandango with castanets," and he enjoyed thinking
that his Potugin, though confined between covers, was on the spot
THE EXPATRIATE
245
to poke fun at the Slavophils and to uphold the principles of Euro-
pean culture.
Structurally, the novel is far from perfection. The years have
staled its timely implications and made mock of its reticences.
The love theme and the civic strain seem to be only superficially
connected with each other, and this lack of integration is in the
nature of a defect. Yet an undiminished vitality inheres in its
The
characters, in its palpable atmosphere, in its satirical verve.
underlying conception of life here is fundamentally different from
the philosophy back of the Jeremiad in "Enough." Asserting as
it does the absolute value of all that Potugin sums up in the word
"civilization," this is by no means a novel of futility and pessimism.
Moreover, it offers the spectacle of a man's will conquering his blind
emotion in the name of moral decency.
Not that Turgenev completely succeeds in preventing his dreary
mood from creeping into the pages. Litvinov, sitting in the train
that is carrying him homeward, and watching the smoke curl back-
ward from the engine, is suddenly assailed by the thought of the
vanity of all things.
"Smoke, smoke," he repeated to himself several times in succession;
and suddenly everything appeared to him to be smoke-everything, his
own life, Russian life, all things human, especially all things Russian.
Everything is smoke and steam, he thought; everything seems to change
ceaselessly; new images everywhere, phenomenon follows phenomenon,
but in reality it is all the same; everything hurries, hastens to some
goal; and everything vanishes without leaving a trace, without reaching
anywhere; the wind changes its direction and everything shifts to the
other side, and there again is the same incessant, agitated and useless.
play.
This passage is in the nature of a personal digression. But, since
it gives a title to the book, it took on an undue prominence, and ir-
ritated the young people who felt that life was earnest and real.
Whatever Turgenev may have said, he was far from indifferent
to the opinion of the youth. He went to the trouble of sending a
copy of "Smoke" to Pisarev, with whom he had become acquainted
some months previously, and who had charmed him with his in-
246
TURGENEV
telligence and gentlemanliness. Writing to ask the young radical's
opinion of his book, the author said that hatred and contempt was
all that it had won for him from the majority of its readers, and
after his usual fashion proceeded to take advantage of the occasion
to express a humility which was no less honest for being assertive.
He had, he said, no illusions about the quality of his talent: it was
only a common, almost wild Russian apple-tree.
Pisarev's reply was characteristically frank. A sincere Nihilist
himself, he said that he was not at all annoyed by Turgenev's
cavalier treatment of the "radical" Gubaryov and his circle.
"Fools," wrote Pisarev, "should be thrashed, even at the altar."
The scenes at Gubaryov's, he was sure, were introduced because the
author, having directed the strength of his stroke at the Rights, was
afraid of losing his balance, and finding himself in the camp of the
Reds. But the book made the impression of a strange and dismal
complement to "Fathers and Children." What had the author done
with his Bazarov? Why should he survey the Russian scene from
such a little hillock as Litvinov, when he had erected, in the hero of
"Fathers and Children," a tall tower from which to view it? Did
he think that the first and last Bazarov had died of a cut in his
finger in 1859? To write a novel and leave out this powerful
figure was like ignoring the elephant at the zoo. And "Smoke"
represented Turgenev's second visit to the animal-house, where
"Fathers and Children" had been the first. Either the novelist had
not seen the elephant at all, which was blindness, or, having seen him,
had failed to put him into the picture, which rendered his account
worthless.
To this Turgenev answered that since Pisarev, like the rest of
Russian readers, disliked "Smoke," there must be something wrong
with this child of his. He added, rather lamely, that there were
Bazarovs about, but that having, as life in Russia was constituted,
no field for activity, they did n't really matter. He went on to
that he was looking at his native land not through the eyes
say
of
Litvinov, but through those of Potugin, that champion of European
ways of thinking and acting. "I rejoice in the thought that just
at this moment I have inscribed the word 'civilization' upon my
banner. Let all cast dirt upon it-si etiam omnes, ego non."
THE EXPATRIATE
247
}
In his letter Pisarev had assured his correspondent that he per-
sonally stood apart from factions. He had no group of his own
and knew of the existence of his followers only from references to
them by his opponents. It is not good for the writer to be alone,
Turgenev responded, unintentionally paraphrasing the Scriptures,
adding that of course this isolation is often involuntary. He must
have been thinking of his own isolation in the pleasant purlieus of
Baden, of his own remoteness from the world necessary to him as
a novelist. And it is just possible that he felt an unmeant sting in
Pisarev's remarks about visits to the zoo. How could he make a
fair survey of the native scene from the Konversationshaus of a
foreign resort? The fear that Russia was fading from his view
was growing on him, and his expatriation loomed increasingly as a
danger and a threat to his work.
The predicament that he faced would have been plain tragedy to a
younger man. He needed the constant stimulus of fresh Russian
impressions. He might hold Europe up to his countrymen ever-
lastingly as the noblest model for them to follow, but it was them
and not their model that he must continue to describe. He knew
that he was so made that he must see and hear whatever he was to
write about. It was an essential article of his literary credo that
talent alone is powerless unless it is assisted by a steady contact
with, and a careful study of, the milieu which happens to be the
novelist's province. He held as strongly as ever Van Gogh did
that "to grow, you must plant yourself in the soil." And yet there
he was, a thousand miles from where his art required him to be,
in a place which the presence of Pauline Viardot made his home.
To the end of his days he felt that he had to a degree betrayed his
great and precious gift.
►
J
PART III
=
AGE: 1869-83
Witless and doltish are men that their tears are shed for the dying,-
Fitter were it to mourn the flower of youth as it fades.
•
THEOGNIS
·
#
܃
"
AUN
UNDERSTAND very well that
my remaining abroad hurts my
literary work, hurts it so much
that it may put an end to it; but
this cannot be changed." And
again: "Every day I see more
clearly that torn away from
one's native soil one
soil one cannot
keep on writing. It is time
for me to retire." Thus Tur-
genev in 1869, from Baden.
And ten years later, from Paris:
One can write very well
(C
if one is living in a Russian vil-
lage. There the air is thick with ideas. . . . Here you remember
the past, and nothing alive and vital can come of it." He would
sometimes take refuge from remorse or reproach behind his flaunted
senility: it did n't matter in what part of the world a superannuated
man chose his ingle-nook; of what importance was it if his silence
began a little while before death sealed his lips forever? And then
he would submit that if he had remained at home, it would have been
another story. "I am ready to allow," he wrote in 1871, "that the
talent Nature gave me has not lessened, but I have nothing to apply
it to.
The voice is there, but there are n't any songs to sing." Liv-
ing abroad as he did, he had nothing, he complained, to write about.
In the meantime, he went on writing.
After the publication of "Smoke," his name appeared mostly
under shorter pieces, either stories or sketches much in his early
!!!!
MIXE
amp:
Ein
madhara
CHAPTER XXIX
}
THE CLIMACTERIC

IND
251
252
TURGENEV
manner.
He adjusted himself to what he felt to be expatriation
not by turning to account the immediate experiences with which
life abroad furnished him, but rather by drawing upon his recol-
lection of experiences at home. A reminiscential strain is the hall-
mark of the greater part of the work of his last fifteen years. "The
Brigadier" (1868) deals with matters of "thirty years ago"; the
events narrated in "Lieutenant Yergunov" (1868) "took place
forty years ago"; "An Unhappy Girl" (1869) suffered her fate in
"the winter of 1835"; the occurrences which make "A Strange
Story" (1870) happened "fifteen years ago"; "A King Lear of the
Steppes" (1870) is told as a reminiscence of the author's youth;
"Rap-Rap-Rap" (1871) elaborates an incident "of forty years ago";
"Spring Freshets" (1872) is a recollection of "things that had
taken place long ago," notably in 1840. And there are a number of
later tales and sketches which are even more clearly of a memorial
nature. Every road led him back to the still waters of remem-
brance: aside from his feeling that he had lost contact with con-
temporary Russia, there was his romantic and somewhat pathologi-
cal fixation upon the days of his youth; the very decadence of the
social class into which he had been born; his gift for creating at-
mosphere, which the past seems to exude so much more richly than
the present.
At the very beginning of his stay abroad, Turgenev confessed
to Annenkov that he was now capable only of writing "fairy-tales"
like "First Love." What he meant was stories with as little bear-
ing on a particular time and place as "Cinderella" or "Ivanushka the
Fool." And indeed, the short stories of his latter years are charac-
ter studies of universal validity. At their best, as in "A King Lear
of the Steppes," they exhibit a wholesomeness, a vigor, a knowl-
edge of men that fairly insure their durability. Some of them
show a preoccupation with the supernatural which would suggest
that the author's positivism was not so firm as he believed. As a
matter of fact, like the Russian generals whom he ridiculed, he was
at one time taken up with table-rapping and spirit messages. In
"Phantoms," the earliest of these pieces, the supersensuous element
is introduced as a literary trick of an awkward mechanical kind, and
into "Rap-Rap-Rap" it enters only to be shown up as spurious, but
THE CLIMACTERIC
253
"The Dog" and "A Strange Story" are written as though Turgenev
were genuinely concerned with the possibility of the incursion of the
supernatural into everyday life, and with the nature of religious ex-
perience in its more intense forms. These two stories, like the last
tale which he was to set pen to, argue a strain of mysticism in an
otherwise mundane mind. But it remained only a feeble, half-
hearted reaching beyond the world of the senses. He spoke of
seeing ghosts, one of them being a woman in a brown cloak who
sometimes said a few words in French, but never anything worth
remembering. He dismissed his specters as hallucinations.
There was a definite decline in Turgenev's fertility as the years
went on. During the last twenty years of his life his output was
only about half (more exactly, eleven nineteenths) of what it had
been the previous twenty years. Yet there was no grave interrup-
tion of his literary activity. He had one unfailing source of en-
couragement in Mme. Viardot. There was something stimulating
in the very fact of being close to a woman who lived so energetically
and abundantly for her art. Besides, if she did n't, like another
Egeria, instruct him, she undoubtedly urged him on to write. With
her aptitude for languages, she had picked up some Russian, and
Turgenev fell into the habit of reading his work to her as he com-
pleted it. At the time when he was finishing "Smoke," he wrote to
her, she being then in Berlin on a concert tour: "Lord! how happy
I was when I read you fragments of my novel!
much, solely to give myself that pleasure again.
read you everything to the last line, without sparing you, and I shall
expect the imprimatur from you. I will change or omit whatever
you dislike." And five days afterward: "You know you are my
supreme judge and ruler. I am not sure if my work will be suc-
cessful in Russia, but I have already scored the only success I am
proud of: your approval." Years later Mme. Viardot was telling
a Russian guest of hers that it was a long time since a line of
Turgenev's had gotten into print without her having seen it before-
hand. "You Russians," she added, "don't know how much you owe
me for the fact that he goes on writing."
Now I will write
In Berlin, I shall
What effect her opinions and arbitraments had upon his work
can only be guessed at. Unquestionably she possessed good taste
254
TURGENEV
in literature. At the same time she had a sentimental and con-
servative streak, and as she grew older she was inclined to be
squeamish. When he finished his "King Lear," upon which he
spent, in his own words, "all the strength of his muscles," he feared
that Mme. Viardot would be shocked by its brutality. This story,
he wrote, made the impression upon him of "a large rump, not the
Rubens kind with flushed cheeks, but the ordinary fat-pale Russian
sort." To-day a reader would not know what to wonder at more,
Turgenev's description of this excellent tale, which contains no
word to offend the most chaste mind, or the peculiar sensitiveness
of the great prima donna. Yet there is no particular evidence in his
work of her emasculating influence. In his writings, he avoided,
like a gentleman, the raw and uncivilized, and it is hardly likely
that if he had stayed at home and associated with virile intelligences,
his novels would have had a lustier and harsher quality.
Beside Mme. Viardot's influence, there was another more adven-
titious circumstance which kept Turgenev at his desk: he needed
money. Financially speaking, his base of supplies was a thousand
miles away from where he lived, and that in itself constituted a
serious inconvenience. With an Oriental distrust of the regular
channels of communication, odd enough in such a good European,
he preferred to depend upon the kind offices of devoted but dilatory
friends. The temporary embarrassments from which he suffered
in consequence recurred with annoying frequency. When in the
winter of 1863 he wanted to go to Paris, this owner of thousands
of fertile acres had to borrow money from the good Frau Anstett.
He left his belongings with her as security, and when he got to the
French capital he had to stay longer than he had expected, for want
of cash to pay his fare back to Baden. When the remittances from
his manager did arrive, they were apt to be distressingly small. In
1866 he said that "the Athens of hired labor"-meaning Spasskoye
-was yielding him nothing better than the loss of several hundred
rubles a year. Like most Russian landlords at the time, he was
hard hit by the readjustments incident to the Emancipation, and
like so many others, he had to resort to the sale of portions of his
acreage. Indeed, half a dozen years after serfdom was abolished he
had thus disposed of sixty thousand rubles' worth of land.
THE CLIMACTERIC
255
To make a bad matter worse, there was the necessity of providing
his daughter with a dot. In the spring of 1863 he had hopes of
marrying her off. The wedding was being planned for April or
May of that year. Writing about it to his brother, he refrained,
for fear of the evil eye, from naming the bridegroom: there had
been disappointments in the past. But in spite of this precaution,
the match came to nothing. It was not until February, 1865, that
he succeeded in getting the twenty-three-year-old girl off his hands.
The legal side of the transaction was fraught with difficulties be-
cause Turgenev had now to go through the long-postponed formali-
ties of adopting his illegitimate daughter, so that when the marriage
contract was finally signed, he felt like a general who had fought a
hard battle. The dowry came to one hundred thousand francs set-
tled on her outright and fifty thousand more to be paid later on.
To get the initial sum together, he had to borrow ten thousand
francs from a usurer, paying ten per cent. interest, and the Viardots
lent him something in addition, since he got no help from his
brother, who had turned into a perfect Harpagon.
But, after all, it was worth it. He could not, he felt, as he
looked at the energetic young man who now addressed him as cher
papa, have made a better choice. Gaston Bruère was a blond, hand-
some, thirty-year-old Parisian, who looked like the late Prince Con-
sort of England and who owned what seemed to be a profitable
glass factory. Turgenev thought he had never seen a more radiant.
face than his daughter's on the day of her wedding, and he rather
liked the solemn, respectable church ceremony. He believed that
the man was created to make Pauline Turgenev happy, and that
the two were eminently suited to each other.
Even before the business of marrying off his daughter burdened
him with money worries, he began to realize that the bad times alone
could not account for the paucity of his income. While he was
getting, on an average, fifty-five hundred rubles a year, his brother,
from properties of about the same size, was receiving about four
times as much. It dawned upon him that the fault lay with the
manager of his estates, who, since the middle of the fifties, had
been his Uncle Nicholas. This jolly old satyr had never been par-
ticularly noted for his business capacities, even in the days when
256
TURGENEV
the widowed Varvara Petrovna had leaned uncertainly upon him,
and now age was getting the better of him. The master of Spass-
koye, however regretfully, decided to dismiss his uncle, and en-
gaged in his stead a younger and presumably more efficient person.
In January, 1867 the new appointee, a certain Kiszinski, appeared
at Spasskoye, with orders to take over the management. Uncle
Nicholas turned a deaf ear. He had taken care of his absentee
nephew's estates for so long that they seemed more like his own,
and the idea of handing them over to an utter stranger was pre-
posterous. He sulked, he stormed, he locked himself up in his
room, he refused to budge. Turgenev came to see that letters were
useless, and that he would have to go home to put an end to the
impossible situation: a hateful business, this standing up for your
rights! In March he set out from Moscow over murderous country
roads, firmly decided "to pull the sick tooth." En route, he suc-
cumbed to a combined attack of grippe and gout, and had to return
to the city, where he took to his bed. Upon his recovery he re-
turned to Baden, without having come near enough to the enemy
to give battle, and in May he was forced to ask his uncle again, in no
uncertain terms, to leave the premises.
The old man was not one to go quietly. In his letters he invoked
the spirit of Ivan's mother, complained that he was ruined by his
heartless nephew, and called Kiszinski a Nihilist. A kind of peace
was at last patched up, and Turgenev believed that he had pacified
his uncle by giving him, in addition to such consolations as furni-
ture, horses, and carriages, a promissory note for a generous sum,
with the understanding that it was not to be presented for payment
until after Turgenev's death. The septuagenarian was married to
a woman much younger than himself, and it was probably supposed
that she would profit by this informal arrangement, which amounted
to a bequest. A few months passed and news came that the wily pa-
triarch had presented the note and indeed imposed a lien upon the
properties of which he had recently been the manager. There was a
brief renewal of hostilities and a final settlement that cost Turgenev
twenty thousand rubles in cash. He consoled himself with the
thought that the affair had given him insight into the character of a
Tartuffe of the steppes; he hoped eventually to share his costly knowl-
THE CLIMACTERIC
257
edge with his readers. As he wrote to Annenkov, in March, 1868,
he had come off on top, but with every bone broken. The chaos in
which the old man had left his nephew's affairs was such that Kis-
zinski warned his employer that he could expect no income from his
estates for some time. Turgenev recognized that for a while at
least he would have to depend largely on the Muse for a livelihood.
He was not, however, the man to bear a grudge, and when, five years
later, the old man fell ill, he wrote to his brother begging him to go
and comfort the invalid. He had as a child been deeply attached to
Uncle Nicholas, and that sort of affection died hard.
To meet the demands of the covetous old villain and to save
Spasskoye from going under the hammer, its owner was forced
to sell his Baden villa before it was completed. The buyer was his
next-door neighbor, Louis Viardot, who, Turgenev felt, was thus
doing him a great service. So that by one of Fate's little ironies,
it was as a mere tenant that he moved into the house upon which he
had lavished so much care. The sale was concluded on January
27, 1868-an inauspicious beginning for a year which he considered
his climacteric. He had been born on a Monday, and in 1868 Oc-
tober 28 again fell on a Monday. Besides, New Year's Day was a
Monday. Furthermore, he was to be fifty this year. And, in addi-
tion, the year was to bring the twenty-fifth anniversary of his meet-
ing with Pauline Viardot, as well as the twenty-fifth anniversary
of the beginning of his career as a writer. Surely all these signs
and portents boded no good. Like his mother, he was given to
superstitions in which numbers played a part; and like her, he
smiled at his folly. As a matter of fact, the climacteric year was
no worse than its immediate predecessors, except for the fact that
it left him with the knowledge that he had half a century behind
him. And soon to his little stock of cheerful aphorisms he will
add a new one: "After fifty, a man lives in a fortress which is
besieged by death, and which sooner or later must be surrendered
to the enemy."
The year held in store for him one disheartening experience which
was unexpected. In June he went home, on one of his usual forag-
ing expeditions intended to fill his purse with the proceeds from the
sale of a manuscript or a tract of land, and also to satisfy himself
258
TURGENEV
about his new manager, and to renew lapsed contacts. He found
the country in a sad state. "What an appearance Russia presents
now," he wrote to his brother, "this land which everybody tells you
is so rich! The roofs are torn up, the fences are down, not a
single new building to be seen anywhere, except dram-shops. The
horses, the cows are dead, the people haggard. .. Around Peters-
burg everything is burning: forests, houses, the earth itself. . . .
All you see is men stretched out sleeping on their bellies, everywhere
impotence, flabbiness, dirt, poverty." Spasskoye afforded no refuge
from the distressful sights he saw elsewhere. Emancipation seemed
to have aggravated the condition of his former serfs, rather than
otherwise. Through the entire fortnight that he spent on his estate
he had the feeling, so he said, of a hunted hare:
I could n't stick my nose into the garden, without being assailed and
attacked by former serfs, peasants, burghers, retired soldiers, peasant
girls, peasant women, priests, deacons, the blind, the halt, and the im-
poverished neighboring gentry. Shaggy and hungry, they sprang at
me from behind trees, from under bushes, from the very ground,
threw themselves at my feet, and with mouths gaping like fledgeling
jackdaws, they shouted hoarsely: "Barin, Ivan Sergeitch, save us, save
us; we're dying!" In the end I had to flee, so as not to part with my
all.
It was hard for him to believe that it was only a matter of three
years since he had seen Spasskoye. Was it that the place had so
altered, or was the change in him? His old hunting companion,
Afanasy, who on their first trip, when Turgenev was a boy of
seventeen, had pulled out of his tarry boot nearly a whole sucking-
pig and eaten it without bread, Afanasy who could once digest bul-
lets, Afanasy who, never able to carry his liquor, had of old
swaggered after a single glass, and now was reduced to tears by
the same amount-Afanasy was a wreck. And Porphyry, under
whose tutelage he had-it seemed only yesterday-made his first
trip abroad, was now an old man. The first night Turgenev spent
under the ancestral roof, he went to bed with a queer feeling: the
old walls seemed to stare at him as at a stranger. And after all,
he told himself with a pang, that was what he was.
In the morn-
THE CLIMACTERIC
259
ing he took a turn in the park. It looked as immense to him as
when he was a child-in fact, large enough to hold the entire Thier-
garten valley. The trees, especially the old lindens, had, like Kis-
zinski's new beard, grown magnificently. But neither decay nor
growth had obliterated the familiar landmarks. He walked past
the place from which he had once stolen strawberries; past the tree
on whose branches had perched the crow that was his first hunting-
trophy; to the spot where he had found an uncommonly large mush-
room; to that diminutive battleground where he had watched an
adder and a toad engage in a struggle that had forever injured his
faith in a benevolent Creator. Every corner laid upon him the
troubling hands of memory. And always, with the leap of recog-
nition went the recoil of estrangement.
It was just a quarter of a century since his mother had placed
the slim volume, his first-"Parasha”—on her drawing-room table
for all her visitors to admire. And now who was left in this
unhappy country to admire his mature work? True, in Germany
and in France they were translating and apparently reading him.
But "Smoke" had been a failure, and no new novel was taking
shape in his mind. Obviously, he was played out, and he might as
well close his literary career, appropriately enough on the silver an-
niversary of his marriage to literature,—as also of his incomplete
"unofficial" marriage to Pauline Viardot,—and when his years had
reached a round fifty. And so when he came to write the final
chapter in his Reminiscences, for his collected works, to be published
the subsequent year, he turned it into a farewell to his readers.
His service to letters, he wrote, had come to an end "amidst the
gradual cooling of the public." He was laying down his pen in
the belief that the new age demanded new men, and with some
satisfaction in the thought that he, for one, had cast his mite into
the treasury. Before withdrawing, however, he begged leave to
offer his young confrères a word of advice and to set before them a
last request. His plea was that the young writers should do every-
thing to preserve the strength and beauty of the language that was
their great heritage. The substance of his counsel was: be truth-
ful, especially about your own sensations; deepen and extend your
experience through study; be free to doubt everything, even the
260
TURGENEV
worth of your own nation; above all, do not let yourself be caught
in the trap of any dogmatism.
Some of the ideas which he expressed thus publicly crop up again
and again in the course of his correspondence with Foeth, during
the sixties. The point to which he keeps reverting is that freedom
is the artist's natural prerogative. "You are buoyed up by joyous
childlike faith, you feel like giving forth lyrical effusions; go to it!"
he urged the poet. "You'd like to undermine every emotion, you'd
like to poke your inquisitive nose everywhere, you'd like to crack
things open like nuts; go to it!" Above all else, the artist must
avoid the blinders of a "system." He was repeating to Foeth what
he had told Tolstoy. The writer owed allegiance only to his per-
sonal vision of the truth, and to the logic of his art. Not that
Turgenev always held to this principle. Writing to a radical friend
in 1876, he admitted that he should have toned down Bazarov so as
not to play into the hands of the reactionaries. The artist, he said
then, should have been sacrificed to the citizen: "The issue in-
volved more important things than mere artistic truth, and I
should have understood that." Yet in writing thus, Turgenev was
more probably trying to see things from his correspondent's point
of view, as he was apt to do, than expressing his own opinion.
The main bone of contention between him and Foeth was the rôle
of reason in art. Foeth's position was that of the romanticist, con-
temptuous of cerebration, putting his trust in the unconscious in-
stinct which swells the bird's throat with song and moves to ut-
terance the Pythian priestess on her tripod. Turgenev, on the
contrary, upholds rationalism. "Art, I say, is such a great thing
that the whole man, with all his faculties, including the intellect, is
hardly enough for it." He could understand, he said, Foeth's
maligning the intellect, if he were a fanatic or a Slavophil, but he
was a poet, and should have known better than to try to substitute
for his Pan's pipes "the cheap Rousseau-esque penny-whistle that
had been soiled by so many spittles." And again, “We here in the
West," he writes from his Baden refuge, “send to school people who
attack reason and recommend instinct and naïve unsophistication."
This was in 1866. In "Smoke," at which he was then working,
THE CLIMACTERIC
261
Potugin declares: "Instinct, however nearly it approaches genius,
is unworthy of man: reason-simple, sound, commonplace reason-
that's our true inheritance, our pride. ." Referring to Tol-
stoy's idea that only unconscious activity is fruitful, he asked:
"How then did the Americans build the railway between New York
and San Francisco?-in sleep, without consciousness? Or is n't
that a fruitful activity?" It must not be thought, however, that
Turgenev was unaware of the part played by the subliminal self in
the creative process. Talking to some friends about his work, late
in life, he said that after some external stimulus has set the mind in
motion, the unconscious steps in and puts its hand to the wheel.
The artist's experience is almost that of the dreamer. "You walk,
he is quoted as saying, "among the heroes of your novel; you see
yourself among them, and at the same time you realize the difference
between that self and your ordinary self. It is thus that in a dream
you know a man to be Ivan Feodorovich, although he looks like
somebody else, a fact which does not trouble you in the least."
""
It would seem as if Turgenev's reliance on the intellect were the
attitude of a man who in his behavior was the plaything of impulse
and adventitious influences, and who only in his art gave evidence
of that free mind which, in Santayana's fine phrase, "rejoices at the
harmonies it can find or make between man and nature; and, where
it finds none, solves the conflict so far as it may and then notes and
endures it with a shudder." Lacking the spiritual conviction of
his great contemporaries, he was inclined to exalt the rational mem-
ber. He repudiated instinct because it was the essence of Nature,
that brutal and irreconcilable Mother.
P
*
་་
ASSING through the gambling
saloon in Baden one Saturday
in July, 1867, Turgenev noticed
in the crowd a familiar face bent
eagerly over the table. It was
the healthless, big-browed, thin-
bearded face of the author
of "Crime and Punishment."
Knowing that gamblers dislike
being accosted in the midst of
play, Turgenev went by without
speaking. He had last heard
from Dostoyevsky two years
previously, when the latter,
stranded in Wiesbaden, had appealed for a loan of a hundred thalers.
The man had lost everything, including his watch, at roulette, and
in the pension the sneering waiters would serve him nothing but
tea. "You are much more understanding than the others," he
wrote, "and morally it's easier for me to turn to you." Turgenev
responded by sending him fifty thalers.
They had seen each other before that in the late autumn of 1863,
when they met in Baden. Dostoyevsky was then on his way to
Italy with a lady who had been his mistress and whom he was now
comforting almost fraternally for the defection of another lover.
He concealed his companion from Turgenev, but not his weakness
for gaming. Having made a lucky stroke on his first trip abroad
the previous year, he had conceived the notion that he could make
himself the master of Chance, and had developed a passion for the
wheel which was to torment him for a decade. At the time of this
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262
MEEK PAGAN AND VICIOUS CHRISTIAN
263
first encounter. in Baden, Turgenev had felt rather friendly toward
the unhappy gambler, and handed him the manuscript of "Phan-
toms" for the magazine "Time" (Vremya), which Dostoyevsky was
publishing with his brother. But the man was so engrossed by his
mania that in the end he returned the piece unread. Turgenev
shipped the manuscript off to Annenkov, with a request to decide
if "the nonsense" was worth printing. The supreme arbiter gave it
his blessing, but the author was so long making up his mind about
it that even this imperturbable adviser lost patience.
Just before Christmas Turgenev received a letter from Dostoyev-
sky, begging the piece for a new review, "The Epoch" (Epokha),
which he planned to start in January, 1864, the old one having
recently died a violent death. The editor, who had read the manu-
script during its peregrinations, argued that a dose of fantasy and
poetry was just what the public needed, at a moment when a prosy,
factual, utilitarian, Quakerish manner had driven literature into an
impasse. Even from a utilitarian point of view, he went on, the
piece held its own, for "Phantoms" was veritable music, and surely
music is "useful, since it is a kind of language expressing what con-
sciousness has not yet grasped." Indeed, the only fault he found
with the piece was that it was not fantastic enough. Here spoke
not only an enemy of literal realism, but also an editor trying to
lasso a valuable contributor. Whether because of Dostoyevsky's
plea, or because of an energetic letter from Annenkov, Turgenev
yielded, and “Phantoms" appeared in the first issue of "The Epoch."
To his brother, Dostoyevsky wrote about "Phantoms" in quite dif-
ferent terms, after re-reading it soberly in print: "There is much
rubbish in it, something nasty, sickly, senile, impotent, and so with-
out faith, in a word, the whole Turgenev, with all his convic-
tions, but the poetry will make up for a lot.”
He might continue to solicit contributions from the elder novelist,
and praise him to his face, but scarcely a shred was left of the ex-
cited admiration he had felt for the man in the distant days of their
youth. An obscure, poverty-stricken fellow, Dostoyevsky had sud-
denly been hailed as a genius by the great Belinsky himself, and
welcomed into the literary circle of which the author of "Parasha"
had for some time been a member. The spring of 1845 was then
-
264
TURGENEV
unfolding its white nights over Petersburg. In the intoxication of
the season and his new fame, the shy, proud young man had, by
his own account, nearly fallen in love with Turgenev: "A poet,'
was his comment to his brother, "a gifted man, an aristocrat, hand-
some, rich, intelligent, educated, twenty-five years old-I don't
know that Nature has refused him anything. Finally, a straight-
forward character, beautiful, formed in a good school." A story
which Dostoyevsky wrote in 1848 bears an epigraph from the
verses of this poet.
As for Turgenev, he shouted Dostoyevsky's name from the house-
tops, scolded him paternally-being three years his senior-for
wasting his substance on women, and wrote epigrams against him
when success turned the head of this queer, talented youth. It was
hard for him to resist the temptation of feathering his wit with
malice, even if the shaft must strike a friend.
Turgenev was in his full stride as a novelist—indeed, the fore-
most writer in Russia-when in 1859 Dostoyevsky, returning to
life and letters after the ten years' hiatus caused by his Siberian
exile, found himself at the very starting-point of the race. The
Russian republic of letters being small, it was natural for the two
men to come into contact again. The following year both of them
took part in a benefit performance of Gogol's "Inspector General."
Thereafter they corresponded now and again, and regularly read
each other's books. Dostoyevsky, coming out of prison, swallowed
"A Sportsman's Sketches" at a gulp and smacked his lips over it, and
Turgenev found a Dantesque touch in "The Dead House." He
considered its author to be one of the two or three people who had
grasped his intention in "Fathers and Children." Yet their per-
sonal relations remained without depth and body.
The years that established each on his separate height showed how
divergent were the orbits in which their lives moved. A wider
gulf of temperament and mentality divided Turgenev from Dos-
toyevsky than from his other great contemporary, Tolstoy. As
early as the middle sixties Turgenev must have begun to see what
the complexion of Dostoyevsky's ideas was like. The man was ob-
viously headed for the patriotic, mystical, Orthodox, Slavophil camp
-in short, for everything that went against Turgenev's grain.
MEEK PAGAN AND VICIOUS CHRISTIAN
265
His literary work, too, although attesting a talent of a high order,
was full of things intolerable to the elder novelist. "Neuropathic
nonsense" was Belinsky's term for the experiments with which
Dostoyevsky followed up his first novel, and the phrase must not
seldom have recurred to Turgenev as he read the later works. He
found the first part of "Crime and Punishment" admirable, but the
remainder struck him as "something like a prolonged colic." These
novels flaunted the psychology which he would have hidden out of
sight; they reeked of the clinic; they lacked all reticence and meas-
ure; they were empty of lyrical overtones.
For all that, being a tolerant, skeptical, self-distrustful man of
the world, Turgenev was less likely to involve himself in a quarrel
with this old acquaintance than to allow their relation painlessly
to lapse. But the meddling arm of circumstance thrust itself be-
tween them. Hearing from Goncharov that Turgenev had seen him
at the roulette table that Saturday in July, 1867, Dostoyevsky felt
that it was incumbent on him to go to see the man. Not that he
looked forward to the visit with any pleasure, but inasmuch as he
owed Turgenev money, he felt that his failure to call would be con-
strued as evasion. Accordingly, the next Wednesday at noon, Dos-
toyevsky made his way to the quiet house on Schillerstrasse where
Turgenev lived, and found him at home-in fact, just sitting down
to lunch. Dostoyevsky had come to Baden with his stenographer,
who, a few months earlier, had become his second wife.
That very
day at tea he told his Anya about the visit, and on the same evening
she set down his words, with her little hooks and dashes, in the
diary in which, with the meticulousness of her calling and a woman's
interest in trifles, she regularly recorded the happenings and talks
of each day, the harassing ups and downs of a gambler's fortunes,
the sum spent for every spool of thread and piece of soap, the sums
received for articles pawned, and the sums laid out for the rare
spree when her husband was at once in pocket and in good humor.
The visit, we learn from Mme. Dostoyevsky's journal, which was
published only in 1923, lasted an hour and a half. The entry tells
us that Turgenev seemed to be galled by the reception accorded
"Smoke," and kept peevishly returning to the subject. He spoke
of the rumor that he was to be expelled from the ranks of the gentry
266
TURGENEV
i
on account of the novel, and said that this would give him the
greatest pleasure. "As usual," writes the diarist, "Fedya [Dos-
toyevsky] spoke to him somewhat sharply, advising him, for in-
stance, to buy himself a telescope in Paris, and, since he was living
so far from Russia, to train it on that country; otherwise he would
not understand what was going on there." The visitor also told
Turgenev that he was deceived in thinking himself a realist. The
talk turning away from literary matters, Dostoyevsky vented his
irritation against the Germans, saying that they were generally
stupid and often crooked. The host took this as a personal affront;
in fact, he said plainly that he was now a German himself. They
managed to part, however, without an open break. How wicked
it is, the entry concludes sententiously, for a Russian to speak with
contempt of his native country. "Well, God forgive him! I
know, though, that Fedya was frightfully enraged by this talk with
Turgenev, and that this abominable habit people have, of repudiating
their own, badly upset him."
About seven weeks after the encounter, Dostoyevsky, writing to
his friend Maikov, poured out his heart on the subject of that
renegade, Turgenev. This epistolary account of the interview which
took place on July 10 is an elaboration of Mme. Dostoyevsky's re-
port. He begins by pointing out that he went to the house in a
frame of mind likely to make the visit a very awkward one. He
had, he wrote, lost all liking for the man long before this; he
could n't stand his Pharisaical manner of setting out to embrace
you, and then offering his cheek to be kissed; he, Dostoyevsky, had
been owing him fifty thalers since the Wiesbaden days (a debt,
which, by the way, he was not to make good until 1876); above all,
he had just been reading that revolting novel, "Smoke." And in
this mood he had to listen to his host repeating all the blasphemies
against Russia uttered in that book. "He told me himself that
the leading idea, the main point of 'Smoke' was this: If Russia
sank through the ground, that would be no loss to mankind.
The traitor thought that the Russians "must crawl in the dust be-
fore the Germans," spoke of civilization as "the one universal and
inevitable road," and called the Slavophil will to be different "pig-
gishness and folly." Of course, a man of this temper did not
999
MEEK PAGAN AND VICIOUS CHRISTIAN
267
believe in God: "He announced to me that he was definitely an
atheist." Dostoyevsky retaliated with the remark about the tele-
scope, and when Turgenev showed irritation, said "with really very
well-feigned naïveté: 'I did n't expect the failure of "Smoke"
would upset you so much; the thing is n't worth it; spit on it.'
'I'm not at all upset. What are you talking about?" " It was then
that Dostoyevsky took up his hat, but first he had to hit out at the
Germans. At that Parthian shot Turgenev grew pale and said:
"You are insulting me personally. I have settled here definitely.
I consider myself a German and not a Russian, and am proud of it."
"Though I read 'Smoke' and have spoken to you for a whole hour,'
Dostoyevsky replied, "still, I did n't expect this from you. Forgive
me if I have insulted you.'
"",
"
Before the year was over, Turgenev learned from the faithful
and vigilant Annenkov that what seems to be a copy of this letter
to Maikov had been sent anonymously to Bartenev, the editor of
the historical review "Russian Archives" (Russki Arkhiv), with
a request not to publish it before the year 1890. In the letter of
protest which the indignant novelist addressed to the editor on
January 3, 1868, he pointed out that he could not possibly have dis-
cussed his intimate convictions with his visitor, since the man, ow-
ing to his morbid attacks and for other unmentioned reasons was
"not wholly in possession of his mental faculties." He continued:
man.
I saw Mr. Dostoyevsky only once. He sat with me no more than
an hour, and retired after having relieved his heart by ferociously abus-
ing the Germans, myself, and my latest book. I had neither time nor
desire to argue with him. I repeat, I treated him as I would a sick
The arguments which he expected from me must have presented
themselves to his deranged imagination and he lodged information
against me with ... posterity. In 1890 doubtless neither Mr. Dos-
toyevsky nor I shall longer engage the attention of our compatriots, and
if we are not wholly forgotten, we shall be judged not by one-sided de-
nunciation, but by the results of our whole lives and work.
""
Recalling the unfortunate affair some three years later, in a letter
to a friend, Turgenev spoke more freely:
He [Dostoyevsky] came to me not to pay the money he had
borrowed of me, but to upbraid me for "Smoke," which, according to
268
TURGENEV
his notion, should be burned by the hand of the executioner. I listened
to this philippic in silence, and what do I learn? That I expressed within
his hearing criminal opinions, which he hastened to communicate to
Bartenev. . . . It would have been simple calumny, if Dostoyevsky
were n't crazy-which I don't doubt in the least. Perhaps he hallu-
cinated.
As the meeting was a tête-à-tête, we shall never know how it
would have appeared to a third person. It is hard to believe that
Turgenev held his peace all the time that Dostoyevsky was with him.
Even if he doubted the appropriateness of expressing himself freely
before his visitor, it is quite plausible that he did talk about the
things which were nearest his heart. That Dostoyevsky twisted
whatever he may have heard from Turgenev's lips, is even more
credible. He was naturally inclined to exaggerate and intensify.
His mental state at the time showed a lack of balance extraordinary
even for him. His gambling fever was at once an indication of,
and a contributing cause to, his nervous disorder. If he did not
actually hallucinate, he must have given his imagination free rein.
Not that he imputed these opinions to Turgenev without ground.
Turgenev did have harsh things to say about Russia. His attitude
may have been due in part to an unconscious desire to excuse his
expatriation. But he could not have contemned his country so
thoroughly if he had not loved it deeply. He did on one occasion
declare publicly that he owed Germany too much not to love and
respect it as his "second fatherland." But he admired it less for
its own sake than because it embodied the principles of "civiliza-
tion" which he wanted to see take root at home. He did lack re-
ligious faith. But he felt this to be rather his affliction than his
pride. He was a rationalist, but not a materialist. Dostoyevsky's
hatred—and he had a genius for hating-utterly blinded him, and
led him to see the meek, melancholy Turgenev as an arrogant Judas,
a man without a country and without a God.
Among the things that fed Dostoyevsky's animosity was his envy
of his confrère's financial security. That he, having come back to
his work from the Siberian inferno without any resources and with
a number of financial burdens, should be forced to take one hundred
rubles per sheet, while the other, with two thousand souls on his

FIODOR DOSTOYEVSKY
From a portrait by Perov
UNIL
OF
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MEEK PAGAN AND VICIOUS CHRISTIAN
269
estates, should get four hundred rubles, was a crying shame. The
difference in their fortunes was to rankle in him for many years.
It was galling to know that this flâneur was insured against want.
If he himself should have no cause to worry about bread and butter
for a couple of years, he knew he could write a book that would be
talked of a century hence. Yet the gulf between them was not so
much a matter of outward circumstances or, as Turgenev believed,
even of "convictions.”
The very texture of their personalities was essentially dissimilar.
The whole of Dostoyevsky's passionate and perverse nature was
struggling with the effort to realize God and announce Him to the
people. He was a mystic and a fanatic, but in spite of his intense
religious feeling, he hated his neighbors. To Turgenev, the uni-
for
verse was a concern run without any reference to humane or,
that matter, human values, and showing no evidence of the over-
lordship of even an absentee God. He was so given to doubts that
he sometimes questioned his very unbelief. He was a rationalist,
impatient of dogma as he was of force, and holding all things to be
relative. He observed, he set down, he admired, he deprecated, he
did not participate. Where there was so much in mankind to for-
give, he could not hate; but it was as difficult for him to love,
though he was in love often enough. Dostoyevsky saw man as a
free agent, climbing spiritual peaks by an athletic act of will. To
Turgenev man was a galley-slave, chained to the hard seat of neces-
sity, and at best a stoic at the oar. The stuff of Dostoyevsky's art
is a crisis of the soul; a crisis having crime as its symptom, and
viewed in a transcendental light. Turgenev, on the contrary, brings
to his art a serenity which leans on commonplaces, and a pathos
which on occasion takes on the authority of music.
When Dostoyevsky left Turgenev's house that uncomfortable
Wednesday noon, he promised himself never to cross this threshold
again. The next morning at ten o'clock Turgenev called upon him
a visit which the other took as a hint that Turgenev as well wished
to terminate their relations, for he knew that the couple slept until
eleven and received no visitors before twelve. The Dostoyevskys
remained in Baden seven weeks, but the two men met only once
more, at the railroad station, and by Dostoyevsky's account they
;
270
TURGENEV
looked at each other without bowing. Their personal association
was not again resumed. Turgenev, while recognizing the signifi-
cance of his junior's work, felt it a thing utterly alien to himself.
He described Dostoyevsky as "the Russian Marquis de Sade" and
called him "the most vicious Christian" he had ever known. The
vicious Christian, for his part, bore Turgenev a lasting grudge.
During 1871-72 "The Russian Herald" was publishing "The
Possessed." In this work, which took some four years to write,
Dostoyevsky, whose rage was cumulative, allowed himself to carica-
ture Turgenev in the character of Karmazinov. The object of the
satire immediately recognized himself in this Russian author who
railed against Russia and praised Europe, especially Germany;
who courted the revolutionary youth and was ignored by them; who
had such a devoted public and yet was forever laying down his pen
and talking about the time when death would close his eyes; who
took such tender care of his own person; who betrayed the fears
and foibles, spoke with the shrill voice and moved with the mincing
gait of a spoiled woman. (Turgenev's detractors disliked his
walk, which looked affected, but was conditioned by the fact that his
legs were too short and thin to bear the weight of his huge torso.)
The general public was not slow to discover that Karmazinov
flaunted the mannerisms and the mufflers, the waistcoats and the
Eau de Cologne, the Westernism and the æstheticism of the dean of
Russian letters. There were a few who read into one passage a
reference to Turgenev's life in Baden by the side of Pauline Viardot.
And every one had a laugh over Karmazinov's remark: "I felt
that this question of water-pipes in Karlsruhe was dearer and closer
to my heart than all the questions of my precious Fatherland." At
first reading Turgenev laughed too, and spoke of the Aristophan-
esque humor of the caricature. But he was for a long time indig-
nant with the author for having represented him as fawning upon
the extreme radicals because they were to inherit the earth. He did
cultivate the Nihilists and the radical youth generally, but he cer-
tainly did not believe that the future lay in their hands.
Not content with ridiculing Turgenev's person, Dostoyevsky took
occasion to poke fun at his literary manner, and the novel contains
parodies of several of his writings, among them the piece which
C
MEEK PAGAN AND VICIOUS CHRISTIAN
271
originally appeared in Dostoyevsky's review. It also has a veiled
allusion to the old gossip about Turgenev's youthful cowardice in
shipwreck, combined with a derogatory reference to his account of a
public execution, which was published the year before "The Pos-
sessed" appeared in print. On the night of January 19, 1870, Tur-
genev "supped full of horrors," as he wrote Annenkov. He spent it
in the company of a privileged group of French journalists and men
of letters at the La Roquette prison, in Paris, so as to be present at
the last toilette and guillotining of a certain Traupmann, a notorious
murderer who had massacred a family of eight. Turgenev agreed
to go, as he told the Herzens, because refusals came so hard to him,
but it was a devastating experience, and as a penance for his weak-
ness and curiosity, he made himself write down everything he had
witnessed and felt.
His discomfort began even before he reached the prison, the
gamins mistaking his enormous shape for that of the executioner.
Turgenev's account is a marvel of reportage. He notes every de-
tail: the remarkable whiteness of the condemned man's beautiful
hands, the childlike gesture with which he helped the guards to take
off his prison shirt, the aspect of the executioner, who looked like a
diplomat or a protestant minister. It seemed to this witness that
every one was participating not in an act of justice, but in a murder,
and that the only innocent creatures were the policemen's horses in
the crowded streets outside, chewing oats in their nose-bags. What
he felt chiefly was a sense of guilt, but this was wiped out by sheer
terror when the two attendants jumped at the condemned, so that
he fell head forward on the guillotine and his heels kicked. At that
moment Turgenev turned away and for a few seconds lost con-
sciousness. The narrative, which is a dry, straightforward, and
immensely effective piece, closes: "I shall be satisfied and forgive
my own misplaced curiosity, if my story will add something to the
argume of those who would abolish capital punishment, or, at
least, abolish its public character."
Dostoyevsky, who himself had stood upon the scaffold awaiting
execution, which he escaped only by a last-minute reprieve, was
naturally infuriated by this cruelly weak conclusion. What fur-
ther disgusted him was Turgenev's faint-heartedness at the final
272
TURGENEV
moment, and in addition, his emphasis on his own reactions to the
drama. To Dostoyevsky's way of thinking, a human being has no
right to turn his eyes away from such a scene: only by taking it in,
to the marrow of his bones, can he prove his spiritual maturity.
And that Turgenev should consider his own peace of mind when an-
other man was losing his head, was to Dostoyevsky abomination.
A weird piece of gossip clings to the name of Turgenev's an-
tagonist. One version of the story found its way, some years ago,
into print. According to this account, Dostoyevsky, with his usual
interest in criminal cases, followed the trial of a man accused of
having outraged a child, and became so obsessed by it that he gradu-
ally began to identify himself with the defendant. When the little
girl left the court-room at the end of the trial, the novelist was
drawn after her and made her his victim in turn. Tortured by
agonies of remorse, he finally unburdened himself to a confessor,
who counseled him, as penance, to avow his crime to the person
whom he despised most. This tale has all the earmarks of a legend.
But neither its veracity, nor its bearing upon the obscure problem of
the novelist's perverse impulses is here in question. The point is
that the man named in the story as having been sought out by Dos-
toyevsky, the man to whom he must confess his crime because he
despised him most, was-Turgenev.
JA
I
oogatk),
F "Smoke" was instrumental in
causing the rupture between Tur-
genev and Dostoyevsky, the same
novel was also destined to play
the part of a peace offering.
Since some of the argumentative
passages in the book harked back
to the author's discussions with
Herzen, he felt that it was in
order for him to send a copy
of it to this antagonist. He was
anxious to make up with Herzen.
As he grew older, he clung more
and more closely to the com-
panions of his youth, and he was not one to allow differences of
opinion to sever him from men whom, for one or another reason,
he liked. In the letter which went with the book, Turgenev offered
to bury the hatchet, adding that the distance between them had been
reduced, since Herzen was now relegated to the ranks of the re-
actionaries by the younger émigrés.
NKAM
CHAPTER XXXI
THIRTY DEVONSHIRE PLACE

GOU
L
The very day that he was penning this conciliatory letter, Herzen
himself was writing to a friend about the novel and damning it
in unprintable language. He also published a scathing note on it
in his paper, which was then being issued from Geneva, where he had
settled after leaving London. This did not prevent him from ac-
cepting the tender of friendship, nor yet did it cloud Turgenev's
good-will. After all, the novelist wrote, they were contemporaries,
and so had the surest ground for mutual understanding. The one
thing that troubled his conscience, he admitted, was the fact that
273
274
TURGENEV
his work was appearing in Katkov's "Russian Herald," a notoriously
retrograde review. His excuse, which he knew to be lame, was that
it was the only magazine that people read and that paid well. Her-
zen was willing to let conscience alone, resigning himself to their dif-
ferences.
Their friendly relations were resumed with the tacit assumption
that controversial matters would be avoided. Yet before long they
dug up the old bone of contention. "If the Lord lets you live a
hundred years, as I hope He may," Turgenev wrote on December
12, 1867, "you will die the last of the Slavophils." Could there be
anything more irrelevant than the question of Russia's peculiar mis-
sion, he wondered, in an age whose real problem was the conflict be-
tween religion and science. It was in science, not in the deified
People that a reasonable man must put his trust. Herzen retorted
that science was powerless to save the rotting organism that was
Europe. Should Germany defeat France in the war which seemed
imminent, he observed with uncanny acumen, a period of material
prosperity was likely to ensue, but the spiritual tone would certainly
not be improved. If only the West would see that the Russian peo-
ple were entering history abreast of the social revolution, which
alone could save the Old World! If only the West were willing
to listen to the new word that Russia, whose masses bore within them
the seed of communism, was shouting at it!
"""
Turgenev laughed at this new word. The homeopathy of civi-
lization was, he insisted, the only cure for the ills of the social body.
Everything else was quackery. And maybe even this medicine was
powerless. On Christmas Day, 1867, the same sententious line of
Goethe's that he had quoted to Mme. Viardot eighteen years previ-
ously came tripping to his pen : "Man is not born to be free.'
Given freedom, he said with a prescience matching Herzen's, the
Russians were bound to turn into dogmatists. Perhaps the ulti-
mate destiny of the human species was to parallel the caste organiza-
tion achieved by the bees. Certainly Varvara Petrovna's younger
son was not born to be free: his conduct, generally speaking, was
that of a man either led or driven.
There were not enough common interests between these con-
temporaries to sustain the correspondence. It lapsed shortly, to be
THIRTY DEVONSHIRE PLACE
275
revived again only after an interval of two years. Herzen had just
silenced "The Bell," which for some time he had been publishing
in French to enlighten Western public opinion on the subject of
Russia, and Turgenev wrote to say that the cessation of the paper
was a good thing: "Do the French need to know the truth
about anything, let alone Russia?" Herzen responded cordially
enough, and in a subsequent letter went so far as to ask a favor of
his correspondent, namely, to help kill the rumor that he was seeking
repatriation at the price of abject repentance. He went on to say
that Bakunin was treating God shabbily, and inclosed a clipping to
bear out his words. The inclosure must have referred to the Alli-
ance de la Démocratie Socialiste, just founded by Bakunin, the stat-
utes of which opened thus: "The Alliance declares itself atheist."
So even Bakunin was not inalterable! The last time Turgenev
had seen him, when they had walked together under a London moon,
Bakunin had talked as though he still held the romantic faith of the
old Berlin days, and had condemned Herzen for his disbelief in a
personal God. Having recalled this scene in the letter which ac-
knowledged the clipping, Turgenev went on: "Well, why not open
one's eyes to the truth? But, I wonder, is such a public admission
desirable? Is that the sort of thing one should tell the working-men?
... If there's no strong government in the universe, what will
make men accept a strong government under socialism? And if
they don't, what's left of socialism?" Not that he particularly
cared, because, as he concluded, he would remain "an individualist
to the end."
Herzen, having removed to Paris, was now living in the French
capital, in the oppressive atmosphere of the approaching European
conflict, a man superannuated by his own followers, whom he de-
spised, ignored by the strangers among whom he pitched his tent,
and pursued by all manner of private troubles, of which the least was
the loss of a considerable sum caused by his disposing of the United
States securities he held. He could not forgive himself this step,
not so much because of the money, as because he had doubted for a
moment "the success of so noble a cause as the abolition of slavery.
And where? In a country so healthy and so organically sound as
the American Republic." Chancing to be in Paris in January,
276
TURGENEV
1870, Turgenev went to see the exile for the first time in seven
years, and found him, across the lunch-table, in excellent conver-
sational form. The next day Herzen, who was a diabetic, came
down with pneumonia, and it was soon clear that he would not
recover.
Turgenev wrote to Annenkov that he had visited the family daily,
but if Herzen's daughter is to be believed, he only looked in for a
moment on January 19, the day of his departure for Baden, “in or-
der," she says, "to make sure that the funeral would not delay him."
It is certain that he did not stay to bid his dying friend a last fare-
well two days later and to see him buried at Père Lachaise. He
avoided here what Fate, as though aware of his overpowering fear of
death, had spared him in the case of Stankevich and Belinsky and his
mother, the spectacle of the personal finale. He read with wet eyes
the news that another old comrade was gone, and wrote sadly to
Annenkov: "In Russia they will probably say that Herzen should
have died earlier because he survived himself. But what do these
words mean, what does our so-called activity mean, before this
dumb abyss which swallows us? As though to live and keep on liv-
ing were not the most important thing!"
Turgenev's last talk with Herzen must have at least touched upon
the prospect of war. Like most people, he was inclined to overesti-
mate the strength of French arms. Before he moved from his
lodgings into the house he had built for himself in Baden, he joked
that perhaps the first one to occupy the villa would be a general of
the French army of invasion. Just about the time that he was ut-
tering this pleasantry, the Chief of the French General Staff was re-
marking to Bismarck that though he loved and admired Prussia,
they would have to cross swords in the end, for they were both
cocks, and could not allow any one to crow better than themselves.
The July day on which war was declared, Turgenev chanced to be in
Berlin. Dining in a restaurant, he caught a glimpse, at the table
opposite, of von Moltke, whose cool bearing and professorial brow
strongly impressed him, and raised his hopes of a German victory.
Turgenev was then on his way from Russia to Baden, and when
he reached his destination he found the inhabitants trembling in
expectation of the arrival of the Turcos, and the transient popula-
THIRTY DEVONSHIRE PLACE
277
tion gone-in short, what Clara Schumann describes in her journal
as "a city of the dead."
Weeks of anxiety followed. He set down some of his observa-
tions and opinions in a series of five letters which he contributed
to a Petersburg daily. Napoleon's generals, he thought, were worse
than those of Nicholas in the Crimean War, and the French were
too vain and hypocritical to profit by their mistakes. Without any
malice he hoped that they would get the lesson they sorely needed.
He noted how sober and intelligent the German press was, in contrast
with the ferocity and jingoism of the French. These people did not
care for truth, even in literature: they had no Gogol, no Thackeray,
and they ignored Flaubert. The church bells announced the news
of Sedan, and a republic was declared in France. Lying in bed at
night, he heard through the closed windows the faint booming of the
guns that were bombarding the half-burned city of Strasburg, and
thought wearily that he was living in an age of barbarism. Metz
fell and Paris was besieged. Bazaine's surrender was puctuated by
the collapse of a chimney on Turgenev's villa, and he recalled that
when he had criticized it in the building, the architect had proudly
declared: "These chimneys are as solid as France."
In September he was writing to his friend Pietsch: "We work
for the wounded, we have music, we read, and so the hours pass.
The fall of the French Empire was a great satisfaction to poor
Viardot. Now his heart is bleeding. As for me, I am, as you
well know, wholly pro-German. The victory of France would have
meant an end to liberty. Only, you should n't have burnt Stras-
burg." He wrote to more than one friend to say how much the fall
of "the abominable empire" rejoiced him. To Pietsch, for ex-
ample, he said: "But to have lived to see that wretched scoundrel
[Napoleon III] finally thrown with his whole clique into the sewer,
-that's true happiness! Why is the fellow treated with so
much respect? To be fed to the lice in Cayenne-that's what he
deserves." Turgenev believed that he was witnessing the re-casting
of the star rôle in history: it was passing from the Latin to the
Teutonic race.
He had been delighted to see what decent treatment had been
accorded the French families in Baden, as well as the prisoners of
278
TURGENEV
war whom he had watched marching in endless columns along the
road to Rastadt. The one disturbing thought was the "greed of
conquest" which was sweeping over the Germans. He identified
their victory with the triumph of science and civilization, but he hated
to see them take Paris: such an achievement could only demoralize
the victor. The fall of the empire left him still on the side of the
Germans, although the very fact that they were conquerors slightly
alienated his affections: aggression chilled his sympathies. As a
child he had learned to hate the domineering temper, and in his work,
as in his human contacts, he registered his aversion from it. Be-
sides, as he wrote to Annenkov, he could hardly approve Germany's
desire to saddle itself with another Poland: the Alsatians had be-
come completely French, just as the Pomeranians, once Slavs, were
now Prussians, and there was no reversing the process of history.
Referring to Germany's annexationist appetite, he wrote to Paul
Heyse: "I am bewildered, and fear that I shall soon cease to recog-
nize my once beloved Germans."
His strong sympathies did not save him from the uncomfortable
sense of being, as usual, an onlooker. "These days," he was writ-
ing to Theodor Storm in October, 1870, “it's a queer thing to be
neither a German nor a Frenchman. You cannot help, and at the
same time you are hindered in your own work. You become a spec-
tator from head to foot, and that's not always pleasant." He felt
that even if one side is right, war is a barbarous thing, and just then
it looked to him as though mankind would never outgrow the iron
age. When the disastrous peace came, he pitied "poor France."
Yet the course and conclusion of the war did not alter his original
opinion of it. In 1872 Annenkov wrote to him that if the Germans
"like a polite nation, had allowed themselves to be beaten, it would
be simply impossible to live in Europe." To which Turgenev re-
plied that this was perfectly true.
The war deprived the Viardots of their income. For once Tur-
genev could extend to them the assistance which they had several
times given him. He was enabled to do so by disposing of some
land, and he also used his good offices in the matter of the sale of
a Rembrandt, owned by the Viardots, to the Grand-Duchess Yelena
Pavlovna. Foeth threw out the suggestion that the whole contin-
Į
THIRTY DEVONSHIRE PLACE
279
gent should translate itself to Spasskoye and live there off the fat
of the land. But this extreme expedient was unnecessary: there
was still a place where Mme. Viardot could get as much as twenty-
five francs a lesson. That was England. And so in October, 1870,
the family went to London, and a fortnight later Turgenev joined
them. He had been telling every one that he was going to remain
in Baden, even if the French came. There was no evidence of epi-
demics, and living had actually become somewhat cheaper. But
when his friends left, how could he remain behind?
The Viardots lodged at 30 Devonshire Place, and Turgenev al-
ways managed to be near them, living at one time at 4 Bentinck
Street, a few doors from where Gibbon had written a great part of
"The Decline and Fall," and later at 16 Beaumont Street. But even
with the sea between him and the troubled continental scene, he had
little peace. There were moments when it seemed to him that the
Franco-Prussian War was merely a match to touch off the gen-
eral European conflict which had been feared for so long. "What
will then become of civilization and freedom?" he asked. "If only
Russia keeps out!"
""
This was the first time that he had come to England for more than
a flying visit. He found the life there "joyless but curious." Even
the most intelligent English, he wrote to Flaubert, led a hard life;
one must adapt oneself to it as to their climate. "No Englishman,'
he observed to another friend, "has the slightest suspicion as to what
art is; that's an incontrovertible axiom." He complained of the
post-office, declaring that more of his letters and telegrams were lost
during the winter in England than throughout the rest of his life.
In later years he confided to Henry James some of his impressions
of that "lugubrious" period, mentioning particularly "a visit to a
'bishopess' surrounded by her daughters, and . . . the cookery at
the lodgings which he occupied." He was impressed, and somewhat
dismayed, by the constant activity of these English, so different from
the leisurely ways of Moscow and Petersburg. He was struck, too,
by their phenomenal poise. Just before the downfall of the Com-
mune and the fires in Paris, he was visiting Cambridge and dined at
Trinity. That same evening a debate was to take place at the Union
on the question: Do the French Communards deserve the sympa-
280
TURGENEV
thy of Englishmen? "Turgenev was so anxious to hear the de-
bate and witness the stormy scene," one of his companions wrote,
"that he kept asking if it was n't time to start. After having ob-
served with what calm and respectful attention the young men who
crowded the hall listened to the arguments and voted all but unani-
mously dead against the motion, Turgenev turned to me and said,
'Now at last I understand why you English are n't afraid of a
revolution.
199
The old Viardot's dejection weighed down Turgenev's naturally
low spirits, and he was the prey of uncertainty simply because the
family's plans were in the air. One of the drawbacks to London
was that Mme. Viardot was so often absent from the city on her
concert tours. She had an established audience throughout the
provinces, having appeared there annually during the decade of
1848-58. Turgenev too had to interrupt his stay in London, much
to his distress. Stopping overnight in Baden, on his way to Russia,
he prepares to go to bed with the feeling of being "an apparition" in
his own room. He wonders how he can be here, "body and bones,'
and not at Devonshire Place. "I said 'body and bones,' " he writes.
to Mme. Viardot, "because I know where my soul is. All the time
I am asking myself what they are doing there in London; I see you,
see Didie, Marianne, Viardot, Paul; one more effort and I shall
hear your voices."
""
·
He remained in London with the Viardots through the spring of
1871, while civil war was raging in France. In July the family
went to Boulogne for the sea bathing. Turgenev took them there,
and then crossed the channel again to be present at the Walter Scott
centennial which was being celebrated in Edinburgh on August 9.
There was a pageant of Scott's characters through the hot sunlit
streets, and then a frugal banquet of wine, fruit, and cake in the
glass-roofed hall of the Corn Exchange. According to the account
in "The Scotsman" the next day, "the noble Chairman," the Lord
of Dalkeith, proposed the health of the visitors among whom there
was an American, Dr. Beets, and "Mr. Torqueneff [sic], a distin-
guished Russian novelist." "Mr. Torqueneff" had learned by heart
the speech which he had prepared with the aid of an English friend,
and, as he wrote to Foeth, only stumbled once, thereby winning a

TURGENEV IN 1871
From a drawing by Ludwig Pietsch
UNIL
OF
MICH
THIRTY DEVONSHIRE PLACE
281
round of applause. "All of our best writers," he said, among other
things, "have been sincere admirers, some of them have been imita-
tors of your great master of romance.
""
From Edinburgh he traveled to the Highlands, to shoot grouse.
The weather was fine and so was the breakfast on the moors, but
the sport was rather monotonous and very strenuous: at the end of
the first day, spent in the company of an athletic native, he was ready
to cry with fatigue. He preferred, he wrote to Mme. Viardot,
hunting around Baden, where one is not attached to “a madman with
the legs of a deer, who shouts, 'Come on, come on,' every time you
stop to draw a breath." It was a joy to breathe the air of northern
Scotland, than which, he thought, there was nothing finer in the
world; but the company, like the grouse-shooting, was wearisome,
and this though it included a vigorous, white-bearded man with a
strident voice and a hand-shake like an electric shock, who answered
to the name of Robert Browning. The English poet was staying
with his friends the Benzons, at Little Milton, in the hills above
Loch Tummel, at the time when Turgenev was dating his letters.
Allan House, Pitlochry, a village near by. The poet failed to make
an impression upon him. "Mr. Browning came again last night,"
he wrote to Mme. Viardot on August 13. "He seemed dull to me,
but I was so sleepy with fatigue, I could hardly keep on my feet.”
That was all he found to say of the author of "The Ring and the
Book."
Although Turgenev injured his foot his first day out hunting, he
was too much of a sportsman not to try again. The second time
he was on horseback and had other companions. "I was with Mr.
Benzon, who," he wrote to Mme. Viardot, "reminds one less of a
hunter than of a marmot, and Mr. Browning's son, who wishes to
look like one (a hunter, not a marmot), but is nevertheless merely an
insignificant little simpleton, with a perpetually red wart on his
nose. In the evening there was music, and "Mrs. Benzon," Tur-
genev remarks uncharitably, "squeaked Schubert and Schumann
Lieder, with a false voice and true feeling." He was, however,
pleased by the memories that the singing called up.
""
Browning had just then published "Balaustion's Adventure,
which includes a translation from Euripides, and was at pains to
""
282
TURGENEV
go over from Little Milton to Tummel Bridge to see Jowett, and
consult with him about the rendering of a Greek phrase. Stopping
with Jowett at that time was Algernon Charles Swinburne. There
is no indication that Turgenev met him then, but it is noteworthy
that Swinburne was the only one of the literary men of the period
who won a good word from him. He wrote to Foeth that he would
tell him when they got together about the most recent English
poetry, of which no one, or virtually no one, in Russia had any idea.
"The subject is not agreeable, but interesting, and there is a very
great lyrical talent: Swinburne." Earlier in the year he had com-
mented to a Moscow audience on the degeneration of English liter-
ary taste, especially in poetry. "The English," he said, "are now
admiring the verse of Rossetti, a most insignifiant person, without
any gift to speak of." Over a twelvemonth later he was writing
on the same subject in the same terms to another compatriot, him-
self a writer of verse: "The newest English poets, all these Rosset-
tis, etc., are dreadfully affected; in Swinburne alone there are flashes
of indubitable talent. He is an imitator of Victor Hugo, but he has
true passion and fire, while in Hugo all this is invented. Get his
'Songs Before Sunrise." "
If Turgenev was out of sympathy with the trend of literature in
England, he was not much better satisfied with what the young writ-
ers in Russia were doing. They were proud of their lack of inven-
tion, believing that this gave them a better purchase on the truth.
They did not understand that if art needs truth as a plant needs air,
like the plant it cannot live on air alone. He found their work with-
out grace and without strength, smelling, so he said, of trouser-
bottoms, but he followed it patiently. In 1871, as the previous year,
he went home for a refreshing dip in native waters, and though, as
he observed, some of the waves were muddy, he was glad, on the
whole, of having done so. At the same time he felt himself a
stranger at home. Commenting on Anton Rubinstein's effort to
form a club which would unite the artistic and literary intelligences
of Petersburg, Turgenev predicted to Mme. Viardot, and was borne
out by the event, that nothing would come of it. "Besides," he
added, "this does n't concern me, because I don't live in Rus-
sia.
He went on to say, in a tone to which he had long since
""
THIRTY DEVONSHIRE PLACE
283
accustomed her: "The Petersburg whirl into which I fell and
from which I intend to withdraw very speedily does not for a min-
ute let me forget either London, or my return, or all I love in the
world—now more than ever. I shall be happy only when I cross
the threshold of 30 Devonshire Place."
か
​کا روایتی این مناظرات
❤...
EAVING their Baden home in
the midst of the war, the Viar-
dots did not wind up their af-
fairs there. The summer of
1871 they returned to settle mat-
ters by disposing of their prop-
erty. Turgenev joined them
there after his prolonged week-
end in Scotland, only to be put
on his back by an attack of gout.
It was a dreary autumn for him,
what with the selling of his nest
to a Moscow banker, the trials
incidental to moving, being ill in
dismantled rooms, and his lonely fifty-third birthday, with Mme.
Viardot in Paris, and himself left in charge of the young people.
It was certainly a down-hill plunge now, he was writing to Pietsch
in November: "The brake! The brake! For the love of God!"
What a pleasure—and a contrast—it had been, three months before,
to see Mme. Viardot celebrating her fiftieth birthday he never
missed these anniversaries—in the best of health and the highest
spirits!
CRRATOPHAD
ada
CHAPTER XXXII
{"
"WHEN YOU'RE OLD ...
""

Alg
Mme. Viardot was in the French capital now with her husband,
looking for a suitable house, since they had decided to settle in
what was left of that much battered city. After all, France, as
George Sand had once written to Viardot, was something to come
back to, if only to measure the changes in one's own life by the trans-
formation the country had undergone. Their decision automatically
fixed Turgenev's place of residence. Where else should he rest his
284
"WHEN YOU'RE OLD..."
285
gouty old carcass? "If the family moved to Australia," he con-
fessed, "I would follow them there." By the end of November they
were all reunited at rue de Douai, 48, in the Montmartre section.
""
It was with no particular pleasure that he went to make his
home in the French capital. His visits to the prosperous Paris of
Napoleon III had always left a bad taste in his mouth. He had
found the many new houses, one uglier than the other. The freshly
ornamented façade of the Grand Opéra had looked to him like "the
dream of a cocotte.' The opera itself had degenerated. The
streets had seemed to be full of repulsive people with dirty faces.
The unhappy atmosphere of the Paris to which he now came was
not calculated to make him any more comfortable. Every one, in-
cluding Thiers himself, despised the Republic, and yet saw no way
to anything better. The hatred of the Germans was colossal; "the
only colossal thing there is here," Turgenev wrote.
In the beginning the immediate concern of getting settled in the
new home and the writing he had in hand, took his mind off the
political situation. A visitor found him engrossed with the weighty
business of placing the furniture and choosing the portières and cur-
tains. He was frequently seen with rolls of fabric under his arm,
on his way to or from the upholsterer's, or traveling through the
shopping district. One guesses that the family took advantage of
the leisured and obliging man. His three rooms-bedroom, study,
and library—had not been designed for a giant, and the modest
apartment was rather stuffy, being, to Alphonse Daudet's eye at
least, as "crowded as a boudoir." His green den contained the in-
evitable divan, toward which he naturally gravitated, and among
other things on the walls were a Rousseau landscape and a Corot,
while between the windows hung a marble bas-relief of Pauline
Viardot in profile, and beneath it also in marble a sculpture of
her exquisite hand.
For a decade these rooms saw a multitude of foreign faces,
mostly young, and often troubled. Penniless Russian students came
to ask if the great novelist could not find work for them. He
claimed that the shabby arm-chair in his study had been worn out by
his unemployed compatriots. He penned endless letters of recom-
mendation; he had, so he said, a gift for this kind of writing. He
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TURGENEV
arranged, with the aid of Mme. Viardot, musical matinées for their
benefit. As often as not he dug into his own pocket. His gener-
osity was a byword: it rained upon deserving and undeserving
alike. One petitioner suggested in a letter that the novelist spend a
day or two on a story for a magazine which was offering a prize,
and since he would surely win it, send the cash to the letter-writer,
who was in need. Turgenev did not write the story, but he did look
up the beggar and gave him money. Sometimes he took pleasure
in playing the Paraclete. He would send a sick girl to a medical
celebrity for treatment, and assuring her that the fee was a small
one, quietly foot the large bill. Toward the end, when he was mor-
tally ill, he arranged a "sad little comedy" to assist a fellow-
countryman who was too proud to accept the help he desperately
needed. Turgenev sent a story which the man had translated to
a Russian editor, and begged him to write a letter of acceptance stat-
ing that he was remitting two hundred francs as advance payment,
though the money was really to come out of Turgenev's purse.
He was never without a special favorite whom he kept under
his wing. He would listen to young men ardently urging upon him
the imminence of the revolution, and looking quite placid in his gray
Caucasian jacket with red lapels, he would furnish a quiet interlude
by telling irrelevant if exquisite anecdotes. He was at the mercy of
all manner of people who unloaded their troubles on his big shoul-
ders. Women came to ask for an introduction to Mme. Viardot,
for help in securing entrée to the theatrical world, in bringing a
debtor to terms, in getting rid of a bad husband. He acted as Sec-
retary of the Paris Club of Russian Artists, arranged for exhibi-
tions of their work, followed up Mme. Viardot's Russian pupils.
Indeed, it was said that there was hardly a fellow-countryman of
his in Paris who had anything to do with writing, painting, or mu-
sic, who did n't, at one time or another, get help from this "ambas-
sador of the Russian intelligentsia," as he came to be called. Of
course, would-be authors flocked for advice and assistance. He
offered them money, took their manuscripts, read them, entered into
correspondence with possible publishers, and even with the aspirant's
friends and relatives. He never had the courage to tell a hopeful
writer that his work was worthless, and there was always a crow
"WHEN YOU'RE OLD...
39
287
or two that he was hailing as a peacock. Years previously, a wag,
making a collection of facetious dream interpretations, had set
down that to see Turgenev in a dream signified that one had the sub-
tle ability to dig up a talent where none existed.
He was, and enjoyed being, father confessor, mentor, guide, and
friend. In a sense these protégés and postulants were closer to him
than his own "family," for unlike the Viardots, these people, being
Russians themselves, were interested in the same matters and ex-
cited by the same problems that agitated him. His visitors were
in the way of being a substitute, however poor, for Russia. He
scrutinized them closely, sometimes to their displeasure, as if to test
the accusation so often leveled at him that he was ignorant of the
younger generation. Of course, he was also examining them with
the eye of a novelist. He was lavish of warnings against following
his own bad example of expatriation, with its attendant loss of the
native milieu, of social ties and obligations, of an activity of a defi-
nite sort. "I was better fitted than you for life abroad," he told
one of his young friends, "and even I vegetate here and keep waiting
for something, knowing that I have nothing to wait for any more.”
His callers, on their way upstairs, often overheard the sound of
the piano or the voice of one of Mme. Viardot's pupils. Her music-
room was directly under Turgenev's study, a circumstance in which
he rejoiced, though a jealous compatriot interpreted it as another
instance of the neglect he was suffering. Indeed, he had a special
speaking-tube installed so that he could hear the music more dis-
tinctly. He dined below-stairs, and after dinner they would all
gather around the fireplace, where, falling into a doze, "Tourguel,"
as the girls called him, would wake to the sound of a duo or a
quartet. To all intents and purposes he was as completely identified
with the family as old Viardot himself. He went back to Vergil and
Ovid, partly because he loved the classics, but chiefly to help Paul
with his Latin. He watched with paternal solicitude the progress
of Didie's affair with young Georges Chamerot, which ended in her
betrothal to him. Turgenev considered him "a splendid, capable,
high-minded fellow"; otherwise, he told Pietsch, he would never have
consented to the match. "I have never seen anything more charm-
ing," he wrote of the pair. "All of us, so-called writers, are blind
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TURGENEV
botchers and bunglers in these things. Fortunately, I don't write
any more, so I am saved from the temptation of trying to repro-
duce this spectacle. . . . But I am swallowing everything, every-
thing." He told Foeth that the young man was wholly admirable,
but could not say that he was worthy of Claudie, for in his eyes, no
man was that. The happiness that the young couple radiated was
something to thank God for, but he could n't feel truly grateful to
a Providence that would not restore his own youth; and all else was
"dust and vanity." In good time came the anxious days preceding
Didie's confinement, and the grandfatherly joy in the little Jeanne
Edmée-the baby, like his own granddaughter, being named for
him.
A regular feature of his life on rue de Douai was Mme. Viar-
dot's Thursdays and Sundays. George Sand has described one of
these Thursday musicales given soon after her darling Pauline
moved to Paris: the bare simple room, furnished only with a piano
and chairs; the great jars of poppies and cornflowers on the steps
leading up to the adjacent picture-gallery with its organ; the violin-
playing of young Paul, and the singing of Claudie and Marianne
to their mother's accompaniment; and the miracle of that voice which
she had not heard for twenty years, and which, carrying the melodies
of Gluck, had the power to obliterate for a moment the smoking
ruins of France, the miseries of the present and the uncertainties of
the future. Flaubert, too, when he heard Mme. Viardot singing
Gluck, declared that the emotions her art aroused consoled one for
the malignity of life. What Flaubert was saying, his friend Tur-
genev must not seldom have felt. One of his "Poems in Prose,'
dated 1879, celebrates the triumphant moment when, her last note
uttered, she stands transfigured by the beauty she has just expressed,
and becomes, although but a handful of dust, the radiant incarna-
tion of immortality. His admiration for the artist altered less with
the years than his passion for the woman.
She continued to delight her friends, and occasionally even the
general public, when there was only one octave left to her voice.
Thus, as late as 1876, beginning somewhat rustily, she yet made her
audience shudder as, rubbing together her perfect white hands, she
sang to Verdi's music, Shakspere's words: "All the perfumes of
99
"WHEN YOU'RE OLD..."
289
Arabia will not sweeten this little hand." The same evening she
showed her versatility by singing “Erlkönig,” with Saint-Saens at
the piano, and then, with a Spanish tenor who was present, doing a
comic love-duet. At fifty-five, in spite of her bulging, near-sighted
eyes, thick lips, and bad figure, this supple-bodied woman in the
black-lace gown exercised over the guests seated on her white-
lacquered, silk-upholstered chairs a spell that put into eclipse her
two young daughters.
The Sundays were less serious occasions, what with charades,
games of forfeits, and other parlor amusements. Turgenev, who
had always relished this sort of thing, Saint-Saens, and Paul Viar-
dot were the principal actors. On one occasion Turgenev took the
part of a professor of medicine, while the musician, in pink tights,
was the corpse, and at the grand finale Paul, the chief machinist,
held up a white china plate to represent the moon. Fat old Renan,
with his paunch on his right side, was made to jump over a hand-
kerchief, to the great glee of the company, especially "the perfidi-
ous young." Again, he powdered his vast face all over, trying with
his lips to lift a ring from the top of a flour pyramid. Turgenev's
first impulse, when in 1868 he was offered an introduction to this.
"exquisite seminarist," as he called Renan, had been to decline it.
Was it that he felt an instinctive dislike for the man who was to pro-
nounce the funeral oration over his body?
-
The apartment on the rue de Douai was Turgenev's winter quar-
ters. The first summer away from Baden he spent partly at home in
Russia, partly with the Viardots in the country, at Valéry-sur-
Somme. The following year he summered with them in a suburb
of Paris, Bougival. There was everything to recommend the place:
it was within forty-five minutes of the city; it was pleasantly situated
on a forested hill overlooking the Seine; and-cholera had never
been known there! And so in 1874 Turgenev, in partnership with
Viardot, purchased a fine property there at the price of one hundred
and eighty thousand francs. There was some suggestion of a Rus-
sian manorial estate about Les Frênes. The place was so called be-
cause of the ash-trees surrounding the house. Turgenev would have
found a melancholy propriety in the fact that his last home should
be named for the tree of whose wood his coffin was to be made.
290
TURGENEV
With its spacious grounds, its springing fountains, its moss-covered
statues, its river-view, this was an estate fit for gentlemen. Thirty
paces from the main house, he built himself a comfortable chalet
in the Swiss style, but with incongruous ornaments intended to re-
mind the owner of his far-away Scythia. The last tile was placed on
the roof in 1875, but he did not move in until the spring of the next
year.
In the half-dozen summers that remained to him, Les Frênes was
the counterpart of his Baden nest. There were the same faces, the
same domestic diversions, the same sporadic, half-acknowledged
unease. Mme. Viardot's married children summered there, too,
and the whole family would gather as of old around the lunch-
table, to which the samovar was regularly brought, the one Russian
feature in Turgenev's French home. In the afternoon they would
fill his study, which was on the second floor and furnished richly in
crimson and black, Mme. Viardot with some hand-work, Claudie at
her easel in the big bow-window, Louise reading aloud from some
French or English book, and he at his desk over his correspondence,
interrupting now and then, only to have Marianne's fingers close
up his mouth: "See here, Tourguel, we want to listen!" On Sun-
days there was always music, with Mme. Viardot at the piano in the
drawing-room.
These companioned hours were matched by many lonely ones
of lying abed with the gout. The disease played with him, he com-
plained, like a cat with a mouse. At any moment it was ready to
pounce on him and send his best-laid schemes a-gley. "Man pro-
poses," he paraphrased the old proverb, "and Gout disposes." The
very first year in Paris was particularly trying in this respect. On
his fifty-fourth anniversary he suffered the twelfth spell in six
months, and cursed the day of his birth. His visits home usually
ended in an attack, and it was Mme. Viardot's contention, with
which he agreed, that the famous Russian hospitality was to blame.
He suffered cruelly in 1877 and 1878, but thereafter he was able to
lay his crutches aside, and actually mounted a horse-Didie main-
taining that he looked like a retired Württemberg general. As in
Baden, except for these attacks, he enjoyed fairly good health. At
the age of sixty he was able to enjoy hunting, although his pulse was
"WHEN YOU'RE OLD..."
291
no longer one hundred and eighty when he saw his hound pointing.
Two or three times he crossed the channel to shoot partridge on the
estate of a friend who boasted the best preserves in Engand, although
confessing that it was rather shameful for such an old fellow as he
to go to all that trouble, merely to riddle poor birds with lead. He
complained that he was hard put to it to follow the sport in France,
because he had neither dogs nor legs, and besides, only millionaires
could engage in hunting there.
He was farther than ever from being a millionaire. Sometimes
he was in severe straits. When he reached Petersburg in 1876, for
example, he had to borrow a hundred rubles to get to Spasskoye.
He was sure of about seven thousand rubles annually from the sale
of his books, and he eked out his income by selling pieces of land.
His estates brought him relatively little; Kiszinski, the manager
whom he had instated with so much difficulty, was no improvement
on poor Uncle Nicholas. When Turgenev asked his advice on im-
portant matters, the only thing he did was to wag his magnificent
beard and show his false teeth. If the man had at least been hon-
est! Turgenev had been foolish enough to trust him for nearly
ten years, but his eyes were opened when a large sum of money
vanished, obviously into Kiszinski's pocket. On June 3, 1876, Tur-
genev wrote from Moscow that he had decided to effect a coup
d'état and "overthrow this Abd-ul-Aziz"-the deposition of the
sultan was then the topic of the day. He kept his word, and when
the ordeal was over, went to his study and watched from a window
the carts being loaded with the rogue's belongings, preparatory to
his departure. Among the goods the master of Spasskoye recog-
nized some of his own possessions, but made no attempt to inter-
fere. Only when the caravan was on the road, he dashed out, shook
his fist at it, cursed the thief vigorously, and having thus relieved
his feelings, went in to write his ladies, in his best humorous vein, an
account of the proceedings.
He appointed a new manager, and leased him Spasskoye for a
period of twelve years, retaining the privilege of selling it. Thanks
to Kiszinski's depredations, he was, he wrote, "a ruined man."
"Virgin Soil," which appeared the next year, brought in several
thousand rubles, but then came the war and a lowered rate of ex-
292
TURGENEV
change. After 1877 he did so little writing that his literary income
came almost entirely from his previously published works. Coin-
cident with the Russo-Turkish conflict came private financial re-
verses which seriously affected him. He had finally to recognize
that he had misjudged his son-in-law as generously as he had his
manager. Gaston Bruère was a bad egg. He had sunk all of his
wife's dowry in his factory, and now he was threatened by bank-
ruptcy. To avert the disaster Turgenev got himself into debt, but
succeeded only in postponing the failure. Meanwhile he was giving
his daughter an annual pension of five thousand francs. The worst
of it was that Bruère was as poor a husband as he was a business
man. He drank heavily, and even menaced his wife with a re-
volver. In the end Turgenev had to help her to run away from the
fellow, and she, with her two children, remained a charge upon
him to the last. Being in hiding from her husband, she was un-
able to come to her father's death-bed, but the bankrupt glass manu-
facturer turned up promptly to put in a bid for the inheritance.
One of Turgenev's creditors was his own brother, to whom he
owed fifteen thousand rubles and was paying nine per cent. in-
terest. Nicholas had taken to augmenting his large fortune by
usury. In 1878, Turgenev found himself unable to make payment,
and offered Nicholas one of his canvases instead. The usurer re-
fused the substitute, and Turgenev, what with other monetary diffi-
culties, was forced to put on the market his collection of pictures.
Since his settlement in Paris he had developed the collector's hobby.
He declared that he was known at the auction rooms as "le grand
gogo russe,” the great Russian sucker. He owned forty-eight can-
vases, nearly one third of them old masters, including a fine Ten-
iers; and among the landscapes, of which he had many, the produc-
tions of the Barbizon school figured largely. He sold the lot at a
great loss. Antokolsky, the sculptor, who came in to see him the
day after the first sale, which took place April 20, 1878, found him
sprawling on his ugly green rep divan, and repeating dejectedly,
"What a Waterloo! What a Waterloo!" He had foreseen the
loss; the same thing had happened when he sold his villa. But, as
he wrote to his brother, his one consolation was that he was now
too old to make many more mistakes.
Ch
-10
“WHEN YOU'RE OLD ...
293
""
That year he turned sixty. He who had cried wolf so many
times needlessly, now had the wolf at his throat. There were mo-
ments, rare enough, when he could find an ambiguous virtue in old
age: it simplified life, and, when neither gout nor spleen tormented
him, he had hours of feeling reasonably well off. But if he had had
his periodic depressions before this, he was now come to a time
when, like Prospero's, his every third thought was his grave. The
letters to his intimates abound in half humorous and often wholly
pathetic lamentations. He is going down-hill: there she waits, the
blind, dumb, gray, cold, stupid, voracious, eternal Night. Why
should he regret the disarrangement of his plans by illness? That
feeling does not befit the dead. He hopes his correspondent will
remember kindly the cadaver named Turgenev. He is an overripe
fruit, hanging heavily on its rotten branch. His mood is gray,
with yellowish spots. He is swinging like a pendulum between
aversion from life and fear of death. An American reviewer calls
him a genius; pshaw! he would give up, not only his own reputa-
tion, such as it is, but the fame of a real genius, to have a few weeks
of foolish youth again, and spend them hunting partridge, ten hours
on end. He quotes, in a letter, an entry from his diary:
March 17, 1877; midnight. I am again at my desk and a darkness
blacker than night pervades my spirit.
It is as though the grave
were hastening to swallow me. The day, empty, aimless, colorless, flits
by like a moment. Before you know it, you're falling into bed again.
I have neither the right nor the desire to live, there is nothing more to
do, nothing to expect, nothing to wish for.
He is cooling and growing a film, like a pot of rendered fat placed
out in the frost. He would be glad of any excitement, but the
spirit cannot be aroused any more. Strange, when you're old,
life goes so much faster. But you get nothing done, and there's
really nothing to do. In old age one feels the thorns of the rose
one picked-or did n't pick-when one was young. One draws on
one's patience, a bitter herb, which heals as little as all the other
medicines.
MONTÃO
Fuatershy
}}
CHAPTER XXXIII
COMING to Paris to stay, in the
late autumn of 1871, Turgenev
brought with him the manu-
script of his short novel "Spring
Freshets," completed except for
minor details. He had man-
aged to write the piece between
trains, as it were, and in spite
of the miseries of moving.
Annenkov, to whom, as a mat-
ter of course, the manuscript
went first for criticism, wrote
back enthusiastically that his
friend was still at the "zenith"
of his creative powers. Thus sanctioned, the novel, like several
sketches which had preceded it, made its appearance in the great
liberal review, "The Herald of Europe," (Vestnik Yevropy) to
which Turgenev had transferred his allegiance when "The Russian
Herald" grew too reactionary.
When he had transcribed the novel,-the clean copy was always
in his own hand, he made, as he wrote to the editor, a surprising
discovery: he had thought of his work as full of blue sky and the
song of larks, but it proved to be a poisonous toadstool. "So im-
moral," he said, "I have never been." He repeated this self-
accusation in a letter to Pietsch. The reference was to the fact that
his hero could appreciate stainless beauty and betray it ignominiously
by yielding to lust. The situation here parallels that of "Smoke,"
only the man is younger, his bride is not a plain Russian girl but a
ravishing Italian maiden, and instead of resisting the scarlet woman
!
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CORRE
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1
294
THE LAST WORK
295
after a momentary lapse, he trails after his siren, no less shameful
than her other lovers or than the gluttonous husband whom she
amuses with her conquests. The remark of Potugin in "Smoke":
"Man is weak, woman is strong, Chance is all-powerful," is better
exemplified in "Spring Freshets" than in any of Turgenev's other
novels.
Annenkov suggested that Sanin, the central character, should have
been made to run away from both women, horrified and puzzled by
himself, so as to counteract the impression that he is capable of
"savoring divine ambrosia and devouring raw meat like a Kalmuck."
And after publication, the author wrote that he was disgusted with
his production: if he had only considered it before it went into
print, he would at least have altered the end, have had Sanin flee
his enchantress, have allowed him another interview with Gemma,
his bride, would have had her reject him, and so forth. But now
he was done with it, and he was not going to touch his abortion
again. As a matter of fact, he need have had no qualms about the
ethical import of his story: if it conveys any lesson at all, it is that
the wages of sin is death-death not of the body, but of the spirit-
ual member.
One may put aside Annenkov's scruples as to the moral implica-
tions of the tale, but one agrees whole-heartedly with his admiration
for it as a piece of writing. The characters live-not only the
weak-willed Sanin, and the woman who seduces him, but also the
girl's mother, and the excellent Pantaleone, old friend and servant
and majordomo of the little Italian household, as well as the German
shopman who is the epitome of Philistinism. Through this charac-
ter Turgenev was working off a grudge against the fatuousness of
post-war Germany. Gemma, like so many of his enchanting vir-
gins, is perhaps too much the incarnation of man's wistful dream
to be quite human.
The story, Turgenev confessed, was based in part on a sentimental
episode of his early manhood, when, passing through Frankfort in
1840, he was smitten by a beautiful Jewish girl. However that
may be, the impulse that worked itself out in the tale was clearly
an effort to recapture the spirit of youth. Life to him was like
one of those fruits of Oriental legend, "all sweetness on one side,
296
TURGENEV,
:
all bitterness on the other." And as he munched, wry-faced, the
bitter half that was age, he kept trying to recall the taste of the
sweet half that had been consumed.
"Spring Freshets" is related as the reminiscence of a middle-aged
man who, at two o'clock in the morning, after an evening spent
with charming women and distinguished men, flings himself into
his arm-chair and covers his face with his hands, overcome by a
disgust with life. If this lonely man stretched beside his empty
fireplace and meditating on "the vanity, the uselessness, the stale
falsity of everything human," on the suddenness of old age, on the
gnawing fear of death-if this man were to take his hands from
his face, would he not uncover the very features of his creator?
And this image of the sea of life, smooth and transparent "even to
its very dark bottom," this sea on which a man floats in a small
cranky boat, while "on that dark slimy bottom horrible monsters,
like huge fishes, are dimly visible,—all the ills of life, sicknesses,
woes, madness, poverty, blindness . . .", monsters that move, and
rise, and threaten, and sink again, barely moving their gills, only
biding their time till one of them shall inevitably "capsize the boat,'
-does not this image convey the essence of Turgenev's private
laments?
The novel had a tremendous success, especially with women.
The issue of the magazine in which it appeared went into a second
printing, an unheard-of thing. But all this did not hearten the
writer. For one thing, the critics, finding in the novel no food for
their homiletics, were inclined to dismiss it as light literature.
Their dissatisfaction with the work because of its lack of social
import, was in a sense an indirect reproach to the expatriate for
exiling himself from the scene which it was his duty to represent.
Turgenev was all too ready to admit that this reproach was justified,
although occasionally he protested that it was the novelist's right to
treat purely psychological themes.
In the years that followed, he published very little. What could
he write about? He had once spoken of his Muse as a hen which
he must summon coaxingly with "Here, chick, chick, chick." Just
now the hen was shy; or, to change the metaphor, there was "rust
on the wheels.” He confessed in March, 1873, that if it had n't
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297
been for promises he had made to two editors, he would joyfully
have thrown down his pen. "And, of course," he added, "once
these obligations are discharged, I shall never touch my pen again.
Here is my solemn oath on it." It would be a pleasure to watch
the literary scene with the serenity of one who had retired. Of
course, his literary impulse was not dead, but it was certainly dor-
mant. Such writing as he did was done under compulsion. When
there was no demand for his rye, the remittance in payment for
some tale or other was welcome. At a loss for suitable subjects,
he found himself rummaging in his portfolios and turning up yellow
sheets which contained drafts jotted down at least a quarter of a
century earlier. Most of these notes had gone to the making of
"A Sportsman's Sketches." But some of the material which had
remained unused looked as though it could be put in shape for
publication. By September, 1872, he had turned out a sequel ("The
End of Chertophkhanov") to one of these sketches, and was plan-
ning to salvage four more pieces. In two minds as to the wisdom
of such a step, he put the matter up to Annenkov: should he write
them or not?
G
Annenkov said no. "A Sportman's Sketches" was not only a
mile-stone in the career of its author, but also a monument to a com-
pleted phase of Russian culture, and it would be vandalism to tam-
per with the book at this date. "On the anniversary of the Poltava
victory," he wrote, "Peter wore his old bullet-ridden hat, but he
did n't deck it out with peacock feathers." Turgenev replied by
cheerfully quoting Julian the Apostate, "Thou hast conquered,
Galilean," and decided to leave well enough alone. In 1874 he did
augment "A Sportsman's Sketches" by one more tale, the little
classic, "Living Relics." This sketch, which immediately on publi-
cation brought Turgenev congratulatory letters from George Sand
and Flaubert, he had originally put aside as too dull to waste
time on.
GRAD
About the same time he wrote a reminiscential piece, "Punin and
Baburin," the psychological interest of which outweighs its sig-
nificance as a document of social history, and more than a year
elapsed before he offered his public another short narrative, "The
Watch," a study in adolescence. When he sent this story to the
-
298
TURGENEV
editor of "The Herald of Europe," he stipulated, with that lack of
self-assurance which he never outgrew, that should the piece be
found wanting in merit, it should be consigned to the flames. He
hoped that the critics would not say, "Mr. Turgenev's watch is
slow he still imagines himself a writer!" It was quite in character
for him to concede on occasion that he was in truth no writer. All
his life, he said, he had spent with people who took no interest in
his work; his nearest and dearest did n't even know the language in
which he wrote; for months, for years, he would forget that he had
any business with a pen.
He might deny the writer in himself as often as the cock crew,
but his literary instinct was as strong as ever. Nor, in spite of his
residence abroad, had he resigned the function of the author who,
in tracing the lives of his characters, fills out the wider contours of
the contemporary scene, the writer who seeks to show the very age
and body of his time, its form and pressure-in short, the function
of historian to his day. As early as the winter of 1872, he con-
fessed that he had "the subject and plan of a novel all ready." He
meant a large ambitious work which would face the issues of the
age. Two of his twelve characters had "not been sufficiently studied
on the spot," were "not caught alive." He could n't rely on his in-
vention. He must make at least temporary visits to Russia, to
"saturate" himself with his material. "But will these visits be suf-
ficient?" he asked. "My literary conscience will tell me that. If
so, I'll write the novel, if not-amen!" His trip to Russia in the
summer of 1874 was in the nature of an exploring expedition, and
he was able to send Flaubert news "from the depths of Scythia,” as
that confrère put it, that he had "found the information" for the
book he was planning.
That very summer something odd and unprecedented was taking
place in a thousand Russian villages. Young people disguised as
farm-hands, artisans, nurses, were traveling from one rural com-
munity to another, leaving in their wake subversive tracts, mem-
ories of unexpected kindnesses, and a good deal of queer talk. Be-
fore this year there had been only sporadic efforts to carry the new
evangel of revolution to the masses. But this year was marked by
a veritable crusade. It was in many respects a children's crusade.
THE LAST WORK
299
These evangelists were little more than boys and girls, possessed by
a religious faith in the immediate advent of the social revolution,
and betrayed by their naïveté and lack of organization. They left
lecture-halls and ball-rooms behind them, they gave up army com-
missions and estates, to learn a trade with which they could make
themselves useful while they were arousing the peasantry to revolt,
or peacefully spreading the gospel of the new order. To use Bak-
unin's phrase, they "went to the people."
To the outside world they were a fresh crop of Nihilists. But,
as Turgenev perfectly understood, these followers of the violent
Bakunin and the relatively moderate Lavrov were quite different
from the Nihilists of the sixties, whose road had proved a blind alley
and been abandoned. These earnest, selfless souls who were run-
ning the presses abroad for the publication of underground litera-
ture, and who in 1874 had left in thirty-seven provinces at home
traces of their propaganda, had identified their personal salvation
with the cause of the masses, the People. These Populists rejected
the extreme materialism and utilitarianism of their predecessors,
and restored æsthetics and philosophy to the old pedestals. They
lived for an ideal the achievement of social justice, based upon
agrarian communism and primitive democracy. Turgenev's novel
was to deal with this new phase in the history of intellectual
Russia.
Some of his material was, happily, to be found in Paris. There
were models ready to hand in the Russian colony whose members
plotted and starved and studied in the attics of the Latin Quarter.
Not a few of these young people resorted to his well-known gen-
erosity, and he cultivated them because youth was irresistible to
him, and incidentally because they were his subject-matter. He
was acquainted not only with the rank and file, but also with men
who were the captains of revolution: young Prince Kropotkin, the
gifted Kravchinsky, the great Peter Lavrov, the brilliant Lopatin,
whom Karl Marx loved and admired. A Russian friend sent
Turgenev a portofolio of diaries and letters, to help him realize
what the thoughtful youth were like. He was even on the point of
making a trip to Zurich, which became, after the fall of the Paris
Commune, a hot-bed of extreme radicalism, and where over a hun-
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TURGENEV
dred Russian girls were studying at the university, fitting themselves
for revolutionary activity at home.
He picked up his novel several times, only to drop it again. He
had promised it long before its completion, to "The Herald of
Europe." In order to force himself to get ahead with it, he had
the editor, Stasulevich, advance him money of which he had no
need at the moment, so that his indebtedness would spur him on to
fresh efforts. While he was working on the book, he was insisting
that he had nothing more to say and desired to say nothing more,
that living away from Russia as he did, his art was no better fed
than a hibernating bear who sucks his own paw. At the same time
he was not unaware that he was hatching an important piece of
work. He told the earnest and caustic Saltykov that he did n't
want to disappear from the face of the earth before he had finished
his big novel. He begged the great satirist not to be annoyed with
him because, to keep his hand in, he was writing trivial things.
"Who knows?" he added wistfully. "Perhaps I shall yet kindle the
hearts of men!"
He finally wrote the novel "at one stroke," as he said, in the sum-
mer of 1876, when he was again at Spasskoye, in the throes of dif-
ficulties connected with the administration of his estates. He
exhibited a capacity for work which must have appeared miraculous
even to himself. In a surprisingly cheerful letter to Flaubert he
wrote that he was spending white nights bent over his desk. He
was possessed by what, with his wonted modesty, he described as
the "illusion" that if he could not say a new word, he could at least
say an old one in a new way. "My devil of a novel," he said, "has
gotten hold of me in a ravaging fashion in spite of everything.
In the middle of July he completed the manuscript under Belinsky's
eyes the portrait of his old friend hung above his desk. It was
October, and he was back at Bougival, in his recently built chalet,
which smelled of new furniture, when he set "Finis" to his clean
copy. The manuscript was forthwith sent by messenger to Annen-
kov, who was just then staying in Baden. Turgenev was over-
joyed by his friend's warm reception of the book and obediently
followed his advice as to alterations and omissions. Annenkov
was highly enthusiastic. Here, once more, was a novel which was
""
THE LAST WORK
301
an event. The Danube guns-the preamble to the Russo-Turkish
War was then in progress—might drown out the book, but not for
long. Turgenev need not worry about the success of "Virgin
Soil"; such works leave broken pavements behind them, like Krupp
cannon.
Since the novel trod on dangerous ground, the author suffered
some anxiety as to how it would fare at the hands of the censor.
The epigraph of the book refers to a plow which should cut deep.
Turgenev hastened to explain to Stasulevich that what he meant was
not revolution, but the civilizing force of education. At first the
prospect was favorable. But on December 6, 1876, a group of
students of both sexes gathered before the Kazan Cathedral in
Petersburg, and shouting, "Long live the revolution!" hoisted the
red flag, with the inscription: "Land and Liberty," a slogan which
long survived the underground organization of that name which
was founded the same year. The demonstration, which seemed to
Turgenev the height of folly, filled him and his publisher with de-
spair: surely the authorities would consider untimely the publication
of a novel which dared to deal with the revolution. However, the
first part of the work-it was to appear in two instalments in "The
Herald of Europe"-passed unchallenged. The second part got by
with some difficulty and was saved by a little diplomacy on the part
of the editor. Rumor tells that he put a copy of the manuscript
into the hands of the empress's lectrice, that the emperor heard a
chapter or two and signified his approval. The novel appeared in
book form the following year, and by that time it was accessible in
nine languages.
The censors had reason to look at "Virgin Soil" with suspicion,
if only because of the author's cavalier treatment of government
officials. Moreover, if he presents the revolutionists as puerile and
futile, his attitude toward them is less that of enmity than of affec-
tionate derision. Temperamentally, they seem closer to him than
the Nihilists typified by Bazarov. And Solomin, the prosy hero of
the novel, the man upon whose broad plebeian shoulders, Turgenev
insists, the future of Russia rests, Solomin accepts the ends of the
militant Populists, even if he rejects their means. True, this hard-
headed, hard-working fellow, whose English technical education was
302
TURGENEV
·
successfully grafted upon the native shrewdness of the Great Rus-
sian, does not believe in the imminence of the revolution. He relies,
like Turgenev, on the gradual, incremental, peaceful process of
education for the achievement of a just social order. His outlook
is in sharp contrast with the liberal velleities of the gentry and with
the bureaucracy's veneer of progressivism. Like Turgenev, he
foresees the decay of the predatory feudal class, but his pleasure in
that eventuality is tempered by the conviction that the masses would
gain nothing from the rise of an equally predacious bourgeoisie.
The author held that Solomin the sober-the epithet was written
in large letters at the head of the sheet on which this character's
biography was sketched out-was the true hero of his book. The
reader is inclined to raise to that dignity the pathetic Nihilist, Nezh-
danov. This sensitive, introspective, frustrate young student is a
house divided against itself, a fact symbolized in and partly ac-
counted for by his birth: he is the illegitimate son of an aristocrat.
One of a little group of revolutionists, he yet has no real faith in
the Cause. Taken on as a tutor in the house of a wealthy govern-
ment official, he meets there a young girl, Marianna (named for
Marianne Viardot), who, like himself, has been humbled by cir-
cumstance and placed in an ambiguous position. She too is ready
to dedicate herself to the oppressed masses, but with complete
courage and unselfishness.
Here is the familiar contrast between the weak hesitancy of the
man and the calm strength of the woman. The two are drawn to
each other, less by a physical attraction than by a community of
ideals; indeed, they flee the house together, resolved to "go to the
people." Nezhdanov, a Hamlet in the rôle of Don Quixote, takes
part in an abortive effort to rouse the peasants. The result is self-
disgust and literal nausea, because he cannot carry the raw vodka
which his potential proselytes force down his throat. The young
man is entangled in a tragic coil. He recognizes that he is un-
worthy of Marianna; then, too, he is reluctant to sacrifice himself
for a cause in which he cannot believe. He cuts the knot by putting
a bullet through his heart. Turgenev points the moral of his tale
by giving Marianna in marriage to Solomin. In sum, what the
novelist here offers the young men by way of counsel is essentially
THE LAST WORK
303
the same as the lesson of "Smoke": advance by inches; serve the
people humbly that they may be ready for a future leader; work
steadily at the small task.
Some time before "Virgin Soil" took definite shape, Turgenev
was hoping that its publication would show where he stood and thus
dispel the cloud of disapproval in which he had been enveloped since
the appearance of "Fathers and Children." By the time the manu-
script was in proof, he had lost that confidence, and was saying
cynically that he did n't care what happened to the book, as long as
he got the cash for it. (As a matter of fact, he got one hundred
rubles more per sheet than he had asked.) In a more serious mood
he said he was sure the younger critics would flay him, but he
anticipated this with philosophic detachment, feeling that in the
end they would recognize him for one of their own.
His worst fears were justified. He was accused of having
drawn a distorted picture, of being generally incompetent to deal
with the subject, and, as Annenkov too had foreseen, he was de-
nounced as having defamed the youth. Later opinion reversed this
judgment. As a matter of fact, Turgenev gaged with remarkable
penetration the social forces then at work: peasants, landowners,
revolutionary intellectuals, bureaucrats. A participant in the revo-
lutionary movement could undoubtedly have presented a more ac-
curate account of the situation, but for an innocent bystander, he
acquitted himself brilliantly. He saw clearly that the Populists had
no understanding of the masses whom they were trying to arouse,
and events bore out his contention that their efforts would prove
vain.
As usual, the damning remarks of the critics had more weight
with him than the private encouragement of friends like Annenkov
and Stasulevich, whose judgment posterity has ratified. Several
weeks after the second part of this masterly novel appeared in print
he wrote, on the same day, in almost identical terms, to his brother
and to his publisher, crying mea culpa and announcing his final abdi-
cation as a writer. His eyes had been opened with regard to "Virgin
Soil" it was a failure. Surely the entire press had n't entered into
a conspiracy against the book. Furthermore, all that the critics
said was true. In his heart he agreed with them. No, one
304
TURGENEV
could n't write about Russia without living there. He had taken
upon himself a task to which he was unequal, and fallen down under
it. It would have been better if he had stopped writing several
years previously. "There has been something tragic in the fate
of every Russian writer who was at all prominent; with me, it is
absentee-ism, the causes of which it would take too long to go into,
but the influence of which is incontestably expressed in my last-I
mean last-work."
[00 on ass
CLEVE
GADAARAN
CHIN
Y
41993.
CHAPTER XXXIV
A MARRIAGE OF SOULS

1
тобо
OP
Sa
IFE in Paris had its compensa-
tory features. In spite of his
prejudice against France, Tur-
genev had moments of feeling
that nowhere else could one live
so comfortably and freely. For
one thing, there were highly
stimulating contacts. His was
an uneasiness of spirit which
might have crabbed and soured
another, and a habit of narrowly
observing his companions, which
few of them relished. But he
had, too, the savoir faire of a
man of the world, the novelist's interest in his fellows, a boy's love of
fun, and the approachability of an abjectly modest man-all of which
made for smooth and generous social intercourse. On his previous
visits to Paris he had come to know virtually everybody worth know-
ing. By the time he came to make his home there, some of those old
acquaintances were gone: Prosper Mérimée, one of his translators,
and also Sainte-Beuve, who, during their last encounter in 1868, had
drawn the location of his supposed cancer for his guest.
Of the old guard, there remained, among others, "Mother Sand.”
Although he had known her for many years, through the Viardots,
it was only now that he was entering the circle of her familiars. As
a young man he had, like the rest of Belinsky's group, thrilled to her
championship of caged emotions, the oppressed sex, and the down-
trodden People. Belinsky himself had called her "the Joan of Arc
of our time." In his maturity Turgenev was inclined to dismiss her
-
305
306
TURGENEV
writings as tiresome garrulities. But now, seeing her intimately,
and ignoring, as most good friends had to do, her novels, he suc-
cumbed completely to her personal charms. For her part, she had
long known and admired his work: he wrote simply and sincerely
where her compatriots, she contended, either posed or wallowed.
She praised him to his face, and he showed himself "as surprised as
a child," and she said the same kind things in print, when she dedi-
cated to him a sketch published in Le Temps in October, 1872.
There was more than one exchange of courtesies: he sent her his
kill, and at another time, in default of game, a barrel of oysters; she
presented him with a pair of cuff-links. She begged their common
friend Gustave Flaubert to prepare him for abduction; she must see
him at Nohant. And indeed, after he settled in Paris, he made
several trips there, generally along with the Viardots. He arrived,
usually after several postponements, occasioned sometimes by gout,
sometimes by his habit of letting himself be waylaid. "That's what
it means," he apologized once to his prospective hostess, "to have a
short thumb-the sign of a weak will."
Not these latter-day visits, but rather the memory of his youthful
admiration, led him to canonize her after her death in 1876.
"George Sand," he concluded his obituary note, "is one of our
saints." And yet his final estimate of her owed not a little to this
friendly intercourse at the end. Certainly it was rare refreshment
to spend a day with this plump, soft-voiced, soft-footed old lady,
who looked like a Jewess, he observed, because of her wig, and who
was always trailing cigarette smoke and an atmosphere of benevo-
lence and generosity. She lived at Nohant, her ancestral estate,
companioned by her son, his wife, and their two little daughters.
Here was an idyllic epilogue to a life dangerously crowded with loves
and labors. Her guests were treated to hunting in the morning,
fresh-water bathing in the afternoon, and music or marionettes in
the evening. Maurice Sand modeled the dolls' heads and his mother
made their dresses; like Voltaire and Goethe before her, she was de-
voted to her puppets. And amid these preoccupations, "the dear
lazy soul of a Turgenev," as she called him, was sure to find time to
tell fairy-tales to her favorite grandchild, their "delicious Lolo."
In the middle of March, 1873, she invited him and Flaubert to
A MARRIAGE OF SOULS
307
Nohant for a "mid-Lent fantasy." She even promised the big
Norman a costume; she had heard he was "very good as a pastry-
cook at Pauline's." Flaubert replied that Turgenev seemed to him
"to enjoy very little liberty," but that he had finally succeeded in
making him swear to go to Mme. Sand's on Easter Eve. It was
after this visit that the two men, sitting in the carriage which took
them to the railway station, spoke enviously of young Sand, who, in
addition to being happily married and the father of two charming
children, had this jewel of a mother. Flaubert, whose attachment to
his own mother had verged on the morbid, had only recently lost
her, and Turgenev must have contrasted the good Mme. Sand with
his erratic maternal parent. In the train Flaubert felt heavy and sad,
and consoled himself with his companion's excellent cognac. Tur-
genev, whose diffidence consorted ill with the dignity of his silver
beard and his great frame, was well able to be compassionate toward
this big Norman, with the shoulders of an ox, the mustaches of a
Viking, and the complexion once likened to brandied cherries fallen
into the fire, who concealed behind his roaring vehemence the spirit
of a shy boy.
At this time the two men were bound by a friendship of long
standing. Indeed, Flaubert was the only French confrère with
whom Turgenev achieved a real intimacy. They had met for the
first time in a tavern on the left bank of the Seine, and they were to
go on exchanging opinions on life and letters across a variety of
dinner-tables for more than twenty years. He had invited Flaubert,
as he did so many others, to join him in Baden, offering as one in-
ducement its giant trees: to sit in their shade, he said, was to borrow
their sap. Although Flaubert did not accept the invitation, and there
was little intercourse between them in the next half-dozen years,
the warmth of Turgenev's feeling for him did not abate. In 1868
"le bon Moscove," as his friend liked to call him, was writing that
there were few men with whom he felt so completely at ease and so
alive. "And besides," he added, "we are two moles tunneling in the
same direction." That same year he went to see Flaubert for the
first time in his lair, an old house overlooking the Seine, in the vil-
lage of Croisset near Rouen. Upon his departure his host sent after
him a native cheese, which he took with him to Baden, assuring the
308
TURGENEV
sender that at every mouthful he would remember the day, at
Croisset.
The month which witnessed the beginning of the Franco-Prussian
War found Flaubert telling George Sand that she and Turgenev
were the only people to whom he could talk freely of the things near-
est his heart. When the Commune was intrenched in Paris, Tur-
genev inquired of Flaubert how he had stood the storm: "We have
some hard moments to live through," he wrote, "we others, born
spectators." Upon the collapse of the revolutionary régime, he
wrote again, in reply to a note from Croisset. He no longer invited
his French friend to his Baden mole-burrow, as, with a tactlessness
surprising in him, he had done in his previous letter: "I understand
your repugnance to setting foot on German soil." When they see
each other, they can talk over this matter of the war at leisure-not
that it is a pleasant subject.
It was, indeed, a sore subject. In his note Flaubert had intimated
that it was Russia's duty now to avenge France. As a matter of
fact, the detached and haughty maître, who had always abominated
the patriotism of the mob, had so far succumbed to the war hysteria
that he had wanted to take up arms "against the compatriots of
Hegel." He swore he would never put eyes on another of "these
cannibals," who wished to destroy Paris because it was beautiful.
Apparently he did not appreciate that his correspondent was pro-
German. When the fighting was over, Flaubert, more disheartened
by the stupid and dishonorable conduct of his fellow-countrymen
than by the horrors of war, said in bitter jest that he was going to
ask Turgenev what he must do to become a Russian.
What the two men found to say to each other about the conflict
when they met after it was over, is not a matter of record. It is
highly probable that Turgenev avoided wounding Flaubert by pre-
senting the German point of view too warmly. A friend was more
precious to him than an opinion. Besides, by this time Flaubert had
turned from denouncing the Germans to berating the French, as a
nation that "closed its eyes to the truth, that loved la blague, that
asked art to be moral, philosophy to be clear, vice to be decent."
Such a wholesome attitude of self-criticism was just what Turgenev
had hoped would result from the defeat. The Frenchman's remedy
A MARRIAGE OF SOULS
309
—to educate the ruling middle-class-was also quite in line with his
ideas, and he was likely to welcome Flaubert's pet notion of basing
politics on science, and making the Government a section of the
Academy. Certainly, Turgenev sympathized with Flaubert's feel-
ing that there was no place for such a "mandarin" as himself in the
hideous world which the conflict had ushered in. In any event, their
friendship did not split on the rock of war. It grew stronger with
the years.
They saw much of each other in Paris, where they both wintered.
Flaubert was occasionally at Mme. Viardot's Thursdays and Sun-
days, and Turgenev thought nothing of spending the day with him,
only to return after dinner and remain until one in the morning.
There would also be, after many delays, a visit to Croisset now and
then. That is, when Flaubert could tear Turgenev away from the
Viardots, of whom he was not a little jealous: "Turgenev would
like to come, but the Viardots take him elsewhere, and he is afraid to
face their wrath." And three years later, when Turgenev neglects
him, he again suggests that perhaps he is too much occupied with the
Viardots. But it was not easy for Flaubert to take care of him
when he came. Before one prospective visit the host was much ex-
ercised as to whether or not his guest could be accommodated on the
bed in the spare room. He wrote from Paris to the niece who kept
house for him, asking her to measure the couch, and saying that he
would give up his own bed. Turgenev presented his friend with a
dressing-gown, and regaled him with such Russian products as Tol-
stoy's "War and Peace," as well as salmon and caviar. They were
both gourmets, especially the Frenchman. He won ten bottles of
champagne from the Muscovite by wagering that hot roast chicken is
eaten with mustard. The famous chef, Pellé, was consulted and
rendered this decision: "It is done [eaten without mustard], and
even often, but it is not according to the rules of good cooking.'
The notes Turgenev wrote to Flaubert, addressing him as "my
dear old fellow" or "my ferocious ancient," are among the most
charming of his letters and are, indeed, more felicitously worded than
those he wrote in Russian. There is little shop talk in these mes-
sages, but an occasional inquiry as to Flaubert's work. When, in
the summer of 1875, he was taking a rest in a Swiss resort, Turgenev
""
1.
i
310
TURGENEV
asked if he was inventing "something passionate, torrid, incandes-
cent, in his ice-box at Rigi," and wished that his hyperemic friend
would come back "pale and monochrome as a line by Lamartine."
Not seldom the letters carry a strain of fraternal affection, which
expressed itself practically in an effort to obtain for the pinched
Flaubert a sinecure at the Bibliothèque Mazarine.
""
"I am a soft pear and an old rag, but I love you and embrace you,'
one letter concludes. Flaubert, in a moment of exasperation at the
Muscovite's spinelessness, had called him "a soft pear," and the
nickname stuck-a fact which Turgenev accepted with the heartiest
good humor. Had n't he reproached himself years earlier, in a letter
to Herzen, with what he called "my sheep-like nature"? Besides,
there was the gout. Flaubert could not understand this disease; the
procrastination it caused made him dizzy. In the last note he was
to receive from Turgenev, the latter, referring to one of his cus-
tomary delays, added: "Of course, you will tell me I am a soft
pear, a rag, a clout, and I say you are right."
The letters from his "Patmos," as Turgenev called Spasskoye,
had to make up to Flaubert for the visits he was never able to pay
there. They describe the atmosphere of "grave and immense stupor,
in which there is at once something of life, of the beast, and of
God"; the warm pallor of earth and sky in a landscape that would
be merely pretty were it not for the large sweep, the great uniform
spaces which lend it dignity; the old wooden mansion, with its ivy-
clad veranda and green iron roof; his study, with its soporific sofa,
and an ancient Byzantine icon frowning darkly from the corner,
nothing but an immense face, black, lugubrious, rigid, framed in
silver—a rather annoying companion, which he dare not remove,
lest his servants think him a pagan. One evening, Turgenev wrote,
he sat on the balcony while some sixty peasant women, nearly all in
red and all ugly, except one, were dancing like she-bears and singing
in harsh if true voices. It was one of the little fêtes he was in the
habit of arranging, and which cost him only a couple of pails of
vodka, some cakes, and nuts. And then, too, it cost him some heart-
ache. Watching their awkward gambols, he felt, as he confessed
to Flaubert, "terribly sad."
It was scarcely an unusual thing for him to be sad. True, he
A MARRIAGE OF SOULS
311
sometimes tried to cheer up his correspondent, who was in sore need
of cheering, especially in his last years, when he was contending with
genteel poverty and was in the midst of the excruciating labors on
his last novel. Shortly before his death, Flaubert complained that
he was liquefying like an old Camembert. All too often Turgenev
allowed himself the luxury of detailing the minutiae of his own lique-
faction and general wretchedness. "Infirmities, slow and chill dis-
gust, the painful agitation of useless memories-that 's, mon bon
vieux, the prospect that offers itself to a man past fifty." At the
writing, they are both past that age. Turgenev is indisposed:
Mme. Death has left a visiting-card to show that she has not for-
gotten him. His days at Bougival run out, like water, like sand-
the reading of the second canto of Byron's "Don Juan" making "a
luminous streak across the grayness." He feels old, gray, dull,
useless and stupid, and even his attack of gout was abortive, like
everything else. He has no sorrow, but neither has he any joy, like
a shadow in the Elysian fields of Gluck's Orphée. He turns sixty:
"This is the beginning of life's tail." When existence becomes ab-
solutely personal and on the defensive against death, it loses interest,
even for the individual concerned. A year later, he feels "impotent,
old, forlorn, gouty, with two sores instead of legs," but even though
he keeps to his room like an old crab in his damp hole, he will make
an effort to drag himself to Flaubert's lodging on the morrow.
Flaubert was the first to surrender the fort. Turgenev was in the
depths of Scythia when, in May, 1880, his friend died at Croisset.
Four years earlier, condoling with that very friend on the death of
George Sand, he had written that this "good felllow" and "good
woman," with all her charm and valor, had disappeared into a hole
that did n't even know what it had devoured. And now the insati-
able hole had claimed another rare and doughty spirit. To the
woman who had guarded Flaubert in those last clouded years, Tur-
genev wrote: "The death of your uncle is one of the greatest sor-
rows I have experienced in all my life, and I can't accustom myself
to the thought that I sha'n't see him again. It's one of those pains
for which one does n't want to be consoled." And he offered her his
services in connection with the publication of the novel which had
"killed" his friend. With Hugo and Zola, he served on the com-
312
TURGENEV
mittee for the erection of a monument to the novelist, and even, to
the indignation of the patriots, solicited subscriptions for it at home.
Daudet, who saw much of the two men, and often when they were
together, speaks of their relation as "a marriage of souls." It ap-
pears, to the outside observer, as unaccountable as most marriages.
True, they had a high regard for each other's work and critical judg-
ment. Turgenev considered that Flaubert alone could dispute with
Tolstoy the title of the foremost contemporary writer, and Flau-
bertus dixit was to him the last word. Although the Frenchman
was more reserved, he too had the highest opinion of his friend, both
as novelist and critic. "Nothing escapes him," he wrote to George
Sand, after having read to Turgenev a part of the manuscript of
La Tentation de St. Antoine. "At the end of a hundred lines he
remembers one weak epithet. He made two or three excellent sug-
gestions. . . ." This was exactly thirty years after the listener had
submitted to Tatyana Bakunin a portion of his own abortive "St.
Anthony's Temptation."
They had much in common, aside from their work. They were
contemporaries, Flaubert having been born the same year as Pauline
Viardot. Both were old bachelors, both lonely, for all their friend-
ships and interests. Celibates are apt to be drawn together. Fur-
ther, each of them abominated the class into which he was born, and
the respective characteristics of which each, to some extent, exempli-
fied. Like Turgenev, Flaubert was acutely aware of what he called
"the Machiavellism of Nature." Above all, they were two writers,
as Turgenev liked to insist, tunneling in the same direction. Both
were dedicated to the objective method, and both were intent on mak-
ing the novel not the vehicle of fantasy or individual crotchets, but a
transparent vessel which would at once show the true color of life
and give it shape.
But if Flaubert, like Turgenev, was a realist, there was also in
his work a romantic pull toward frenzy and exoticism which was
quite alien to Turgenev's sober temperament. The disciple of
Gautier was much more indifferent to the moral implications of art
than the pupil of Belinsky could ever be. The author of Salammbô,
unlike the author of "Fathers and Children," had never been told
that he must convey the body and pressure of his own time. Flau-
A MARRIAGE OF SOULS
313
bert's interest was mainly in form, in manner, in technique. Tur-
genev, although he scolded his compatriots for their churlish neglect
of these matters, was for his own part never so deeply concerned with
them as his friend. He could not see the virtues of Chateaubriand's
style, much to the distress of Flaubert, who considered it the foun-
tainhead of French prose. His loathing of Hugo was only matched
by Flaubert's idolization of that grand old man of literature. "God!
to what lengths," Turgenev was writing, apropos of the appearance
of Les Chansons des Rues et des Bois, "the vileness and abomina-
tion of decay can go! Can any emetic compare to this? An age
in which such reptiles crawl into the light can have no place for art."
There were all these differences between the truculent Norman and
his soft-spoken confrère from the steppes, and in addition, the im-
mutable fact that one was French and the other Russian, a circum-
stance the implications of which forced themselves increasingly upon
Turgenev's attention. Yet the union was a real one; indeed, some of
their differences drew them together. One senses in Turgnev's
attitude something of the quality of his affection for Belinsky, some
shadow of his feeling for Stankevich. Like those friends of his
youth, Flaubert possessed a passionate integrity, a strength of will,
which found expression in his monkish devotion to his work. The
"soft pear" admired and loved this tenacity, if he could not imitate
it. Daudet tells us that in this union Turgenev played the feminine
part. "In the factory which turns out human beings," he adds,
"there is such confusion that a masculine soul sometimes gets into a
female body and a feminine soul into the carcass of a cyclops."
(MUNIK
PARIS: FRIENDS AND STRANGERS
noons.
ART of the routine of Tur-
genev's life in Paris was his way
of disposing of his Sunday after-
He spent them at Flau-
bert's. He had to limp up three
flights of stairs to the apartment
overlooking the lawns and trees
of Parc Monceau. Generally
the first of the company to arrive,
he would exchange fraternal em-
braces with his host, and either
curl up on the divan "like a boa"
or sink into an arm-chair, in
genial anticipation of hours of
palaver. Before long, others would assemble. The host sometimes
lent to the otherwise conventional scene an exotic note. Mme.
Daudet, coming to fetch her husband one evening, found Flaubert
presiding over the gathering, clad in a kind of Arab blouse decorated
with an ancient frill, and wearing a red Algerian cap.
Turgenev might bring with him a volume of Goethe to translate
for the company, and at least one of his listeners felt that it was
like hearing Goethe himself read and speak. Once he tried to in-
troduce them to Swinburne. But readings were incidental. The
late afternoon hours, when twilight was thickening the shadows in
the smoky room, loosed the spirit of talk among these quick and well-
stocked intelligences, and Turgenev, for whom conversation was as
natural a medium as writing, basked and soared in his element. All
manner of subjects were touched upon: the sciences as well as the
arts, food as well as philosophy. A young stranger from the States,
SLSUPPLY abattñ ar pi
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314
PARIS: FRIENDS AND STRANGERS
315
one Henry James, came to some of these Sunday gatherings as a
half-worshipful, half-critical apprentice.
By that time the impoverished Flaubert had removed to a more
modest apartment just under the roof of a house at the end of the
Faubourg St.-Honoré, a place which James describes as looking
"rather bare and provisional." The substance of the discussion
"in that little smoke-clouded room" was, he tells us, "chiefly ques-
tions of taste, questions of art and form; and the speakers, for the
most part, were in æsthetic matters radicals of the deepest dye.
The conviction that held them together was the conviction that art
and morality are two utterly different things, and that the former
has no more to do with the latter than it has with astromony or
embryology. The only duty of a novel was to be well written;
that merit included every other of which it was capable." If
Turgenev, who had a phenomenal memory, recalled how, twenty
years previously, he had disdained French writers for their want
of æsthetic principles, he could only have remarked how times
had changed. There was nothing now that they had in greater
abundance. Perhaps because James too was an outsider, he observed
that Turgenev had "reservations and discriminations" which set him
apart from these companions and kept him from being "all there,
as the phrase is." But the American admitted that the Russian
"so far as he was on the spot . . was an element of pure socia-
bility."
•
It was at Flaubert's that Turgenev met for the first time Alphonse
Daudet, the little man with the big head that seemed to belong
to another body, and Emile Zola. Both men were then in their
thirties; Daudet was already fairly well established in the literary
world, but Zola was still struggling along. Turgenev gave his ready
friendship to both, especially to the one who most needed befriend-
ing. He had long known Edmond Goncourt, whose sharp-featured
face he also saw here frequently. The four of them formed the
group of Flaubert's "faithful." Turgenev was very much one of
them and found all doors open to him. Daudet's son recalls how,
as a little boy, at the age for fairy-tales, seeing Turgenev and Flau-
bert enter the house, he exclaimed: "Are those giants?"
Goncourt's "attic," which took the place of Flaubert's little salon
•
·
316
TURGENEV
after his death, was another haunt of the Muscovite's. Beginning
with 1872, the Goncourt journals are sprinkled with references to
"the gentle giant . . . with white hair falling into his eyes and a
deep furrow across his forehead." The collector's passion which
the two Goncourts had shared, as they had shared everything, had
turned their old house in the vicinity of the Bois de Boulogne into
something of a museum. The study, which smelt pleasantly of old
books and glowed with the gold of the bindings, held, in the shape
of an immense desk built for two, a monument to the strange
intellectual symbiosis of the brothers. It was here, one morning
in 1877, that Turgenev came to hear Edmond Goncourt read aloud
the first novel he had set pen to since his brother's death. Flaubert
was absent, being laid up with a broken leg, and, by Daudet's account,
shaking the air of Normandy with formidable Carthaginian oaths.
But his "faithful," along with the publisher Charpentier, were all
there.
And of course Turgenev was seen now and then in the dis-
tinguished crowd that packed Victor Hugo's large salon, presided
over by the David bust. The aged dean of French letters, a little
deaf, somewhat absent-minded and withdrawn, throned it at the
head of the dining-table, his neck swathed in a white foulard scarf,
his arms folded over his chest, his body buttoned into a frock-coat
and leaning back slightly. Goncourt describes his manner of toy-
ing with and caressing the words he spoke in a slow, rather flat
voice, his eyes half closed, his face, with the dark warmth of a
Rembrandt syndic, "playing dead" but crossed by strange feline
expressions. And hovering about was his friend, Mme. Drouet, the
quondam Juliette of the Gaiety, now a white-haired old lady. Tur-
genev, who liked to regale his friends at home with anecdotes about
the French, took away from these visits more than one to illustrate
the demigod's ignorance and vanity. The choicest of them, of
which there are several variants, has Hugo credit Goethe, whom he
hated as much as Turgenev loved him, with the authorship of
"Wallenstein.”
"But maître!" Turgenev remonstrated, "Wallenstein' was writ-
ten by Schiller."
"Well," grumbled Hugo, "they are all one."
PARIS: FRIENDS AND STRANGERS
317
A more popular version in which Turgenev does not figure, has the
poet exclaim: "You see: somebody else wrote Goethe's best work!"
Generally speaking, Turgenev had only sneers for French verse.
In 1873 he recommended Leconte de Lisle to Foeth with the com-
ment: "Although a Frenchman, he's a true poet."
The members of the little group with which Turgenev fell in,
occasionally dined together at one another's homes, but more often
at some café. Gautier died too soon after Turgenev's settlement
in Paris for the novelist to see much of him, but he appeared at
least once at these restaurant gatherings, and so did Mère Sand, whom
Goncourt ungallantly described as getting more and more mummi-
fied. In 1874, at a dinner at Café Riche, it was decided to hold
these refections once a month during the coming winter. They
came to be known as "the dinners of the Five"-Turgenev, Flaubert,
Goncourt, Zola, and Daudet-or "the dinners of the hooted authors."
Each of the four Frenchmen laid claim to the title by reason c a
recent failure, and Turgenev assured them that he was hooted at
home, a statement which they accepted on faith, since they had too
far to travel to verify it. For misprised writers, they were very
exclusive, refusing, for example, to admit to their circle Girardin,
who wanted to slip in, because he was only a journalist.
The Five were hard to suit and often changed restaurants, going
from Café Riche to Adolph and Pellé, behind the Opera, or to the
tavern on the corner of rue Favart, known for its bouillabaisse, or
to Voisin, whose cellar satisfied all desires and conciliated all ap-
petites. Every one of these men had something of the gourmand
in him, and had strong preferences in food as in literature. When
Zola was in the flush of his prosperity he served up a dinner con-
sisting of green-rye soup, Lapland reindeer tongues, gray mullet à
la provençale, and guinea-foul with truffles. It was their general
custom to start at seven in the evening and remain at table two
hours or more. Flaubert, his vest unbuttoned, presided with Rabe-
laisian verve.
The food was important and the conversation more so. The
Goncourt Journals evoke the atmosphere of these symposia. The
Muscovite's childlike voice would begin to charm the company as
soon as the soup was on the table. They talked shop, they gossiped,
318
TURGENEV
they reminisced. The inaugural dinner opened with a dissertation
on the difference between constipated and diarrheic writers, and from
that the talk drifted to the mechanism of the French language. It
was likely to drift to almost any topic. It touched upon things
weighty and trivial, personalities and ideas, contemporaries and
classics. Once, Goncourt reports, Turgenev, "his lips wet with
desire," cried out that he would give anything for "The Wine-
flask," the lost comedy of that old drunkard Cratinus, which won
the Athenian prize over Aristophanes' "Clouds." As they grew
more expansive, Zola was likely to complain of his poverty and
Daudet to strike up a Provençal song. Each brought a mélange of
impressions and opinions to share with the others.
There were two subjects of which the company never tired: love
and death. The cynicism with which these Parisians discoursed on
the major passion must have been almost as disconcerting to Tur-
genev as it was to that other stranger within their gates, Henry
James. They told salacious stories which it was hard for him to
match, although, being a sociable sort, he did his best, and they al-
luded casually to perversities which merely puzzled him. They must
have listened with amusement to his declaration that the eyes of the
first woman he had ever loved seemed to him discarnate. And he
must have taken in with embarrassed bewilderment Flaubert's stories
of his amorous experiences in Egypt.
When Flaubert and Goncourt maintained that love had no bearing
on a writer's work, he simply let his arms drop. Nothing, he con-
fessed, could take the place of women for him. Love alone could
produce that exquisite unfolding of the whole being which so
stimulates the artist. Zola observing that love had no specific
qualities to distinguish it from the other emotions, Turgenev insisted
that it had a color peculiarly its own, that it produced an effect
unlike the effect of any other feeling. But then, Flaubert, Goncourt
and Zola all admitted that they had never been seriously in love.
He himself approached a woman with respect, with agitation, with
surprise at the happiness which the encounter gave him. These men
seemed to know only physical sensations. When the talk was of
death Turgenev was on firmer ground. A dinner would begin
gaily enough, and end in a minor key. On one of these occasions
PARIS: FRIENDS AND STRANGERS
319
he impressed the company with a nightmare he had had, in which he
had identified a brown stain on the wall in front of his bed with
death itself. Sooner or later the "black subject" was bound to
crop up.
Turgenev's friendship for these men was not merely a matter
of intellectual traffic and social courtesies. He begged off when
Guy de Maupassant wanted to begin a series of literary appreciations
with an essay on him. He had a horror, he pleaded, of réclame
amicale. But he himself indulged in friendly puffery without stint.
He taxed himself to promote his friends' interests. He tried to
introduce them to foreign audiences, using his connections on the
Continent and in England to that end. He wrote, or at least
promised to write, prefaces; he revised; he translated. Occasionally
he advanced money to the author on expected sales. He worked
for the French, as he worked for the Germans, as he worked for his
own countrymen. In his last decade he turned himself into a kind
of international literary agent, an earnest, eager, and not always
efficient go-between, giving his services freely and sometimes to his
own cost. He did this partly because of his love for literature,
partly out of pure generosity,—there was not a spark of jealousy in
him,-partly out of his inability to refuse any one anything.
He confessed to a Russian publisher that his encomiums were
often due to an amiable weakness. They finally agreed that his
recommendations should be disregarded unless he volunteered to
read proof. He promised Auerbach a foreword to the Russian
translation of "The Country House on the Rhine," and having de-
layed the task from day to day, finally deputed Pietsch to write
it for him, and put his own signature to the piece. His penalty
was to read the thing to Auerbach and hear him say, "You alone
could have penetrated so deeply into my soul!" There was not a
little of vicarious fatherly affection in Turgenev's treatment of
struggling authors, as in his anxious running about and fussing over
the scores of his young compatriots who presented themselves to him
in Paris for assistance in one and another way.
Zola especially was in his debt-Zola, whom, according to Gon-
court, he treated with "paternal irony." He was taken under
Turgenev's wing in the days when, by his own account, he was
320
TURGENEV
starving. Turgenev placed his novels with Russian publishers; in-
deed, La Faute de l'Abbé Mouret made its first appearance in a
Russian translation. He arranged to have him contribute to Peters-
burg reviews, and even told him what to write about. He passed
on his complaints to the editor. He passed on the editor's ex-
planations. He remitted payments. One of Zola's ways of re-
quiting these attentions was to give a reading at the matinée which
Turgenev arranged for the benefit of needy Russian students. The
wild man, whom Turgenev described as something like "an intel-
ligent, somewhat awkward and baggy Parisian working-man," was
altogether comme il faut, even to white gloves, and having stayed
awake three nights over the worry of this, his first public appearance,
was unable for a scandalous length of time to utter a syllable.
Turgenev also took steps to interest Russian publishers in the
works of Goncourt and Taine, and particularly of young Mau-
passant, the flower of Flaubert's little flock. When his efforts to
get a translation of Une Vie published in Russia-a translation
at which he personally had worked-proved vain, he paid the author
a thousand francs out of his own pocket: "To present four hundred
rubles to a man of talent, who is, moreover, my friend-my means
permit that." As for the master himself, Turgenev could not do too
much for him. He translated La Légende de St. Julien l'Hos-
pitalier and Hérodias, lavishing on them all his skill as a stylist,
and flattering himself that in this pitting of his native tongue against
the French, Russian had not come off so badly. He refused to take
any payment for his pains, turning over all the proceeds to the
author of the original, who was then in straightened circumstances.
He had also arranged for the translation of La Tentation de St.
Antoine, but the censorship barred it. He offered to send copies
of the book to competent critics in England, and trumpeted the
author's praises to friends in Germany.
Not that he was whole-heartedly in sympathy with the work of
his French confrères, Flaubert excepted. He had the highest respect
for "the gay, fresh, and healthy" talent of Guy de Maupassant, and
he did not deny that the others were gifted: he recognized the
originality of Goncourt, the charm of Daudet, the solidity of
Zola. He appreciated their understanding of their craft. If only

TURGENEV IN 1872
From a portrait by Perov
UNIV
OF
MICH
PARIS: FRIENDS AND STRANGERS
321
their concentration upon their work had not blunted their sense of
life and its values! Everything that these arrant litterateurs handled
turned to literature as everything Midas handled turned to gold, and
in both cases the gift was a curse. The fact that Turgenev had
something of the Midas-touch himself, did not make him any less
sensible of its bane. French literature, he once observed, stinks of
literature. He was thinking, more particularly, of the Goncourts
and perhaps Daudet.
As for Zola, he found his method essentially "vicious." Ex-
cellent as his prose was, he exhibited the chamber-pot too often.
Sitting at a beer-table with George Moore at the Elysée Montmartre
one rainy evening, Turgenev had a good word to say for the heroine
of L'Assommoir, which was then appearing serially, but added
that the book was spoilt by the author's desire to tell "what she
[Gervaise] felt rather than what she thought." "What difference
does it make to me," he asked, "if she perspires in the middle of the
back or under the arms?" Zola's emphasis upon the animal proc-
esses of existence, his obscenity, his scientific pretensions, were a
weariness and an irritation to Turgenev. He confessed that Nana
bored him. He suspected that Zola had never read Shakspere..
His own instincts were all in the direction of an art speaking with the
tongues of men and angels the language of reason and beauty.
He broke bread with these men, he sat at their firesides, he wrote
them cordial letters, he exerted himself in their behalf, but now and
then the malicious youth whose sharp tongue had delighted Belinsky
cropped out in this sexagenarian, and he allowed himself unkind
observations on his foreign friends. Even his most ill-natured re-
marks were often the result of a good-natured weakness, and he
would have been scandalized by his own words had he heard
them repeated. He made his comments before those who were apt
to savor them-Russians intensely jealous of the strangers who had
annexed their Turgenev. His malice occasionally enlivened the
gatherings of the Five. Sitting at dinner with them one night, he
said of one of their prominent colleagues: "The comparison is not
noble, but allow me, gentlemen, to liken Taine to a hound I once
owned. He searched, he pointed out, he went through all the mo-
tions of a hunting-dog in the most admirable fashion, but I was
322
TURGENEV
forced to sell him; he had no nose." Turgenev was on friendly
terms with the critic, and indeed recommended one of his books for
translation into Russian. The French must have applauded with
special zest another remark to the effect that, aside from music,
the Germans had no feeling for art. He generally found it hard to
refrain from telling people what he thought they would like to
hear, and occasionally he could be double-tongued to help a friend.
When Turgenev's uncomplimentary remarks about his French
friends came to their notice after his death, through the publication
in Paris in 1887 of a book of reminiscences by a young Russian
émigré, there was a little retrospective animadversion. Daudet, who
got the worst of it, expressed in print his pained surprise at his
friend's duplicity. Goncourt made an entry in his journal to the
effect that, after all, Turgenev's work lacked the primitive vigor
of his race, and that his characters seemed to have been drawn by a
Russian who had ended his days at the court of Louis XIV. He
was, when all was said, a foreigner, Goncourt explained, and so,
having no key to the subtleties of Parisian irony, gave vent to the
irritation he could not help feeling. Daudet went farther and called
in question the Muscovite's grasp of the genius of the French
language, though no less an authority than Taine is said to have
likened Turgenev's French to that spoken in the eighteenth-century
salons of Paris.
Indeed, at bottom, Turgenev was a stranger, though in a famil-
iar land. His point of view was fundamentally Russian, and
his affectionate respect for the West was that of an outsider, nat-
urally distrustful, curious, amused, and a shade contemptuous.
He was of course aware that his French colleagues held him in high
regard, except for such a soured, venomous spirit as Huysmans,
who dismissed him as "a tap of tepid water." Daudet placed him
on an "ivory throne" in his private heaven, and Goncourt did rever-
ence to his "immense and cosmopolitan knowledge." But admira-
tion centered rather about his person than around his work. He was
to them the lovable barbarian, the seductive Slav, the huge snow-man
with the feline smile, the colossus with eyebrows of tow, the giant
of the North, the silver-haired giant with the head of the Heavenly
Father and the timid gestures of a child. The very homage they
PARIS: FRIENDS AND STRANGERS
323
paid him betrayed their feeling that here was a prodigy, a
curiosity, an alien-attractive and congenial enough, but au fond
not one of their own.
True, being men of penetration, they grasped some of the es-
sentials of his character. Flaubert spoke of him as an homme mené,
a man in leading-strings. And Daudet perfectly understood,
though somewhat late in the day, that Turgenev was a fretted spirit,
a man dissatisfied, especially with himself; a man who had never
conducted his life as he wished. The Russian, Daudet said, was
like one who is badly bedded, and who turns about and about rest-
lessly in the twisted folds of his sheets.
In his last years the dissimilarity between the Russians and the
West Europeans, particularly the French, was constantly in Tur-
genev's mind. He developed a theory the gist of which was that
each race has its own morality. Indeed, this was to be embodied in
the last big work which he planned. He spoke to several of his
friends about it, and their various accounts all point to the con-
clusion that his theme was the gulf in psychological make-up
between the Russian and the Westerner, more particularly, the
contrast between the Russian revolutionist's search for ethical ab-
solutes and the French socialist's narrow, fatuous dogmatism.
Turgenev's English friend and translator, W. R. S. Ralston, who
had hoped to stay with him at Spasskoye in the summer of 1882
and to translate, under his supervision, the novel as it came from his
pen, thus sums up the plot:
A Russian girl who has accepted the ideas held by the Nihilists, leaves
her native country and settles in Paris. There she meets and eventually
marries a young French socialist. For some time all goes well in the
household, which is united by a common hatred of all laws and cere-
monies. But at length the young wife meets and has much confidential
talk with one of her own countrymen, who tells her about all that the
Russian socialists are thinking and saying and doing in the land of her
birth. She recognizes to her horror that the ends and aims, the aspira-
tions and yearnings of the Russian revolutionists are widely different
from those of the French and German socialists, and that a great abyss
divides her, so far as her thoughts and feelings are concerned, from the
husband with whom she used to fancy herself entirely in accord.
.
324
TURGENEV
A corroborative Russian report indicates further that one of the
chief characters was to be a man who seeks the solution of the social
problem in a new religion. Turgenev's model for this character
was the well-known revolutionary leader, Nikolay Vasilevich
Chaikovsky, recently deceased. Fired by religious and social ideal-
ism, he went to America in the seventies, with a number of his
compatriots, to join an agricultural commune founded in Kansas.
He had an unhappy experience there, and subsequently fell in with
the Shakers. After a while he left them, to return to Paris, where
Turgenev befriended him. In the autumn of 1879, for example,
Turgenev was trying to place an article of Chaikovsky's on the
religious sects in America. The story goes that in Paris the young
man met two Russian girls, sisters, and both medical students, one
of whom was betrothed to a Frenchman. Chaikovsky spent hours
with the girls in vehement discussion of such subjects as the duty
of educated people toward the masses, and this intellectual inter-
course, which had, it is true, a faint amorous tinge, nearly resulted
in a breaking of the engagement. The affair-Turgenev was in-
formed of it through his association with Chaikovsky-was the
germ of the novel in which he hoped to set forth the difference he
found between the make-up of his own compatriots and the dis-
position of those among whom he was now living.
It was almost as though, in his old age, when many men undergo
religious conversion, Turgenev grazed the danger of being converted
to what he had so long rejected, Russian nationalism. The French
had exhausted their stock of spiritual energy and had reached a level
of dead uniformity in tastes and ideas. Nothing could reduce
Russia, with its rich variety of cultural types, to such a sad state.
These sentiments, ascribed to the elderly Turgenev, might better
have fallen from the lips of a Herzen. At the dinners of the Five,
too, he touched now and then upon the contrast between the two na-
tions. The Latins, he said, were hommes de la loi, in whose veins
ran the milk of the Roman she-wolf, sticklers for the conventions,
conformers to a code, martyrs to an artificial sense of honor. The
Russians, on the contrary, were hommes de l'humanité, possessed
of a warmer social consciousness, irreverent toward man-made rules,
rooting for fundamentals, unafraid of the crude, the bare, the simple.
PARIS: FRIENDS AND STRANGERS
325
The French, he contended, were too eager to express themselves
felicitously to take time to think things through to the end. The
Russians, he once said, were liars, because for centuries they had
been slaves, but they demanded in art what life had so long refused
them-truth and reality.
I
•
I
"
-
4/24
ERMANY was Turgenev's sec-
ond fatherland. France came
to be his adoptive if somewhat
uncongenial home, at which he
grumbled with filial freedom.
In England he was always a visi-
tor. He had a sound knowledge
of English literature: Shak-
spere he had by heart, Burns he
wanted to introduce to his com-
patriots, and Dickens delighted
him immeasurably. He consid-
ered the English political system
a model one, and would gladly
have seen Russia follow it. He loved grouse-shooting in Cam-
bridgeshire sufficiently to cross the channel for it several times.
On one of these occasions George Eliot, who, according to her
second husband, preferred Turgenev's society above that of any
other literary man she knew, made a special trip to Six-Mile Bottom
to see him. With his gift of familiarity, he won friends not only
in London, but at Oxford and Cambridge as well.
He seems not to have met Dickens personally, although the Viar-
dots were acquainted with him, but attended three of his readings in
1863, and was reduced to what he called "the ecstasies of a calf.”
He wrote in his Reminiscences that Dickens combined "in one person
several first-rate actors who make you laugh and cry in turn."
Carlyle had conveyed the same impression when he described Dick-
ens's readings as "a whole tragic, comic, heroic theater visible per-
forming under one hat." Turgenev had some commerce with this
fellow-enthusiast, with whom he appears to have been in serious
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CHAPTER XXXVI
"AU REVOIR IN AMERICA!”

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"AU REVOIR IN AMERICA!"
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disagreement on more controversial subjects. He called at the
houses of men like Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Madox Brown the
painter, and William Spottiswood the mathematician, who in his
youth had traveled in Russia. He met Tennyson, and though he
did not feel completely at home in the poet's tongue and used a
quaint bookish turn of speech absent from his ready French and
German, he held his own happily in the conversation. A dinner
was given in his honor, at which Trollope, Walter Besant, and James
Payn were among those present. Yet his personal connections
with the English remained tenuous. He described to Foeth the
impressions he carried away from his visit in 1878 in these terms:
“Marvelous, queer, grandiose, stupid, all in one, but chiefly some-
thing wholly alien to us."
The one Englishman with whom he was on terms of close ac-
quaintance was his translator, W. R. S. Ralston. He seems to have
been the only one of Turgenev's foreign friends who visited him
at Spasskoye. This was in the summer of 1870. Ralston had an
inquisitive, scholarly turn of mind. On being shown about the
village and taken into the peasant cottages, he asked about the names
and uses of the subjects he saw there and carefully wrote the in-
formation down in the note-book he carried around with him. After
Ralston's departure Turgenev received a deputation of peasants who
wanted to know when they were to go to England. They had con-
ceived the notion that the Englishman had taken an inventory with
a view to transporting them and their household goods to his own
country. It took Turgenev a long time, by his own account, to
disabuse them of this idea. He did not allow his guest to depart
without arranging in his honor a village fête. Foeth, responding
to a rhymed invitation, was also present, and left a description of the
festival, which appears to have ended in a scarcely bucolic fashion.
The tipsy peasants kept clamoring for more vodka, and when colored
ribbons were distributed among the women, the crowd became so
hilarious that Turgenev, his neighbor, and his amazed Englishman
had to run for safety to the balcony of the manor-house.
English appreciation of his work was expressed in the conferring
upon him of an honorary degree by Oxford University. It may very
well have been Ralston who broached the matter. Early in 1874 Tur-
328
TURGENEV
genev wrote to him: "I would be very much flattered to have a
degree conferred upon me by the illustrious University of Oxford,
but is it not too ambitious, and would not the public ask: Who is
this man, and wherefore this honor?" The degree was conferred
five years later. On June 14, 1879, Turgenev was writing to
Stasulevich: "Miracles will happen. Tomorrow I am going to
Oxford, for the University there decided to confer upon me the
degree of... Doctor of Common Law." It was thus that he
misinterpreted the initials D.C.L. "The honor," he concluded, "is
as great as it is unexpected." It is quite plausible that he actually
had forgotten the earlier mention of the matter; he had a bad memory
for such marks of esteem as were shown him.
He had been made much of at Oxford the previous year, when
he was the guest of Max Müller. The scholar was rather doubtful
as to whether it was proper for him, as a regius professor, to enter-
tain a man who had publicly shown disrespect to her Majesty the
Queen. In the summer of 1876, when the papers were full of the
Bulgarian atrocities, Turgenev, spending a sleepless night on the
train between Moscow and Petersburg, composed a fantasy in verse
which held up to scorn Queen Victoria's pro-Turkish policy. The
ladies at Windsor are playing the then fashionable game of croquet
under the eyes of the queen, who is horrified to see the balls turn
into bloodied heads. Retiring to her castle, she finds the hem of her
gown soaked in gore, and implores the rivers of England to clean
it, only to be told by the poet that no waters will wash out the stain
of that innocent blood. "Croquet at Windsor," as he called this
execrable piece, though barred by the censorship, was widely cir-
culated, being recited even at the parties of the heir apparent, and
was translated into German, French, and English. Not, be it noted,
that Turgenev was swept off his feet by the wave of patriotism
which seized the country on the eve of the Russo-Turkish conflict.
Indeed, deeply as he felt for the Bulgars, he was one of the few
people who were out of sympathy with the war. He had no feeling
of racial solidarity with the other Slavs, and did not, so he said,
consider Mohammedanism inferior to Christianity.
When he came to Oxford, feeling against Russia was still running
high in England, and he feared that there might be some unfriendly
"AU REVOIR IN AMERICA!"
329
demonstration against him as a Russian. But nothing untoward
occurred. The late James Bryce, then regius professor of civil
law, who introduced Turgenev to the Vice-Chancellor of the Univer-
sity, is said by "The Oxford Journal" to have spoken of "Mr. I.
Turgenev's wonderful genius which was shown in his romances,
and his description of Russian life, which had led to the emancipa-
tion of the serfs." At the same time a like honor was conferred
upon John Ruskin, Sir Fredrick Leighton, the ambassador at St.
Petersburg, and the Governor of Fiji.
Turgenev's broad shoulders carried the gorgeous gown with
dignity, but he could not help a private chuckle at the notion that he
was now a doctor of law, he was a little hazy as to whether it was
common or natural, and as a matter of fact it was civil law,-
he who was unable to transact the simplest ordinary business. Two
months later the French Government similarly honored him by
making him an officer of public instruction. "It appears," he
wrote, in thanking Flaubert's niece for her congratulations, "that
this gives one the right to wear a violet ribbon-violet, mind you,
not red. I'll pin it on the doctoral gown I got at Oxford, which
is a very bright red; the two colors will go together perfectly."
Turgenev's interest in the Anglo-Saxon world was not con-
fined to England. It was probably a polite exaggeration when he
told an American visitor in Paris that it was an idée fixe with him
to visit the United States and see the great republic for himself,
but the New World did touch his imagination. From the end of
the sixties on, many Russians found an extraordinary attraction
in American life and institutions, and not a few crossed the Atlantic
with the notion of settling in the States, there to lead the good life
which political restrictions made impossible at home. These so-
called "Americans" planned to live in communal fashion on the
land, work with their hands, and eschew the evils of private property
and urban existence. Turgenev's interest in the country was of a
different order. What he admired was the industrial activities
of the practical-minded citizenry and their democratic institutions,
which seemed to him the best insurance of the liberty of the individ-
ual. To such Americans as came to pay their respects to him
in Paris-by the time he had settled there his name was beginning
1
330
TURGENEV
to be familiar to readers in Boston and New York-he was the
friendliest of hosts. One of these visitors from the States was
Hjalmar H. Boyesen, later professor of Germanic languages and
literatures at Columbia University. During the summer of 1873
he came several times to the apartment on rue de Douai, in a spirit
of awe and admiration, and set down their conversations in some de-
tail.
America was a great topic with them. The youthful guest, re-
ferring to Dickens's first trip to Yankee-Doodledom, observed that
if Turgenev carried out his intention of going there, he might react to
the States in the same adverse way. Where there was freedom of
thought and speech, Turgenev replied, abuses were bound to appear
on the surface and it was easy to discover them, but, for himself,
his prejudice was all in America's favor. He went on to mention
a talk he had had with Carlyle and how the Scot had thundered
against democracy and expressed "very unreserved . . . sympathy
with Russia and her emperor.' It was wearisome, Carlyle had said,
to see how in a country like Great Britain "every petty individual
could thrust forth his head like a frog and quack away at his
contemptible sentiment as long as anybody had a mind to listen to
him." Turgenev had wished that Carlyle might spend a month
or two in one of the interior provinces of Russia. Why, the very
value of American institutions was the wide scope they offered to
"individual development."
""
Ibsen's name coming up in this connection, Boyesen observed
that it was because of his pessimism that the playwright was no
democrat: a true democrat "must have perfect faith in his kind."
Lacking that faith, Ibsen could say that he would lose his self-
respect if he were to find himself with the crowd in any vital matter.
"I should say," countered Turgenev, "that there is always the pos-
sibility that the minority may be in the right. But that is an ex-
ception rather than the rule."
Turgenev surprised Boyesen by his familiarity with American
literature, of which they had much to say to each other. Hawthorne
he considered "the first literary representative of the New World."
"The Scarlet Letter" and "Twice-told Tales" had the flavor of the
soil and spoke of a new civilization. He had compliments for
"AU REVOIR IN AMERICA!"
331
Lowell, whom he had recently met, and his guest had to mention
Howells but once, to find on his next visit a copy of "Venetian Life"
lying on Turgenev's table. Turgenev touched on Bret Harte, too,
a writer of sterling qualities whom, he feared, prosperity had spoilt.
And he spoke with warmth of Walt Whitman; there was good grain,
he said, to be found in all that chaff. He seems to have discovered
the poet the previous year. Having promised to send a short piece
to "The Week" (Nedelya), and having nothing on hand, he decided
to give the editor, as he wrote to Annenkov, "several translations of
lyrical poems by the remarkable American poet, Walt Whitman
(have you heard of him?) with a little introduction. You cannot
imagine anything more striking." Annenkov became interested,
and wanted to see the material, but illness interfered, the transla-
tions were "stranded on a sand-bank," and in the end nothing came
of the project.
About his own work Turgenev spoke with his usual expansiveness.
The young American said that his host's tales had so entered into
his life that he could no longer distinguish between the impressions
they had created and those which belonged to the actual world.
That was precisely, Turgenev exclaimed, what he was aiming at!
"I never try to improve on life; I merely try to see and under-
stand it. . .. Every line I have written has been inspired by some-
thing that has actually happened to me or come within my
observation."
Of course, he seldom found "a pure type"; his protagonists were
like composite photographs. And how they dogged him, until he
had them in hand! If he was reading, they would whisper their
opinions into his ear; if he was promenading, they would criticize
every one he met and all he saw and heard. He lacked, as he said
Boyesen must have noticed, a "philosophical mind." He saw, and
drew conclusions from what he saw. Abstract things suggested
themselves to him as concrete pictures; when he could reduce his
idea to such a picture, he felt himself master of it. These images
became the essence of reality.
"Europe, for instance," he told his visitor, "I often think of as
a large, dimly lighted temple, richly and magnificently decorated,
but with the dusk hovering beneath its arched ceilings. America
332
TURGENEV
presents itself to my thoughts as a vast fertile prairie, at first sight
somewhat barren, but with a glorious dawn breaking on its horizon.”
"Au revoir in America!" were the words with which he speeded
his parting guest on his way home. Turgenev never got to America.
He had to content himself with the stray visitors from the States
who waited upon him in Paris. When Emerson was in the French
capital they were engaged to dine together, but gout intervened.
In 1878 he met the abolitionist, Thomas Wentworth Higginson,
who was a delegate to the International Literary Congress, over
which Turgenev presided with much embarrassment. He spoke
warmly to him of his compatriots, naming Emma Lazarus, with
whom he had had some correspondence, in addition to Boyesen.
Mr. Higginson was charmed by this genial Russian, who "united
the fine benignant head of Longfellow with the figure of Thackeray"
and whose “winning sweetness of manner surpassed even that
of Longfellow." He was disappointed, on looking for a photograph
of Turgenev in the Paris shops, to discover that "his name proved
totally unfamiliar." These pilgrims from the States were apt to
regard him with a reverence which must have struck him as oddly
unlike the treatment he was used to at home.
•
Another of his American devotees was the late Henry Holt.
Having published an English translation of several of his works,
he not only wrote a very friendly letter to his Russian author, but
sent him a check. Turgenev, who had never received or ex-
pected to receive anything tangible for translations of his work, was
overwhelmed. He wrote to Ralston forthwith, asking him to trans-
late a short piece of his ("Living Relics") which he wished to send
to "this phoenix of an editor," together with his photograph, “as a
token and a proof of gratitude." America, he added, was "decidedly
the land of eccentricities." Of the letter "with the included check"
he wrote to Mr. Holt: "... Seldom or never has anything during
all my literary career given me such unmitigated pleasure. The deep
sympathy I always felt for America and the Americans has been
accrued by it; and the appreciation of your countrymen, testified by
your amiable letter, makes me proud and happy.
•
""
This interchange occurred in the winter of 1874. Five years
later Mr. Holt was summering in Paris, and Turgenev invited him
"AU REVOIR IN AMERICA!"
333
to his apartment. The publisher's reminiscences give a brief account
of that meeting, with Turgenev leaning over the rail of the circular
staircase to greet the young friend from the States, who felt, looking
up at that "full-bearded, strong, kind face," as though he were
"ascending to a prophet." The one remark the American cherished
was Turgenev's "I am no puritan.
""
The publisher was also received at Bougival, and made very much
at home there. "He spoke English," Mr. Holt remarks, "better than
I did." After a session with the samovar, they went into the
novelist's bedroom, the windows of which gave on a fine view. His
visitor commenting on the landscape, Turgenev replied that it made
no impression on him. The visitor expostulated: did n't every one of
the great scenes in his novels have an appropriate natural background?
“Well,” he said, “I had n't realized it. So far as I know myself,
if all being were arranged in an orderly progression from inanimate
matter up to the highest thought and feeling, my interest would begin
where conscious life begins."
There was an American with whom Turgenev's contacts were
less casual than passing acquaintance,-a young fellow-craftsman,
Henry James. Not that there is evidence of his having been par-
ticularly impressed by the young man, either as a personality or as an
artist. His graciousness had in it a touch of condescension. He
wrote to Ralston in 1875 to try to make friends with James, de-
scribing him as "a very amiable, sensible, and gifted man, with a
tendency toward tristesse which will not frighten you." And seven
years later, again writing to Ralston, he says that he has had a
visit from James, who "is as amiable as ever, but has grown very
fat." Turgenev found that some of James's pages were written
with the hand of a master, but the American was probably justified
in fearing that his tales struck the Russian as "having on the surface
too many little flowers and knots of ribbon, of being not quite meat
for men."
James's references to Turgenev were not free from such hollow
notions as "Slav imagination," "Slav languor." There are other
indications that in writing about his senior, he spun things out of a
reverent fancy. Yet in some ways the young American showed a
penetrating insight into Turgenev's work and character. "To de-
334
TURGENEV
""
scribe him in the fewest terms," James wrote even before they had
met, "he is a story-teller who has taken notes. . . .
. . If we are not
mistaken, he notes down an idiosyncracy of character, a fragment
of talk, an attitude, a feature, a gesture, and keeps it, if need be,
for twenty years, till just the moment for using it comes." And
again: “... He has no recognition of unembodied ideas; an idea,
with him, is such and such an individual, with such and such a
nose and chin, such and such a hat and waistcoat, bearing the same
relation to it as the look of the printed word does to its meaning.'
This is uncannily like what Turgenev said of himself. He was a
realist, certainly, as were these "grandsons of Balzac"; but James
seems to have felt, too, that he was to a degree like his unfortunate
hero, Nezhdanov in "Virgin Soil," "a romanticist of realism"; one
who looked at life steadily, but who could not help gagging when he
thought of swallowing it whole. He was inclined to leave the
difficult, sordid, tawdry aspect of things out of the picture. That
tendency toward tristesse which Turgenev found in James, the latter
recognized in him: "The element of melancholy in his nature was
deep and constant." James comprehended, too, Turgenev's attitude
toward his distant, repellant, seductive native land. "Turgenev
gives us a peculiar sense of being out of harmony with his native
land. . . . He loves the old and he is unable to see where the new
>>
is drifting. . . And again: "Turgenev strikes us . . . as a
man disappointed . . . in the land which is dear to him. . . .
The fermentation of social change has thrown to the surface in Rus-
sia a deluge of hollow pretensions and vicious presumptions, amid
which the love either of old virtues or of new achievements finds
very little gratification."
Those Sunday afternoons at Flaubert's, in the "little salon at the
top of a house at the end of Faubourg Saint Honoré," where, James
says, "Turgenev's beautiful faculty of talk showed at its best,"
clarified for the younger man his view of this "most approachable,
most practicable, least unsafe man of genius" it was his fortune
to meet. "Our Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, moralistic, conventional
standards were far away from him," James says. But during those
hours in that company the young man could not help feeling that the
Russian, like himself, was somewhat distressed by the equally rigid,
"AU REVOIR IN AMERICA!"
335
if so differently oriented standards of the French school, as regards
the art that all of them were practising.
It was not only at Flaubert's that James saw him. He visited
Turgenev more than once in his "little green sitting-room" in the
Viardot house. What he noted here particularly was the immense
divan, so huge that smaller persons than Turgenev "had to lie upon
it rather than sit," and a few choice specimens of French painting,
notably a fine Rousseau. There were also visits to that "very pretty
domain," Bougival, where Turgenev's library had the same simple
effect-few books, a vast divan, and several valuable canvases. Best
memory of all, perhaps, was that of a certain Parisian déjeuner in
"a new sumptuous café in the Avenue de l'Opéra," where the two
men sat talking from noon till late dusk:
The gray damp of a Parisian December . . . made the dark interior
of the café look more and more rich and hospitable, while the light
faded, the lamps were lit, the habitués came in to drink absinthe and
play their afternoon game of dominoes, and we still lingered over our
morning meal. Turgenev talked almost exclusively about Russia, the
nihilists, the remarkable figures that came to light among them, the
curious visits he received, the dark prospects of his native land.
The two writers were to have more in common than either one of
them could then appreciate. Turgenev was in his grave when James
was writing to Stevenson, "I want to leave a multitude of pictures of
my time so that the number may constitute a total having a certain
value as observation and testimony." This was the essence of
Turgenev's effort. James, like Turgenev, was, in the phrase of
Edmund Gosse, “essentially a homeless man." Both felt that the
home scene was fading from them, and that, as James has it, they
"could trust [it] for effect no longer." Both had to see themselves,
in the home newspapers, lampooned as renegades. But Turgenev's
expatriation came too late in life to orphan his work. He did not
"attempt to project himself into an atmosphere" in which he had
no "transmitted and inherited property." He might for a time hang
up his harp on a willow tree in a strange land, but he did not forget
Jerusalem, and his right hand never forgot its cunning.
可
​IY
CARTETTY
AVEMA
ZINAAZAR.
CHAPTER XXXVII
THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE

}
FME
HE lesson learned from the failure
of "Virgin Soil," Turgenev
wrote to his brother, would not
be lost on him: his literary
career had come to its final end;
his name would never again ap-
pear under any original work.
"Diderot," he observed, "said
somewhere that 'before death
one several times attends his own
funeral'; so I too have been re-
duced to walking behind my
literary coffin. I will find some
other occupation for myself, and
then the last of old age will come and the daily petty cares connected
with the preservation of life will absorb all other interests." Even
before his entire novel appeared in print he had begun the avowals of
abdication which came in the wake of each of his books. He had
done his bell-ringing, and it was time for him to climb down from the
belfry. "Enough!" When he was preparing to go to Petersburg
at the end of May, 1877, he felt that he would n't stay there long:
"... There everything smells to me of literature; and I have con-
ceived a sufficient disgust for it lately
He has no desire to
write. It seems strange for him to think that he had once been a
man of letters.
,,
While he was thus protesting, two new stories appeared over his
name, one of which-and by far the better of the two-"The Story
336
THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE
337
of Father Alexis," was written after "Virgin Soil." Thereafter
he held his peace for nearly four years. When he did take up his
pen again, it was not to resume the chronicling of his times. Out of
the cedar chests of memory he drew the materials for two character
sketches, "Old Portraits" (1881) and “A Reckless Character"
(1882). The first belongs with the best of his pages. It is a sober
evocation of the days when serfdom was in flower, and, while con-
veying all the charm of a patriarchal past, refuses to gloss over its
horrors. Its excellence is in sharp contrast with the helplessness
of another piece published the same year, "A Song of Triumphant
Love," which is in effect a wretched pasticcio of an Italian novella.
The year before his death he attempted a Poesque theme in the story
"Clara Milich," and reluctantly handed to his avid publisher a
sheaf of papers which he called "Senilia-An Old Man's Jottings."
These sheets, varying in size and color, corresponded, he explained,
to the cartoons an artist sketches for a large canvas, and he was sur-
rendering them as a sign that he had given up all thought of writing,
and with some idea of posthumous publication. He was, however,
persuaded to allow fifty of them to appear at once.
The title "Poems in Prose," which was bestowed on the collection
by the editor of the review in which they appeared, is not a happy one.
Most of the pieces lack utterly the pitch and accent and pattern of
poetry. The personal, lyrical quality which some of them possess is
generally blighted by a weakness for the allegorical and the senten-
tious. A few read like leaves from a novelist's note-book, but even
those, though not lacking in excellent touches, wear gratuitous moral
tags. Several of them are transcriptions of actual experiences.
Such a one is the piece about an evening party at which the guests'
faces are suddenly transformed into death's-heads. He told a friend
that he had suffered from a similar hallucination for months.
He described these anecdotes and character sketches, these parables
and maxims, these day-dreams and nightmares as "the last groans
of an old man." And while not all of them answer to this descrip-
tion, many of them revolve about such themes as the horror of ex-
tinction, the futility of life, the indifference of Nature to human
values, the nostalgia for lost youth, the vain longing for a home, the
hopeless reaching out after the consolations of religion. These are
338
TURGENEV
+
familiar motifs, and so are his references to the enigma of Russia,
his emphasis on the abyss between the Russian masses and the Rus-
sian intellectuals, and his little hymn to "the great, mighty, just and
free Russian language," with which the series concludes.
What kept him from writing was not so much the invectives of the
critics and the indifference of the public, nor even his blunted re-
sponsiveness to new impressions, but rather, he repeated, the fact that
living abroad almost constantly as he did, he was "unable to make
diligent and close observations of Russian life, which, besides, was
getting more and more complicated with every year." As a matter
of fact, the tangle of Russian affairs was just then being resolved
into a clearly drawn conflict. It was natural for Turgenev to be con-
founded by this spectacle, because it was increasingly difficult to re-
main a passive observer. "Going to the people" having failed of
its purpose, the revolutionists adopted the tactics of terrorism. At
first their acts of violence were committed in self-defense or in re-
venge for the harsh treatment accorded their comrades. But soon
they began to use the revolver and the bomb against individuals in
high places, for political ends. They hoped either to frighten the
Government into granting concessions or to throw such confusion
into the enemy's ranks as to be enabled to seize power. The war-
fare between the terrorists and the Government was initiated with the
shot fired by Vera Zasulich at General Trepov in January, 1878,
and culminated in the assassination of the czar on March 1, 1881.
-
Turgenev watched this new turn of events with absorption. His
foreign residence was a real help to him here. He could entertain
some sort of relations with the revolutionists without actually com-
promising himself. Of course, he shuddered at their monstrous
acts and could not approve their aims, but at the same time he was
drawn to them because of their heroism, their singleness of purpose,
their selfless devotion to a cause. He naturally belonged with those
who kept to the middle of the road. He was, as he liked to call him-
self, a "dynastic liberal," and could not imagine any salutary re-
forms except such as would be granted by the existing authorities.
The report of the attempt on the czar in 1879 struck him as "abom-
inable news."
At the same time he continued to associate with as many hotheads
THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE
339
as came his way in Paris. What is more significant, he sometimes
gave them aid and comfort. Thus, he contributed five hundred
francs annually for at least three years to the support of an under-
ground journal issued from a Geneva press by Lavrov. This did
not prevent him from publicly denying any connection with Lavrov
when the man was deported by the French government. It is equally
characteristic that he asked Lavrov's forgiveness, and got it. When
the young Prince Kropotkin escaped from a Russian prison, Tur-
genev suggested that the event be celebrated with a dinner. He cul-
tivated this young man. He gave him "Virgin Soil" to read in
proof. He took him along to Antokolsky's studio, to see the newly
finished statue of Christ Before the People. He insisted that Kro-
potkin get up on a ladder to view the sculpture from above, so that
he could note the strength, the scorn and the hatred in this Mes-
siah. "He must see it!" Turgenev cried, "he's a revolutionist!"
It is said that he kept on his desk pictures of the executed terrorists,
and kissed the photographs of the heroic women condemned in the
so-called Trial of the Fifty, the flesh-and-blood sisters of his Yelena
and his Marianna.
In the winter of 1879 he met the heir apparent, the future Alex-
ander III, and his spouse, at a party given by the Russian ambassador
in Paris, and to his "great joy" he found the heir "open-minded,
honest and kind” and his wife "very charming." This was his com-
ment to a friend who was a respectable citizen and a censor, to boot.
To Lavrov he spoke of the heir's "limited outlook, ignorance and
awkwardness" and reported that the future empress of all the Rus-
sias had expressed regret to him because he wrote in Russian. His
natural inclination, perhaps intelligible in a novelist, to identify him-
self with the person he was addressing, is nowhere better exemplified.
From 1876 until 1882, when he was too ill to move, not a year
passed without his spending some part of it in Russia. He took ad-
vantage of his visits home to study the new phase of the social move-
ment, as, for example, by attending one of the numerous political
trials which afforded the outside world its clearest glimpses of under-
ground activities. The new novel he was thinking of,-for he
would not be done with writing until he was done with living,—while
it was to revolve around the conflict in outlook between individuals
340
TURGENEV
of different nationalities, was also to present the new type of revo-
lutionist, one who bore no traces of Nezhdanov's Hamletism.
He seems to have had in mind a sequel to "Virgin Soil," which
would do justice to the men who, with complete sacrifice of every
private desire and personal ambition, gave themselves to the cause.
Hearing that news of this literary plan had gotten into the French
and German papers, he wrote in November, 1881, that he was not
yet considering it seriously, adding in his wistful way, "Will new
leaves and branches spring from the old, dry tree?" It has been as-
serted by a man who was acquainted with him that the novel wast
actually written, at least in part, but the manuscript has not come to
light. It is more probable that he did not go beyond dictating the
names of the characters to Mme. Viardot as he lay on his deathbed.
He did not always return to the great steppes for what Henry
James enviously described as "a strengthening bath," and what he
himself spoke of as a dip in "potent waters." His trip of 1879, for
example, was undertaken for no less prosaic a reason than to obtain
the legacy bequeathed him by his lately deceased brother. Nicholas
died early in the year. It was not a bereavement that affected Tur-
genev vitally: they had had nothing in common, had seen each other
rarely, and their letters had for the most part been either catalogues
of their respective ailments or accounts of financial affairs. And
yet, as Turgenev wrote to Flaubert, "a brother may be less than a
friend, but he represents something different, something less strong
and more intimate." Now there was no one left with whom to
share the memories of their common childhood. Besides, the pass-
ing of a person, who, however uncongenial to him, was bound to
him by the ties of blood, was a pointed intimation of his own mortal-
ity. And so his sorrow was "retrospective and personal." Nicho-
las had left him a quarter of a million francs, willing the remainder
of his large fortune to his relatives-in-law. Since they were "a
thievish sort," Turgenev thought he had to be on the spot if he was
to get his inheritance.
His brother's death was merely a contributing cause to his depres-
sion. He was, as he told Flaubert, leading the retired life of a mole,
alone, quite alone, and idle. In February he was in Petersburg, and
for once a friendly Fate surprised him. Coming from the shadow
THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE
341
of the sad Parisian winter, and for no more exalted purpose than
to claim his share of his brother's fortune, he suddenly found himself
in the warm sunlight of public favor. His eight weeks' visit
to the two capitals was in the nature of a triumph. He passed
from the arms of one group of enthusiasts to those of another.
He was dined and wined and crowned with laurel wreaths. He
made speeches and received eulogistic addresses. At one gather-
ing a young man read a poem begging him, in the name of the
His rooms at
younger generation, to pay longer visits to Russia.
the Hôtel d'Europe in Petersburg were like a public thoroughfare,
what with the endless coming and going of all manner of people,
among whom the youth figured largely. The very girls who six
months earlier had anathematized him for "Virgin Soil," now
“shrieked like young jackdaws at dusk," as an eye-witness observed,
in delight over an autographed copy of the same novel.
He gave readings from his works, and even when he mumbled
and stumbled the audience acclaimed him with endless plaudits.
One eager young woman broke a window-pane in her anxiety to
catch a glimpse of him, and at the end of another public appearance
he had to be rescued from a cheering mob of university students
by a police officer, who, all the time that he was dragging Turgenev
away from them, kept protesting to the crowd that he was an ardent
admirer of his talent. How often did he wish that he might cast
aside, at one stroke, his fame and the years that had brought it to
him, and be merely one of these anonymous hot-blooded boys who
surged forward to do him honor?
There were a few flies in the ointment. Once when Dostoyevsky
was also on the platform, part of the audience slighted Turgenev by
clearly showing more attention to the author of "The Possessed."
Furthermore, Turgenev could not help noticing that the extreme
left did not participate in the festivities. And yet it seemed as
though he had effected a genuine reconciliation with the educated class
to which he belonged and whose chronicler he was content to be.
The tremendous acclaim rejoiced him the more because it took him
by surprise. He had always been inclined to exaggerate his unpopu-
larity at home, and by the same token had ignored the signs of
the steady growth of his reputation. As early as 1874 his name
342
TURGENEV
-:
was familiar even to an attendant who waited upon him in the public
baths, and the same year two young artisans came up to him while
he was waiting for his train at a railway station, and having assured
themselves that he was the author of "A Sportsman's Sketches,"
bared their heads, and bowing from the waist, thanked him in the
name of the Russian people, disappearing before the astounded man
could find his voice. He had become, without truly realizing it, a
classic, and his work was offering to an increasingly large body of
readers that light and heat and strength which he himself sought in
vain. His novels, in the words of one Russian critic, had become
fashion journals which set the style in manners and morals, and, as
another observes, the conversation in them was, for several decades,
the conversation in every Russian drawing-room, bedroom, and
study.
Turgenev appreciated that the ovations he was receiving were
at once an expression of homage to himself and something in the
nature of an oblique political demonstration. The failure of Rus-
sian diplomacy at the Berlin Congress, the unrestrained rule of the
bureaucrats, and the severe repression of political heterodoxy,
coupled with the fact that Russian arms had secured a constitution
for Bulgaria, combined to stir up strong popular resentment against
the Government. Just then the liberals had been further aroused
by the czar's appeal to the people for help against "a handful of
evil-doers," as the manifesto referred to the terrorists. In reply
some of the more forward-looking zemstvos had demanded inter-
nal reforms.
The progressives turned the meetings in Turgenev's honor into
thinly disguised liberal rallies, whereat he readily connived. In an
after-dinner speech in Moscow he said that he was being applauded
not as a writer, but rather as the exponent of the liberal ideas to
which he had clung since his youth. And speaking at the great
dinner given him by the academic and literary world of Petersburg,
he made a reference to "the crowning of the edifice," a phrase which
every one recognized as a euphemism for a constitution. The re-
port was circulated and recorded in an underground newspaper that
he was appealed to as the one man who could unite all the forces of
the opposition, the one to whom both fathers and children would lis-
THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE
343
ten, and that he virtually agreed to accept the burden, since, he said,
there were no younger shoulders to carry it.
The banqueting played havoc with his digestion, and he returned
to Paris disabled with gout. But morally he was refreshed. He
almost began to believe in himself as a political force. He even
communicated his faith to one of his acquaintances. The German
ambassador to France, in whose presence he analyzed the Russian
situation, wrote in his diary that if he were Alexander II, he would
entrust the formation of a cabinet to the novelist. Turgenev could
not take his mind off affairs at home. He was no sooner back in
Paris than he complained, with more than his usual wistfulness,
of "the burden of living abroad." A man could n't straddle two
countries, with one foot in each. He would have to return to Rus-
sia for good. "But it is hard," he could n't help adding, "to tear
oneself away from what one has grown accustomed to, here." In
August he was writing to Flaubert that he had decided to go home,
not to work, but simply to breathe his native air. And curiously,
his decision had cured him of the nervous exasperation which had
been consuming him. "Laugh if you please, but the idea of plung-
The end of
ing into that morass up to my neck has calmed me."
the year found his determination unshaken. Russia was passing
through a dark period. One could n't, conscientiously, remain an
outsider. Now at the age of sixty-two, he was going to his native
country for the first time, as he wrote to Tolstoy, without thinking
of when he would return to Paris, and indeed not wishing to return
soon.
The visit that he made in 1880 was indeed of extraordinary dura-
tion. He reached Petersburg early in February and did not leave
Russia until nearly the middle of July. During these months he went
through the usual course of public dinners, attacks of gout, and read-
ings for charity, and he also took a leading part in the ceremonies
connected with the unveiling of a monument to his idol, Pushkin.
Of political activity there is scarcely a trace. The nearest approach
to it was his effort to make some contact with the extreme left in
the confraternity of letters. He braved the snow and three flights of
stairs to meet a group of writers who were publishing coöperatively
a radical review. He arrived late, as usual, and found the company
344
TURGENEV
having tea. The group included as well a scientist in a working-
blouse stained with acids.
Turgenev tried to be agreeable, but the frost was not all on the
windows. His companions were likely to recall that though a ter-
rorist's account of his prison experience, published in Paris, had had
the benefit of a preface by Turgenev, the novelist had followed up
this friendly office by an open letter in which he referred to ter-
rorist activities as "abominations," and said that he had always, on
principle, been opposed to revolution. They were acutely aware of
a gap between him and them, and could n't help making him feel it.
They were commoners, who from the start had had to struggle for
a living. He had lived richly by the labor of thousands of slaves.
Their hair was black, but under his silver mop his face seemed
fresher than their careworn faces. His mere physical bulk made
them feel like pygmies; even seated, he towered head and shoulders
above them, so that his genial talk seemed to flow down as from a
height, and his great gestures threatened to push apart the walls of
the narrow room.
In the chilly air, he gave himself over to reminiscence, until one of
the young men, his voice trembling with eagerness, rose to put the
bold question: "What do you think of the state of affairs in our
country? Aren't we on the eve of a revolution? Aren't we just
where France was on the eve of 1789?" This young man, like
not a few others, was somewhat uncertain as to whether the real
Government was in the Winter Palace or in the secret headquarters
of the People's Will (the terrorist party). Turgenev answered by
quietly laying the future on the lap of the gods, and added that a
revolution seemed unlikely because the opposition was not united.
His opponent retorted that the "extreme progressivists," as Tur-
genev euphemistically called the revolutionists, were all united, and
were indeed the only ones to be reckoned with. Then he launched
into an attack on the liberals. The novelist observed with a smile
that for really concerted feeling he would have to look back to the
forties and fifties, when everyone had been against serfdom. From
the question of serfdom it was easy to pass to "A Sportsman's
Sketches," and thence to hunting. It happened that the young man
THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE
345
in the stained blouse was a passionate hunter. The dangerous topic
was not referred to again.
There was another gathering at which Turgenev was asked point-
blank whether one should join the terrorists or "go to the people."
"I see," he said after a moment, "that young people are still pre-
occupied with the question of what's to be done. It's for them to
answer. As for me, I only visit Russia now and then, and I don't
undertake to solve complicated political problems." Already the
prodigal had ceased to think of his return as permanent. "But," he
ventured, "it's obvious that 'going to the people' has been a failure."
The abstractions of socialism, he observed, could have no meaning
for the peasant, who lived in a world of simple concrete things.
In the end he was to lose faith in reforms from above, although he
never gained any confidence in revolutionary tactics.
Of all the events that marked these five months in Russia, what
stood out most sharply were the three crowded June days in Moscow
dedicated to Pushkin's memory. There were moments during the
festivities when it almost seemed as though they were in honor of
Turgenev, rather than in honor of his master; as when the Minister
of Education embraced him on the platform of the great hall of
the university, after the rector had declared him an honorary mem-
ber of the academic body, and the audience broke into thunders of
applause. And again when, in the dazzling White Hall of the
Noblemen's Club (where forty-three years later the body of Lenin
was to lie in state), Pisemsky, a heavy man with the clumsy air of
a peasant, took the laurel wreath with which Turgenev had just
crowned the bust of Pushkin and made a gesture as though to place
it upon Turgenev's head, and once more the public crashed its ap-
probation. And then came the moment when the audience rustled
into silence, to hear Turgenev read aloud the speech in praise of
Pushkin which he had composed in the solitude of Spasskoye.
He stood before the crowd, wearing on his person a lock of the
poet's hair, bearing in his heart a love for Pushkin's verse that af-
fected him physically; he would have given his two little fingers for
a single line of "Yevgeny Onyegin." Had n't Zhukovsky's son pre-
sented him with the poet's signet-ring with the curious Hebrew in-
346
TURGENEV
scription, in recognition of the fact that he was the spiritual heir
of the man who fathered Russian literature, that he was carrying on
the Pushkin tradition of light and grace and reason? Yet his sober,
subtle, critical appreciation, stressing the æsthetic rather than the
moral aspect of the man's work, was not calculated to rouse the emo-
tions of his expectant auditors. How far he fell short he realized
when, the day after his address, Dostoyevsky delivered his speech
which shook this gathering, under the auspices of the Society of
Lovers of Russian Literature, as the crowds in the Duomo were once
shaken by the storm of Savonarola's eloquence. Even Turgenev,
inimical as ever to Dostoyevsky's passionate wrongheadedness, and
slightly humbled by this climax, was swept off his feet.
At the conclusion of the exercises, a number of people came
up to Turgenev to press his hand. Some of them begged him to
remain in Russia. He did not. But he did return for another long
visit the next spring, after having given his blessing to Marianne
Viardot's union with a pianist named Duvernoy. Alexander II had
just been "executed" by the revolutionists, and the flurry caused
by the regicide seems to have stirred again Turgenev's vague political
ambitions. He immediately contributed an anonymous article to
La Revue Politique, in which he gave a rather flattering picture of
the new czar, made a remarkably penetrating forecast of his policies,
and after indicating that he probably would not grant a constitution,
expressed the pious wish that the liberals might persuade him to
do so.
It is reported that Gambetta, whom Turgenev called "the
new Pericles,” approached him on the subject of France's future re-
lations with Russia. However that may have been, when he reached
Petersburg people in high places did not rush to invite him into
the councils of state. Quite the contrary. Pobedonostzev, who was
already a power at the court, hinted broadly to a friend of Tur-
genev's that the latter's presence in the capital was undesirable, for
if the liberals turned his head again, who knew what might come
of it in these troubled times?
Although this message never reached Turgenev's ears, he had
the uneasy conviction that he was under police surveillance both
here and in France, where he claimed to be known to the secret
service as le loup blanc. He did not feel safe in the capital, he
THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE
347
told his friends, only half in jest. But at Spasskoye he was hardly
better off. In the prevailing confusion, almost anything could hap-
pen. A practical joker might send a written order to the local au-
thorities: "Please hang the landowner, Ivan Sergeyevich Tur-
genev." And forthwith he would be hanged by his own peasants.
The droll idea seems to have taken hold of him. He elaborated it
with gusto to Polonsky, who reported it as a day-dream of Tur-
genev's:
We sit on the balcony one fine morning and quietly sip our tea, and
suddenly we notice a crowd of local peasants coming toward us from
the church across the garden. As usual they take off their caps and
bow, and when I ask, "What do you want, brothers?" they reply:
"Don't be angry at us, little father, we are not to blame. You're a
good master and we're very well satisfied. Still, whether we like it or
not, we shall have to hang you. And while we 're at it, we might as
well hang him, too," pointing to Polonsky. "What?" "Yes, quite so.
Those are the orders, little father. We have the rope ready, too.
You'd better say your prayers now. We're no murderers, you know;
we're human beings. We can wait a little."
During the three or four months of 1881 that he was in Russia
Turgenev spent most of the time on his estate. He entertained a
number of guests, and managed to do a little work. By August
he was writing to a friend: "Although in the flesh I am still here,
mentally I am already in Paris, and I feel that a French skin is grow-
ing under my Russian skin, which is beginning to slough off. In
the spring, the process will be reversed." Two more springs were
left him for the Russian skin to renew itself. But when he saw
the green roof of the old manor-house melt, as he drove off, into the
green of the August landscape, it was for the last time. Nor did he
ever see again the colored cupolas of Moscow, or again hobble
through the giddy parade on the Nevsky.
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CHAPTER XXXVIII
Mouw
RECONCILIATION

wim
am
Raidoso
1
NE May day in 1878 Turgenev
received a letter addressed in a
handwriting which he had not
seen for seventeen years. It
was a note in which Tolstoy
held out the olive-branch. Hay-
ing just passed through a moral
crisis, and feeling himself, since
seven times seven years had gone
over his head, a new man, he
desired reconciliation in a spirit.
of Christian good-will with all
whom he had offended or from
whom he had suffered offense.
He was certain, he wrote, that so kind a man as Turgenev had fore-
stalled him in forgetting their old enmity, and he concluded by
declaring his indebtedness to his senior for such fame as he had
then achieved.
This last statement was a gesture of exaggerated humility, and
yet Turgenev had done more than Tolstoy perhaps realized to make
him known in the West. As the self-appointed promoter of Russian
letters abroad, he had interested himself particularly in pushing
Tolstoy's work, in spite of his break with the author. It is re-
ported that when Charles Edmond suggested to Turgenev that the
Paris Temps would welcome a contribution from him, he took
Edmond to his rooms, and handed him, as the choicest possible
offering, a manuscript translation of Tolstoy's "Sebastopol Tales."
He was n't, he added, worthy to unloose the latchet of this man's
shoes.
348
RECONCILIATION
349
Not that his admiration was unqualified. When the first in-
stalment of "War and Peace" appeared, he found it dry and tire-
some, obviously the product of a memory that fastened upon small
irrelevant details, and full of petty psychologizing which was out
of place in a work of epic proportions. By the time the fourth
volume was out, he was ready to concede that the book contained
passages which would live as long as the Russian language, and
indeed, that therewith Tolstoy moved up to the first place among
the writers of his country, and in fact of all Europe. The pas-
sages in which Tolstoy sat awkwardly enough on his philosophic
hobby-horse irritated and angered Turgenev beyond measure, yet
the genre pictures in the book gave him "the chills and fever of
ecstasy." For all its defects, the thing "smelled of life." If
only, Turgenev sighed, a matured intelligence were added to
this rare talent. He saw no virtue in "Anna Karenina," which
seemed to him to present the spectacle of the most gifted writer in
Europe stuck in the native swamp of wilful barbarism. He was
always finding in Tolstoy's writings and behavior the signs of
hostility to the intellect. "War and Peace" was, to his thinking,
flawed by it. He believed that the same tendency accounted for
the fact that Tolstoy sided with the French in the conflict of 1870:
the opinionated wretch abhorred Gallic phrasemongering, but he
hated even more the system, the science, the rationality, for which
the Germans stood.
Reconciliation was naturally welcome to Turgenev. Many years
had passed since he had said that they were to each other as the
Montecchi to the Capuletti, and the edge of that feeling had long
since worn off. He eagerly accepted the outstretched hand.
Three months after Tolstoy's letter reached him, being then on one
of his flying trips to Russia, he made a point of going to Yasnaya
Polyana. He followed up this visit with another a month later.
Several members of the company he found there, including the
Countess Tolstoy and the eldest son of the house, Sergey, who was
then fifteen, recorded their impressions of the guest.
The boy was struck by the man's gigantic bulk, which dwarfed
that of his father, and the yellowish-white hair contrasting with his
father's, in which there was n't a gray thread. He recalls the flabby
350
TURGENEV
legs and the wide-toed soft leather boots of a victim of gout,
and the velvet jacket and waistcoat, in each pocket of which re-
posed a marvelous watch. The giant was very proud of them
and kept consulting both of them to see if they agreed. Not that
he, being after all a Russian, was ever on time. In another pocket
he kept an exquisite snuff-box, which, he confessed, his ladies
in Paris would not suffer him to use, and he had long since given
up smoking because two young girls of whom he was fond refused
kisses that smelled of tobacco. He was reduced to smelling-salts
as a substitute. Relieving all this velvet was a silk shirt and silk
cravat, above which blue eyes beamed kindly from a ruddy face.
The Countess found Turgenev aged, gray and meek, and ex-
hibiting a childish weakness of character. She was charmed, like
every one else, by his conversational verve, observing: "He de-
scribed a statue of Christ by Antokolsky so that we actually saw it,
and afterwards told us about his favorite dog, Pegasus, with equal
vividness." At table he led the talk, making everybody laugh by
mimicking a chicken in the soup and by other parlor tricks. He
spoke slightingly of the French people and of the Parisian argot, and
took occasion to compliment the young ladies present by contrasting
the Russian girl favorably with the French miss. They did not
know that two years previously he had described the Russian woman
to his French friends as "a mélange of simplicity, tenderness, and
unconscious depravity." Later he beat his host at chess. His skill
with one figure had won him the title of "the chevalier of the
bishop."
When the talk turned to literature, he urged Tolstoy to read
young Garshin, Guy de Maupassant, and a certain Mme. Stechkina,
his literary protégée of the moment, upon whom, as usual, he was
wasting his enthusiasm. He was also heard quoting Pushkin at his
host, in support of the contention that poetry has a value. Tolstoy
confessed to a weakness for Pushkin, but persisted in maintaining
that one could express oneself plainly and freely only in prose.
But for the most part, Turgenev avoided contentious subjects. He
was much with the young people,-the house was full of them,-
and showed himself, for a gouty sexagenarian, singularly spry.
Sergey reports that once when his father and the guest were out
RECONCILIATION
351
of doors they found near the house a board balanced on a log,
and seating themselves on the ends, began to play see-saw as un-
concernedly as school-boys.
Upon reaching Spasskoye after this reunion, Turgenev effected
another reconciliation, with Foeth. Four years earlier this ex-
quisite æsthete, who was an eminently hard-headed gentleman far-
mer, a stout pillar of society, and a virulent reactionary, had spread
the rumor that Turgenev was no better than an agitator. Up to that
time Turgenev had ignored the politics of his old neighbor and hunt-
ing-companion, at whose table he had eaten so many excellent din-
ners and whose verses he had read with so much gusto, but this per-
sonal attack he could not stomach, and he broke with him. And now
Foeth followed Tolstoy's example and made a friendly overture in
a charming but not very clear letter, adorned with quotations from
Kant. Again Turgenev responded warmly, although he never got
back to a very secure footing in his further relations with the poet.
As in the case of Tolstoy, he was happy over the closing of the
breach, but well aware that the old differences had not been con-
jured away.
After the second visit to Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy was writing
to a friend: "Turgenev was here again, and was just as charming
and brilliant. But, entre nous, he is a little like a fountain spout-
ing imported water, and one is always afraid that the jet may be
exhausted and the fountain cease playing." To Foeth he wrote
at the same time: "He [Turgenev] is the same as ever, and we
know the degree of intimacy that is possible between us." The
two men wisely refrained from an attempt to exceed this measure,
and thereby the relation was saved. The letter which Tolstoy sent
after his departed guest was very affectionate, but the recipient was
exasperated to find that he was begged never to refer to his friend's
writings—perhaps the only thing about Tolstoy in which he was
genuinely interested.
God knows, when I reread my work or hear it mentioned, I get a
complicated feeling, the chief elements of which are shame and the
fear that people are laughing at me. . . . Much as I love you and
firmly as I believe that you are well disposed toward me, it seems to
352
TURGENEV
me that you too are making fun of me. And so let's not talk about
my writings any more.
"Every one," Tolstoy continued, referring to the fundamental
difference in their way of solving their personal problems, "has
his own way of blowing his nose." If his private concern at the
time was to seek the good life, he did not presume to enjoin it
upon Turgenev, merely wishing him work which he would feel to
be worth while, as the only condition of happiness. He concluded:
I don't for a minute believe that you have given up writing, because,
like an open bottle which has been swung round too quickly to spill,
you still hold most of what filled you. The thing is to find an angle
at which the fluid can run out quietly; that's what I wish for you as
for myself."
To this Turgenev replied:
Although you asked me not to speak of your writings, I cannot re-
frain from stating that I never laughed at you, even the least little bit.
Some of your works please me a great deal, others I don't like at all.
But why should I laugh? I thought that you had long since got rid
of such feelings. Why do only men of letters know them, and not
painters, musicians, and other artists? Perhaps because there enters
into a literary work more of that part of the soul which it's not com-
fortable to show to every one.
As for his own work, he wrote, he had given it up because he
was not living at home. "At least," he added shrewdly, "I account
for my inaction by my residing abroad."
The relations between the two men remained to all intents and
purposes cordial. In May, 1880, Turgenev came to Yasnaya
Polyana again for a few days. One object of his visit was to
persuade Tolstoy to take part in the coming Pushkin celebration
at Moscow, but his efforts were vain. He paid his last visit
to Yasnaya on his final trip to Russia the following year. As
usual he found a houseful of young people, with whom he made
merry. On one occasion the members of the party amused them-
selves by relating in turn their happiest moments in love. Turgenev,
being pressed for his, made a contribution which differed sub-

LEO TOLSTOY
From a portrait by Kramskoy
UNIV
OF
MICH
RECONCILIATION
353
stantially from the story which he had told his French friends
when the same topic was under discussion. He had, he said,
been in love with a girl who, as he thought, did not return his
affection, but once he glanced at her and catching her eyes on
him, knew that she did. After that the boys and girls kept
glancing at one another. He delighted the company by dancing a
cancan with a twelve-year-old girl-not the vulgar steps of the café-
chantant, but the old-fashioned, stately measure. Tolstoy noted in
his diary: "Turgenev-cancan. Sad."
Turgenev further irritated his host by making fun of one of
the master's potential disciples, who discussed the opening of the
fourth Gospel with such vehemence that he fell off his chair. The
visitor was no great reader of the New Testament, and cared
least for St. John. When he confessed as much to a pious second
cousin of Tolstoy's, the good old soul could only sigh: "You will
never be anything but the most likable of pagans." One day there
were thirteen at table, and pleasantries were made about the ominous
significance of the number. "All who are afraid of death," cried
Turgenev, "raise hands," and lifted his own. Only Tolstoy, out
of politeness, followed suit. This was the second time within a few
weeks that Turgenev had publicly declared the fear that haunted
him. The previous month his present host, who was then a visitor
at Spasskoye, had heard the same thing from his lips.
"How can it be that Turgenev is not afraid to be afraid of death?"
Tolstoy commented, in a letter referring to the matter. He himself
knew the chill of that terror well enough. It had led him, one night
in an Arzamas tavern,-him, blessed with genius and health and
children and chattels,-to the brink of suicide. This fear was
perhaps the very root of the unease from which he had found
refuge in the faith and the way of life of the masses.
In fact,
he had come to Spasskoye fresh from a pilgrimage which he had
made on foot, so that he might the better identify himself with the
common folk. As he stood at Turgenev's door, paying the driver
who had brought him there, it looked as though one peasant were
paying another. The visit over, Tolstoy made this entry in his
diary: "Turgenev fears the name of God, but acknowledges
Him. . . . Lives in luxury and idleness."
354
TURGENEV
Turgenev read Tolstoy's "Confession," the first piece begotten of
his conversion, which was sent to him by the author, and prudently
avoided expressing his opinion of it, for fear, as he wrote in his
letter of acknowledgment, of "falling into an argumentative tone."
He did, however, urge him to resume work, as though a piece
like "Confession" were negligible as literature. He conceded
that a man must first of all lead a good life, but he insisted that
this should not interfere with the writing of good books. To prod
Tolstoy further, he went so far as to exalt his literary labors
into a mission. To others Turgenev spoke of the "Confession"
without mincing words. What a pity, he told the lady who brought
him a copy of it, to see a talent like that wasted on such nonsense!
As though Tolstoy were the first to discover these platitudes about
life and death!
And he recalled how one day, strolling through the meadows
at Yasnaya Polyana, the two of them had come upon an aged nag
at grass, and how the host had gone up to it and stroked it and
talked to it gently, telling his companion just what the creature was
thinking and feeling, until Turgenev in a transport cried out:
"You must have been a horse once, yourself!" That was the sort
of thing he should be doing, instead of trying to climb into the
pulpit. "The thing is remarkable," he allowed in a letter, "for its
sincerity, truthfulness and force of conviction, but it is all built
on false premises and leads to the most gloomy negation of human
life. This too is a kind of Nihilism." To his friend's elderly
cousin who had called him a pagan he said that it was a pity that
Lev Nikolaevich had abandoned literature to write "such trash"
as his ethico-religious tracts.
•
Tolstoy justified Turgenev's worst apprehensions. What the
latter had feared was that the proselyte would cart into literature
the Scriptures, commentaries, and homilies which formed his chief
reading matter after his conversion. Having found a faith in
which to rest, Tolstoy was then busy shelling out the kernel of
true ethical Christianity from the age-old husks of mysticism and
theology. At Yasnaya Polyana, in 1880, the master of the house
showed Turgenev the results of his most recent labors. "[He]
has written," the unenthusiastic guest confided to a friend shortly
RECONCILIATION
355
afterwards, “a whole heap of papers. He has a trunkful of these
mystico-ethical disquisitions and various pseudo-critical interpre-
tations. He read me some of this stuff, which I simply do not
understand . . . I told him:
I told him: "That's not the real thing,' but he re-
plied: 'It is just the real thing.'
199
To the end the two men remained antipathetic. What was real
and precious to the one was unreal and worthless to the other.
Turgenev could not breathe comfortably in Tolstoy's moral uni-
verse, and Tolstoy felt that Turgenev had no moral universe to
breathe in. The one would have had the flesh follow on the leash
of the soul. The other, being of less abundant vitality, was generally
able to keep his natural impulses within the bounds of the good taste
which was part of his make-up, and so accepted them fearlessly.
Faced with the problem of personal extinction, one worked out his
salvation by submitting his ego to the group consciousness, by step-
ping back into the sheltering warmth of huddled, primitive humanity.
The other, as jealous of his distinct, separate individuality as he
was sure of its annihilation, could find no such refuge. "Non-
existence is a black abyss; impersonal immortality is a white abyss,"
he is said to have observed. And so the small flame of his fortitude
was blown upon by every passing wind.
That Turgenev was uncomfortable in his unbelief is certain. In
his early forties he wrote to Countess Lambert on the occasion of
her son's death: "He who has faith has everything and cannot
lose anything, and he who does n't have faith has nothing; and I feel
this the more acutely because I belong to the have-nots."
In an-
other letter of condolence written the same year he observed that
the naturalness of death was far more terrible than its suddenness
or strangeness. Religion alone could conquer the fear of the end.
"But religion itself," he concluded, "must become a natural need
in man; and who does not have it can only turn away his eyes
frivolously or stoically (it is really the same)." Fifteen years later
he expressed virtually the same sentiment when he wrote to
Pisemsky:
My observations of recent years have led me to the conviction that
spleen, melancholy, hypochondria are nothing but forms of the fear of
356
TURGENEV
death. Of course, with every year it's bound to grow. There is no
radical cure for it, but there are palliatives. If the religious feeling
is, as you say, beginning to grow upon you, I congratulate you on
this precious acquisition. It is a sure remedy, only it's not within
everybody's reach.
The years failed to bring him into any haven of spiritual security.
He fashioned himself no staff of faith upon which to lean.
Though he shared Viardot's anti-clericalism, he was far from being,
like this friend, a militant atheist. Though he secretly found his
positivist diet somewhat meager, he kept to it. Though he did a
little dabbling in spiritism when it was fashionable, even to the
extent of attending séances, and showed in a few of his minor
writings an interest in the supersensuous order of things, he never
took refuge in mysticism. The one definite element in his attitude
toward his putative Deity was aversion from any rigid set of dogmas
such as Tolstoy erected for himself. When it came to God, as he
had told Herzen long ago, he agreed with Faust:
Who dare express Him?
And who profess Him:
I believe in Him?
Who, feeling, seeing,
Deny His being
Saying: I believe not?
In this connection it is relevant to consider what Turgenev wrote
in 1875 in answer to a request for a statement of his views, ten-
dered by a lady whose son had to prepare a school theme on the
subject, “Turgenev's Philosophy":
I shall say briefly that I am, above all, a realist, and chiefly interested
in the living truth of the human face; to everything supernatural I am
indifferent, and I don't believe in absolutes and systems; I love freedom
better than anything, and so far as I can judge I am sensitive to poetry.
Everything human is dear to me, Slavophilism is alien, and so is all
manner of orthodoxy.
It was only after death put a seal upon the intercourse between
the two men that the survivor became truly reconciled to the man
RECONCILIATION
357
I
from whom he so radically diverged. Tolstoy continued to feel
that there had been no body to their personal relations; Turgenev,
he submitted, had loved no one except the women with whom he had
been in love. At the same time he acknowledged Turgenev's im-
plicit faith in goodness, and the candor which led him to "turn
his soul inside out" in his books. He understood then the worth
of the work which was Turgenev's immortal residue. Where a
Dostoyevsky, so Tolstoy wrote, was like a valuable racer, but of a
skittish temper and with a secret fault that must sooner or later land
his rider in a ditch, a Turgenev was like a stout, sound horse that
could be depended upon to get one to one's destination.
.}
JAUG
Į x
CHAPTER XXXIX
C
PHOENIX LOVE

HEL
HE expatriate might prolong his
visits home, and even timidly
entertain the thought of settling
in Russia, but in the end he
always returned to France. It
was not that he felt closer to
the friends he had made there
than to those he left behind.
After all, he complained, there
wasn't a house in Paris where
he could spend an evening in-
formally. Nor was he drawn
thither by the more abundant
creature comforts which a West-
ern cosmopolis could provide. As the years went by, his apartment
came to have an unkempt air about it. When he was lying ill in a
Petersburg hotel room during his penultimate visit to Russia, an
admirer who came to cheer him up found his pillow-case “dirty be-
yond belief" and the curtains full of dust. "Dust," the patient
observed, “is as natural on curtains as dew on grass"; he had n't
noticed it, and he said his people in Paris would n't have noticed
it, either. The previous year a Russian friend, coming to the rue
de Douai to take him out to lunch, found his bedroom in disorder at
two o'clock and the bed not yet made. In the study, "a layer of
thick dust covered the small closed piano and the music upon it.
One end of the shade was torn from the roller and hung lopsided,
and apparently had been thus a long time, since a layer of dust was
in its folds."
358
PHOENIX LOVE
359
Turgenev himself showed some signs of neglect. "He wanted to
button his coat . . . and he felt for the button; not finding it, he
moved his hand to the next buttonhole, but the corresponding button
hung by a thread attached to the lining, which was peeking through
a hole. He smiled good-humoredly, threw up his hands and wrapped
the coat around himself." On the way downstairs they passed a
door from behind which came a strong contralto. Turgenev seized
his friend below the elbow and cried: "What a voice-still!"
They had their lunch, and Turgenev was gay and interesting, chat-
ting of Daudet and Zola, and only dropping to a grave tone on the
subject of matrimony. But suddenly he was all eagerness to get
away: “Mme. Viardot's daughter is ill in bed. Perhaps I am
needed to get the doctor or to run to the chemist."
His periodic excursions into Russia were merely leaves of absence
from the Viardots. They were "his own people," apart from whom
he could not live. Away from them, he talked of them often and
wrote to them regularly. As the girls grew into matrons, and had
children of their own, he became increasingly attached to them
through his grandfatherly interest in the babies. He found a bul-
letin about the health of Didie's little girl better reading, so he said,
than the most absorbing magazine article. As for the child's
grandmother, he had long since ceased to be swayed by the passion
for her which had once made him unwilling to alter by a single dot
her homely, fascinating face. But he was bound to her by that
network of cumulative habit, residual sentiment, and accepted obliga-
tion which his unofficial, incomplete marriage, like most marriages,
had in the end become.
It was a strong bond. So curious was Turgenev's subjection,
that one of his Russian friends did not hesitate to speak of his
state as that of a hypnotic. Otherwise, how could the man, sum-
mering with complete contentment at Spasskoye, exclaim apprehen-
sively: "What if Mme. Viardot should call me; then I would have
to go. I could n't help it." People repeated to one another that
the enchantress treated their Turgenev cruelly: when she was cross
with him, she would make him don a fool's cap with bells and
put him in a corner, and when he spoke Russian she would scream:
"Assez de votre langue barbare!" Even his intimates at home, who
360
TURGENEV
could laugh at such absurd gossip, were naturally jealous of this
foreigner who had ravished their great man. Knowing how they
felt, he could not resist on occasion teasing them a little. If he
had to choose, he said, between being the greatest literary genius
in the world, but not seeing the Viardots, and being their porter
should they settle at the end of Nowhere, he would choose the
place of the porter.
Now and then he did chafe under the chains. He felt somewhat
left out in the cold. There were moments, he submitted, when
he would give up all his fame in exchange for having some one
to scold him for being late when he returned to his desolate rooms.
As things were, he might stay away a day, or two days, with no
one to remark it. Life moved a little too quickly for him in Paris.
He complained that nobody loved him, he envied his married friends
openly; as for him, he had "neither wife nor mistress, not a single
woman whom he could call his own." He was always advising
young men to get married. "You can't imagine how hard a lonely
old age is," he said, repeating his time-worn phrase, “when against
your will you must sit on the edge of another man's nest, receive
kindnesses as alms, and be like an old dog, who is not chased out
only because the master has grown accustomed to him and pities
him." It was now over thirty years since he had confided to Mme.
Viardot that at Courtavenel he felt like an unhappy dog sitting
shabbily on his haunches.
He would sometimes hold up his large plump hand, sparsely
covered with black hairs, and stick up his short thumb: Could
a man with so weak a will as this brief member signified, divorce
himself from such an old association? But if he could not bring
himself to break away completely, he did stray afield now and then.
Aside from casual flirtations with women dazzled by his fame,
which have left no traces, there were, in the last decade, two af-
fairs which played havoc with his unwearied old heart.
In June, 1874, when he was laid up with gout at Spasskoye, a
certain Baroness Vrevsky, an attractive woman in her early
thirties, came to spend five days with the invalid. He had be-
come acquainted with her about a year previously, and although
Julia Vrevsky's eagerness to show kindness to people in need
PHOENIX LOVE
361
of it must have come to his notice before this, her acceptance
of his invitation was something of a pleasant surprise. The
visit, he wrote to her, left a deep imprint upon him, and made
him feel that she had become a part of his life. Back in Bougival,
he did not forget those days. "I keep thinking," he wrote to her
from there, "that if we had met when we were young, inexperienced
and above all, free-end the sentence for yourself." An exchange
of letters followed. There was something, he insisted, that tied
the two of them together. He had liked her at first glance, then
there was a temporary quiescence, and after that came her visit to
tighten the bond. He wrote her:
And don't you get it into your head to cut or untie the knot. What
for? Alas, no harm can come of it, either to me, or, for that matter, to
you... I'd like to spend a few hours with you in your room, sipping
tea and looking at the patterns on the frosted windows-but what non-
sense! looking, of course, into your eyes, which are very beautiful, and
now and then kissing your hands, which are also very beautiful, al-
though large. But I like such hands.
They must arrange a meeting shortly: if they don't come together
soon, they will only do so when they are old and it's all over with
them. She must remember that if she is thirty-three, he is fifty-
seven. A month earlier he had suggested that they meet in Karlsbad,
im wunderschönen Monat Mai, a romantic season, if taking the
waters was a prosy business. It would seem that they did have a
reunion at the watering-place, and when he returned to Bougival,
he wrote to her that he had found all "the ladies who owned him"
in fine fettle, while he himself was in fair condition, except that he
was aging so rapidly that within a year he would be "a moral mush-
room"; he had been a physical one this long time. And some weeks
later: "I feel that I am getting old, as I have often said in
jest,' to quote the poet,—and it's no cheerful prospect. Quite the
contrary. I do awfully wish, before the end of everything, that I
might have my fling; will you help me?"
She did not help him. Although the baroness was a restless,
adventurous spirit, and had an unconventional way of obeying her
generous impulses, she held to the moral standards of her world.
362
TURGENEV
Besides, she was just then seriously contemplating a trip to the
East, which she had been dreaming of for some time. She was a
woman with a taste for the exotic, rare in her generation. Tur-
genev had no desire to see her vanish into the dangerous distance.
He admitted that it might be interesting to go to India at that
time, when the Prince of Wales was on his way there too, but he
begged her to resist the temptation and remain near him. His fears
were groundless. The baroness's circumstances having changed,
she found herself settled on the Neva, instead of wandering up and
down the Ganges. And by June, 1876, he was again sitting with
her in her Oriental drawing-room in Petersburg. Soon after their
meeting there he wrote to her:
And you still consider it necessary to soothe me and beg me not to be
afraid, and you promise not to get me into trouble. I assure you that
there is as little in common between me and Joseph as there is between
you and Potiphar's wife. What I am afraid of is cholera, and not
charming women, especially when they are as kind as you. Alas! I
cannot be compromised, nor can I compromise any more, if I ever could.
But the serenity of their relation was occasionally ruffled for him,
he confessed, by the teasing and futile realization that she was a
young pretty woman.
Feeling that a frank statement of his position was in order, he
gave it in a letter written eight months later:
When I first met you, I loved you as a friend, and at the same time
I had the persistent desire to possess you. This, however, was not so
irresistible--I was no longer young-as to make me ask for your hand.
Besides, there were further reasons which stood in my way. At
the same time I knew very well that you would not agree to what the
French call une passade [a temporary connection]. That explains my
behavior.
That these further reasons had had to do with Mme. Viardot is
hardly to be doubted. Having thus made matters plain to the lady,
he went on to say that he looked forward to a deep friendship, un-
troubled by any carnal fret, as soon as his years allowed him to
regard her as a person, rather than as a woman. "But now," he
PHOENIX LOVE
363
submitted, "I still get hot and somewhat frightened at the thought:
and what if she should press me to her heart in an unsisterly fash-
ion ?"
A fortnight passes, and he writes: "There is no doubt that
some time ago, if only you had wished-but alas! now the time
is gone, and all that is necessary is to endure the transitional period
before sailing into the haven of old age." Sixteen years earlier
he had said the identical thing in almost the identical words, and as
far as tranquil friendship with a woman was concerned, the haven
of old age was as distant now as it had been then. In the same
letter he mentions two bits of gossip: one, about Count Sologub,
the casual companion of his youth, a man four years his senior, who
now, in his repulsive old age, has deserted wife and children for
a young woman; the other, concerning a certain marquise, who
is living her own life. He is far from condemning either. "Ah,"
he concludes, with the wistfulness that companioned his fear of life,
"if only we had had the courage a few years ago!"
On April 19, 1877, he was informing the baroness that he hoped
to see her in Petersburg within two weeks. Before the fortnight
was over, Russia had declared war on Turkey and, gout interfering,
he was afraid he might not find her when he got there: she was
going to the front as a sister of mercy. He did manage to see
her once that spring. He never saw her again. She died of typhus
early in the war in the most tragic circumstances. "The Poems in
Prose" include a tribute to her memory, flat, and sincere.
Turgenev wrote this piece in September, 1878. Half a year
later he was in the Alexandrinsky Theater in Petersburg watching
a performance of his play, "A Month in the Country." The
leading lady, Mme. Savin, was a woman of twenty-five, who,
like Pauline Viardot, had black eyes and hair and beautiful
hands, and, like her, had been virtually born on, and certainly
to, the stage. The revival of this piece was a triumph. The
playwright received thundering ovations as he stood bowing
from his box: he refused to appear before the curtain, because, as
he said, he did n't want to be thought of as a dramatic author. The
next day he went to call on the actress. She was flattered by his
•
364
TURGENEV
admiration, but hurt when he showed himself surprised that sucli
fine acting should be done by a Russian, and by an unschooled, self-
taught woman at that.
-
His enthusiasm for her art-he compared her to Rachel-was
soon complicated by another sentiment, which he described in a let-
ter sent to her in November from Bougival, as "that tender,
half-fatherly, half . . . other feeling.'
other feeling." In his subsequent letters,
of which there were many, he kept referring, after his usual man-
ner, to her "dear, pretty hands," and kissed them very tenderly and
very long. During his next visit to Petersburg, in 1880, he made a
point of seeing her again, and often enough to write her after his
departure for Moscow, "I feel now that you have become something
in my life from which I shall never part." And three days later,
"I think of you often, oftener than I should. . . . I love you."
When he was a boy his mother had told him: "You do not know
how to love." She might with equal truth have said, "You will
never know when to stop falling in love."
In May young Mme. Savin went South to Odessa for an en-
gagement. Turgenev, who was then at Spasskoye, had hoped to
see her there, but was only permitted to accompany her in the train
for a short time, leaving her at the Oryol station. On returning
to his lonely house he sent her long letters, in which he reviewed
the incidents of their brief trip together, and embroidered humor-
ously upon his impulse to snatch her from the train at Oryol. For
that hour in her compartment, this white-bearded man of sixty-two
had felt “like a boy of twenty." But, he admitted ruefully, in a
phrase that was one of his private clichés, this was "the last flare
of the lamp." Alas! now he would never be, as she put it, "her
sin." He could n't explain even to himself the feeling this warm-
lipped laughing girl aroused in him. "Am I in love with you? I
don't know. Formerly it was different with me. This insurmount-
able impulse toward union, toward complete self-surrender, where
everything earthly is lost in some fine fire. I probably talk rot,
but I would be unspeakably happy if . . . if ... But he felt that
now such thoughts were vain. The door that so short a time
back had seemed to him half open, with "something marvelous and
mysterious behind it," was now banged shut forever.
در
PHOENIX LOVE
365
During the summer they saw each other in Paris. But as she
was accompanied by a man who was soon to become her second
husband, even the ghost of their old intimacy was absent. She
was, however, a woman who could not easily forego the admiration
of so great a celebrity as Turgenev, and she gave him just the
requisite amount of encouragement. He continued, in his letters,
to kiss her hand lingeringly and to tell her that he loved her. In-
deed, with arrant disloyalty to the ladies who "owned" him, he as-
sured her, "I know of no hands pleasanter to kiss than yours."
She sent him, at his request, a cast of one of them.
And then, when he went back to Russia for what was to be his
last visit, he had the happiness, not granted him by Pauline Viardot,
of welcoming the lady to the ancestral home at Spasskoye. She saw,
as Pauline was never to see, the alleys of the old park, which he
evoked in his letters, with its "rural odors and bird-notes, its sleepy
sunlight and shadow, and two hundred acres of rye waving all
around." His friends, the Polonskys, who were spending the sum-
mer on his estate, had never seen the host in such a flutter of happy
excitement and hospitable activity as during the five July days she
was with them. He arranged a village festival, and the dancing
of the peasant girls soon drew the spectators, including the actress,
and even the master, into the jig. One warm night, when the gar-
den was heavy with fragrance, he sat on the balcony with his guests
and read them "A Song of Triumphant Love," which he had just
completed. The moved voice of the reader, the majesty of the night,
the dance of moths lured to the candles from the dark fields, lent
this hour a palpable enchantment. On another evening, after a late
supper, as the guest of honor recalls, they all wandered out into the
park to listen, at the host's invitation, to "the voices of the night."
One day he took her into his study, seated her in an arm-chair,
and read her one of his "Poems in Prose." It was a piece which
he had not included among those to be published; indeed he said he
would burn it, not wishing to utter a reproach from beyond the
gates of death. It was entitled "To Her," and was an apostrophe
to a woman loved for a lifetime with a love she never understood.
"You, who have plucked all my flowers," ran one phrase which re-
mained in the listener's memory, "you will never come to visit my
366
TURGENEV
grave." Whether or not the "poem" was as vapid as this approx-
imate quotation suggests, it seems certain that it was only an old
man's grumbling.
Turgenev's attachment to the actress was strengthened by her
visit to him. His happiest memory connected with it was of the
dinner served on the balcony to celebrate the wedding anniversary
of the Polonskys, when, after the champagne, she gave him “a
radiant and burning kiss." It "nearly singed him," he said, and
the thought of it made his head swim. When Mme. Savin re-
quired, he slipped readily enough into the part of her "best friend,"
becoming her confidant, and advising her in her rather confused and
hectic affairs of the heart. He also counselled her on matters of dic-
tion, as he had been wont to advise Pauline Viardot on her acting.
Sometimes, however, he allowed his fantasy to paint him in a more
personal rôle. He imagined the two of them drifting down a canal
through the mild Venetian October, or sauntering arm in arm
through the streets of Rome, visiting galleries, churches, gardens,
dining vis-à-vis, sitting side by side at the play, and then "there
my imagination halts respectfully. Is it because what follows must
be kept secret, or because there is nothing to keep secret?" There
are passages in these communications which recall his early love-
letters, but there is also the old man's resignation to the fact that
youth calls to youth.
The spring of 1882 found him incurably ill, and when, in those
gray days, he received a letter from the actress, it was to him "like
a petal fallen upon the surface of a muddy stream." He saw her
that season in Paris, but he did n't expect to see her again. He was,
he wrote to her, in the position of old Lemm in his novel, “A
House of Gentle folk," the worn and wasted music-master who in the
evening of his days cherished an unconfessed devotion toward
the exquisite young Liza. Mme. Savin's second marriage took place
that summer, and he sent her his blessing. At the same time he
insisted that she insure her freedom to pursue her stage career.
He wrote to her almost to the end, and even though he was a ruin
of a man, and reduced by his weakness to mere penciled scrawls, he
wrote with ardor. He recalled regretfully the fact that it had been
Polonsky and not himself who, on her visit to Spasskoye, when she
¦
PHOENIX LOVE
367
•
was bathing in the pond, had involuntarily played for a moment
the part of the elders spying upon Susannah. He placed the recol-
lection of those few days as Spasskoye upon the best shelf of the
archives of his memory. In his final letter, written February, 1883,
he chided her for forgetting him, and said he would cherish the
same feeling for her to the last.
Eleven years earlier this man had heard Gautier, who was to die
shortly, complain that he felt like one already dead. Turgenev had
commented that he himself was conscious of an imperceptible odor
of decay that clung to him as a faint odor of musk sometimes
haunts a room. He gave as the reason for this the fact that love
was no longer possible for him. In the course of his visit to
Yasnaya Polyana in May, 1880, he confessed to his hostess that he
had stopped writing because he could only work when he was in
love, and since those days were over, the days of his writing were
over, too. He made a similar confession to Tolstoy. As a matter
of fact, he went on writing to the very end, and likewise kept to the
end youth's prerogative of falling in love. The man was still
capable of feeling the fine frenzy, and the artist was curiously drawn
to it, as one leans closer to warm himself at a dying fire. Indeed,
"Clara Milich,” his last literary work, has for its single theme the
mightiness of love.
Clara, the heroine of this beautifully wrought narrative, is a
young actress, an intense and single-minded virgin, who falls pas-
sionately in love with a monkish and apparently frigid youth. He
repulses her advances, chiefly because he is afraid of life, and she
poisons herself on the stage, as a Russian actress had actually done,
for romantic reasons, in November, 1881. After her death he
becomes fascinated by her tragedy, in which he is so closely involved.
The fascination is morbid in more senses than one. The dead girl
literally takes possession of him, and in the end he consents to die,
that he may thereby unite himself with his disembodied mistress
eternally.
Turgenev's treatment of the supersensuous is, as usual, heavy-
handed. The transports which the young man enjoys with his
ghostly bride are no more ethereal than those experienced by any
human lover. The author is careful to suggest a realistic interpreta-
i
:
368
TURGENEV
tion of the preternatural elements of the tale, though his own bias
seems to be in the other direction. It is as if he were trying to tell
himself, without really believing it, that man does not altogether
perish; that, if love be sufficiently strong, it can give the familiar,
warm, humanizing colors even to the yonder side of the grave;
that the heat which belongs to youth can burn beyond bodily
existence.

UNIL
OF
ramh.1879.
Mash Vatrusthat Caberem
out guilt a
updannars
ns. Myrand
TURGENEV IN 1879
From a photograph given by him to Mme. Savin
MICH
Pava
Min.
F you juggle the figures in 1881,
you get 1818, the year of Tur-
genev's birth. Seeing an omen
in this, he believed the prediction
that death would come to him
on October 1, 1881. Its com-
ing was, however, delayed two
years. As a matter of fact, at
the end of 1881 he was feeling,
by his own account, "as well as
a fish," and even doing a lit-
tle work. In collaboration with
Pauline Viardot he translated
"The Song of Triumphant
Love" into French and wrote the sketch, "A Reckless Character."
He crossed the English Channel again, and found an abundance of
game, but all too often his hand and eye played him false. He was
guest of honor at a banquet arranged by Ralston, who, he observed
maliciously, hoped thereby to augment his reputation as an authority
on Russian affairs. His letters of these months are rather cheerful
and full of lively comment on sundry subjects, including Sarah
Bernhardt, who was then being acclaimed by the Petersburg public,
and whom he violently detested.
im
CHAPTER XL
CANDIES
"I AM TIRED”
1.

The new year began pleasantly, but by February he was entering
a cloud of troubles. For one thing, his darling Marianne had a
belated confinement which proved very difficult. Then old Viardot,
whom he considered as solid as a granite rock, and who, so he said,
was taken for his son when they went walking together-old Viar-
dot came down with a stroke. To make a bad matter worse, his
369
370
TURGENEV
own daughter ran away from her husband and threw herself upon
her father's mercies for protection. He had to conceal her where-
abouts from the rascally Bruère, and engage in long and costly legal
proceedings. His life, he sighed, was in the yellow leaf.
And yet his health was remarkably good, what with mitigation of
the gout, and only occasional irregularity of the heart-beat to remind
him that he was mortal. On March 6, he sat at dinner with Gon-
court, Zola, and Daudet-Flaubert being in his grave. In spite of
themselves, they kept returning to the topic of death all through the
evening. Turgenev surprised them by taking a new stand. Yes,
death was a familiar thought, he admitted, but when it came, he
thrust it aside, like this-and he waved his hand in a gesture of dis-
missal. When a Russian is caught in a blizzard he says: "Don't
think of the cold, or you 'll die." It seemed as if, drawing closer
to the end he had so long envisaged, he was learning to put the idea
away from him. In 1878 he had written a lyric, his last, in which
he commanded his "dear friend" to let the sunlight enter his room
and place musicians behind the door as he lay dying. Did he re-
member that his mother had mixed her last breaths with the strains
of a polonaise?
Before March had run its course he was attacked, without warn-
ing, by a mortal illness. The great Charcot diagnosed it as angina,
and he was put on his back for an indefinite period. His first act,
when he became aware of his condition, was to summon Annenkov
from Baden to Paris by telegram, for help in the final disposition
of his literary property. As once before, Annenkov, instead of be-
ing received by a moribund invalid, found Turgenev so keen and
lively that it seemed as though the calamity were a dream of the
doctors and the patient. But it was harsh reality. Turgenev was
conveyed to Les Frênes, when the Viardots moved there for the
summer, but any more extensive traveling was out of the question.
Illness had clamped the irons of expatriation on him permanently,
and all he could have of Spasskoye was a spray of lilac inclosed in
a letter. But his enforced immobility was an even harder burden
to bear. The months rolled by, and still he lay abed, unable to
move, or even stand-"a motionless Something," "the patriarch of
the molluscs," as he called himself. He was put on a milk diet,
"I AM TIRED”
371
which did him good, and incidentally made him, so he said, more
moral than he was by nature. By September he was well enough to
turn his invalid table into a desk, and complete the writing of "Be-
yond Death," the story which was subsequently published under the
title "Clara Milich."
He looked forward to another twenty years of this vegetative
existence, and worked out a philosophy of resignation, based upon
what he called "cheerful despair." He compared himself to a man
stone-deaf or completely blind, who, being without hope, is secure
from disappointment. He set forth these precepts for people in his
position: "One should meditate on the past, satisfy the demands
of the present, and never think of the future. To live in peace one
must never undertake anything, never propose anything, not trust
any one, and not fear anything." If he could not budge, at least
he could sleep at night, and after all, why should one move?-don't
oysters live? Perhaps to keep sane, he busied himself with small
things; for example, advising Polonsky, who was summering at
Spasskoye, to dry out the wine-cellar so that his Bordeaux should
not spoil. In the evening there was whist, and sometimes a little
music; that was something to anticipate during the long hours of
the day. And then there were Didie's two little girls and Marianne's
baby to relieve the gloom that now hung about Les Frênes, where he
lay ill and old Viardot was dying. He had the best of care, as he
assured his Russian friends, adding that his ladies would be in-
sulted by an offer of outside assistance.
Another year rolled around, and 1883 was ushered in. In Janu-
ary, the last January he was to see, he was operated upon for a cyst
which he nicknamed Feoktistov, after Russia's chief censor. The
operation took place without anæsthesia, and he told Daudet, who
came to visit him, that as he lay on the table he was thinking of
what was left of the Five, analyzing his pain and trying to find the
right word to describe to them his sensations as the steel entered
the flesh: it was "like a knife cutting a banana." He might lose the
use of his legs, and forgo all hope, but the literary instinct which
he had disavowed so often was inextinguishable. Two weeks after
the operation he had recovered from its effects, and said that he
felt so well that he could dance-if he could only walk.
!!
372
TURGENEV
Suddenly the disease took a puzzling turn for the worse. By
March he was in the grip of inhuman agonies, which were only
posthumously recognized as due to cancer of the spinal cord. What
with the tortures he had to endure, and the morphia he was given
to dull the pain, he became deranged. He screamed so that he
was heard in the street. He wanted to die. He wanted to kill.
He pleaded for poison. He complained that all these people around
him were "conspirators," plotting to put him out of the way. He
dictated irrational telegrams which betrayed his persecution mania.
"Why do you put chains on me?" he asked the Russian ambassador
as he stood at his bedside. One night he pulled his bell-rope so
hard that several members of the household ran in to him, and when
he saw Mme. Viardot he hurled the brass ball of the bell at her,
crying out, “Ah, there is Lady Macbeth!"
While he was tossing from one crest of suffering to another, old
Viardot breathed his last. Turgenev mourned him less than he
envied him. After the funeral the family took their remaining pa-
tient back to Les Frênes with them for the summer. It was now
May. For a while he had relief. He had survived the tempest,
but it was the mere shell of his former self that came to shore.
Seeing Annenkov after an interval of twelve months, he began to
cry, and Annenkov had to struggle to keep back his own tears. The
details of his delirium had bitten like acid into his memory, and
the inveterate litterateur promised himself to put his experiences into
writing, if he ever took up his pen again. "I was at the bottom of
the sea," he told Annenkov, "and I saw monsters and foul creatures
tangled together which nobody has as yet described because nobody
has survived the spectacle."
He hated himself for the way he tormented his ladies when he
was in pain. Mme. Viardot was so good, so patient. One day he
begged her to throw him out of the window.
"But my dear Turgenev," she remonstrated, as with a child,-she
sometimes thought of him as one,-"you are too large, and too
heavy, and besides, it would hurt you."
He could not help smiling at that. As soon as he drew a free
breath his sense of humor revived. He mimicked with all his old
vivacity the righteous indignation of the old-fashioned Russian
"I AM TIRED"
373
woman doctor of whom, among others, he had begged poison. Nor
did he lose interest in his literary protégés. Unable to hold a pen-
cil, he dictated a letter of recommendation to accompany the manu-
script of a young author, which he was sending to Russia.
The definitive edition of his works was his chief preoccupation
during these months. He astonished Stasulevich, who came to
consult with him on the matter in August, by the practicality of his
judgment and an unwonted firmness. Having taken care of his
literary remains, he arranged for the disposal of his poor bones.
He wished, he said, that he might lie at the feet of his master, Push-
kin, but that he did not deserve, just as none of his works had de-
served to be dedicated to the poet's memory. Let them lay him be-
side his old friend and teacher, Belinsky. Stasulevich tried to dis-
miss the matter with a joke. He pointed out that the Volkov ceme-
tery (the Russian counterpart of Père Lachaise), where Belinsky
was buried, was in very bad condition and might be condemned, in
which case Turgenev would have to resume his travels even in his
coffin. He had previously deposited securities with the Viardots,
the interest on which was to go to his daughter's maintenance. His
personal estate was, naturally, to go to Mme. Viardot, and he pro-
vided that his land should be sold, and the proceeds turned over to
her, since, being inherited property, it could not, according to Rus-
sian law, be willed to anyone outside of the family. But the testa-
tor's habitual procrastination made the document invalid in the end,
for his signature was never certified by a notary.
The novelist's condition was one of the topics of the day in Rus-
sia. His prestige there had been hurt by "The Song of Trium-
phant Love." Many people took it as evidence of his complete
alienation from Russian life, and some friendly souls even tried
to read into the piece an allegory which would give it a civic import.
But more recently he had rehabilitated himself with the short sketch
"The Threshold," which was circulated in manuscript copies be-
cause, since it canonized the revolutionists, it could not have passed
the censor. It has to do with a Russian girl who stands on a
threshold beyond which lies a darkness that promises, as she well
knows, only an anonymous martyrdom, lonely and perhaps vain,
and who, crossing it, is hailed by two voices, one crying, "Fool!"
374
TURGENEV
the other, "Saint!" It was generally believed that he wrote the
poem in memory of Sophie Perovsky, the heroic girl who paid with
her life for her part in the assassination of Alexander II. After
Turgenev's passing, the terrorist party was to issue a proclamation
claiming him as one of theirs, and on his bier was to lie a wreath
from those buried alive in the Russian prisons for their political
faith, with the inscription, "From the dead to the deathless."
There were conflicting bulletins in the Russian newspapers about
the progress of his illness and there was more than the usual amount
of gossip as to how he was neglected by his foreign friends. It is
true that he lacked the atmosphere of intense public sympathy which
would have braced and supported him had he been in his native
land. But, as a matter of fact, the "old carcass," as his trained
nurse casually referred to him in a letter, had the best of care.
In the summer he received a tender letter from Tolstoy:
The news of your illness . upset me terribly. When I became
convinced that it was serious, I realized how much I loved you. I felt
that if you should die before me, it would hurt me deeply. . Perhaps
all this is hypochondria and the lies of the doctors, and we shall yet see
each other again at Yasnaya and at Spasskoye, please God. When I
first came to believe, I hope without cause, that you were dangerously
ill, I had the idea of going to Paris to see you. Write or have some
one write me definitely and in detail about your condition. I will be
very grateful. . . . I embrace you, dear man and cherished old friend.
Turgenev managed to hold a pencil long enough to scrawl a reply:
•
Dear and beloved Lev Nikolayevich, I have not written to you for a
long time, as I have been ill, and am, to speak frankly, on my death-
bed. I can't recover, and there's no use thinking of it. I am writing
to you just to tell you how glad I am to have been your contemporary,
and to make a last request of you. My friend, return to your literary
work. That gift of yours comes from the same source as all else.
How happy I would be, if I thought that my request would influence
you.
I am a doomed man. The doctors do not even know what
to call my complaint. Nevralgie stomacale gouteuse. I can neither
walk, nor eat, nor sleep. It tires me even to mention all this. My
friend, great writer of the Russian land, heed my request. Let me
know whether you receive this sheet, and permit me once more closely,
·
"I AM TIRED"
375
closely to embrace you, your wife, and all yours. I can no more. I
am tired.
This, his last letter, was widely circulated, and the title "great writer
of the Russian land" was always to shadow Tolstoy, to his dis-
pleasure.
During these tortured final months, when the once ample con-
tours of Turgenev's personal life shrank and withered, his funda-
mental devotion to writing came to the surface like the bones in an
emaciated face. During a respite, which occurred in June, he dic-
tated a piece which recalled in detail one of the most vivid, if not
most glorious experiences of his youth: the fire on the boat that
was taking him from Russia to Germany, when he was a nineteen-
year-old lad. And then, a fortnight before the end, as Mme. Viar-
dot related at length in a letter, he called her to his bedside and with
tears in his eyes-he cried easily now-asked her to do him a favor
which no one else could render.
"I'd like to write a story which I have in my head, but that
would tire me too much; I could n't do it."
"Well" she understood him at once-"dictate it to me. I don't
write Russian fast, but still I think that with a little patience on
your part, I shall be able to manage.'
"No, no," he said. "If I dictate it in Russian, I shall stop at
every word, every phrase, to choose my expression, and I don't feel
capable of so exhausting an effort. No, what I would like to do is
to dictate the story to you in the various languages that we both
know, using the expressions that come to me most readily, and you
put it into French."
""
They set to work according to this plan, and after a few sessions,
she showed him her final version, with which he was delighted.
This French text was translated into Russian a few years later by
his friend Grigorovich. It is the story of the degenerate scion of a
noble Russian family gone to seed, who becomes a horse-thief. On
one occasion the wretch is nearly torn to pieces by incensed peasants,
a lynching, the author observes, which would not have had "the
excuse of the sentiment of justice which is, in some measure, in
the heart of every American." The tale concludes with the nar-
rator coming upon the mutilated corpse of the well-born rogue, and
376
TURGENEV
|
--
the piece is with double fitness entitled, "An End." In thus ex-
emplifying the decline of the class to which he himself belonged,
Turgenev seemed to be saying to the new social order, Morituri te
salutamus. It is appropriate, too, that his last story should sug-
gest, as far as such an unauthentic product could, his first manner,
that of "A Sportsman's Sketches." It was as though his art had
described a full circle, and returned again to its origins.
And yet even now his thoughts were not wholly retrospective. He
kept returning to his plan for another big novel. He was so well
pleased with the collaboration on the short story that he suggested
to Mme. Viardot that they begin preparatory work on the large
piece. "But alas!" Mme. Viardot concludes, "his condition grew
worse, and he could do no more than dictate the names of the
characters."
His sufferings could not alter the gusto for writing which he
had so often tried to deny. They had, further, a certain compensa-
tory feature: their cumulative effect was to destroy in him his an-
cient fear of death. As early as February, hearing that the author
of Meistersinger had died, he was writing: "That Wagner
should make his escape upon the first attack of an incurable illness,
is another sign of his unfailing luck. I know people who envy
him." He wrote to Polonsky in May, "My thirst for death is
growing, and all that's left me is to beg that you on your part should
desire the granting of your unhappy friend's wish." He told the
painter Vereshchagin that he called upon death a hundred times a
day, and was not afraid to face it. He begged Maupassant, who
came to see him five days before the end, to make himself his friend
by giving him a revolver; none of the family would consent to let
him have one. Physically, the giant had shriveled to a thin waxen
image of his old self. His eyes were sunken, his limbs were sticks.
"How can one live," he asked, "with legs like a grasshopper's?"
The tenement was no longer habitable, and he was ready to abandon
his lease.
Often, just before waking consciousness is blotted out, the
drowsy mind leans for a moment upon a single image, which is like
the first stile on the borders of sleep. And it may well be that be-
fore all consciousness ceases, the mind turns its back on nothingness
"I AM TIRED"
377
and rests briefly upon such a soothing image. If this was Tur-
genev's experience, what detained his fading awareness? Was it
some scene of these latter days, or some quiet memory floating out
of the past? his mother's bonneted head nodding over her game of
patience; a gray and green-gold vista of silken grass and lindens;
Stankevich's gnarled fingers beside Chouchou's at the piano; a little
red Moscow church with green cupolas; the corner house on the
Nevsky where he had first met Pauline Viardot; Didie in the bow-
window at her easel; a sunburnt old peasant woman holding a pot
of unskimmed milk, beaded with dew; Tolstoy astride a log, bobbing
gravely up and down; the broken rusty prow of the old galley in the
museum at Ventnor, with the inscription Giovane Speranza? He
had asked a similar question in one of his "Poems in Prose":
"What shall I be thinking of when I come to die?" Would it be of
how he had let the years go by, taking the least of their gifts, and
seeing their scorn too late? Would it be of the rare good hours,
the few loved faces? Would old mistakes and misdeeds foreclose
upon his last moments? Or would he be wondering what, if any-
thing, awaits the dead? No, he concluded, rather would his mind
take up some trivial thing, as if trying to look away from the
advancing dark.
On the last day of August, a Friday, Louise came into his sick-
room, and he seemed to recognize her, but his mind was badly
befogged.
"Look, Louise!" he exclaimed; "look, how strange: my leg is
suspended over there in the corner. The room is full of coffins.
But,” he added, with a sly glance, "they have given me three days to
live."
Tag
It fell out that he spoke the truth. Toward the end he was un-
conscious most of the time. On Sunday he came to himself, and
began to talk. But it was only a compatriot who chanced to be in
the room, and, in some measure, Pauline Viardot, who understood
him, for the words he spoke were neither in the language of his
"second Fatherland" nor in that of his adopted family, but in the
language of his wet-nurse and the serf who had first chanted verse
to him in the Spasskoye park. At one point he turned to Didie's
husband and assured him repeatedly that he loved him.
378
TURGENEV
"You must believe me," he said. "Kiss me in token of it. I
believe you; you have such a fine Russian-yes-Russian face."
To Marianne, who knelt beside his bed, he gave instructions as
to how she should bring up her boy. Neither Chamerot nor
Marianne understood a syllable of what he was saying. He reached
out, as though in an effort to embrace them all, his eyes moving from
face to face:
"Come nearer, nearer. Let me feel you close to me. The mo-
ment has come to take leave, like the Russian czars.”
For a second he seemed to recognize Mme. Viardot, and became
alert: "There's the queen of queens," he said. "How much good
she has done!"
The words of the plain folk began to come to his lips. It was
as though he imagined himself a dying peasant, bidding his house-
hold farewell. Then his speech became more and more broken and
finally ceased. Early Monday afternoon he began to breathe
heavily. His hands were warm to the touch. He lay quiet. It
was two o'clock. He stretched out his arms for the last time.
"The first day," Mme. Viardot wrote in a letter to Pietsch the
same week, "the frown left by his sufferings, together with his im-
mobility, gave him a severe and energetic look. The second day
he resumed his kind and gentle appearance; at moments one would
have said he was going to smile."
"I AM TIRED"
379
P
Turgenev is not known to have written any inscription for his
monument. Had
Had he chosen to do so, it is not impossible that he
might have allowed words like these to be graven as his memorial:
EPITAPH
HERE INDIFFERENT EARTH COVERS ONE WHO LOVED THE LIGHT
ABOVE THE EARTH, AS IT SHINES UPON ALL THAT IS VOWED TO
DARKNESS, BUT CHIEFLY AS IT ILLUMINES THE HUMAN FACE; ONE
WHO ABHORRED ALIKE BRUTE NATURE AND BRUTE MAN; ONE WHO
LAUGHED AT THE FOOL, SCORNED THE COWARD, AND DECRIED THE
SLAVE HOUSED IN HIS OWN FLESH; ONE WHO WORSHIPED THE
SELFLESS MAN, EXALTED THE TEMPERATE, AND TRUSTED THE EN-
LIGHTENED; ONE WHO, BEING A SKEPTIC, COULD NOT ACT, YET, BE-
ING A CITIZEN AND A POET, MUST SPEAK; ONE WHO, ERRING MUCH,
KNEW NO FULFILMENT, SAVE IN HIS ART, BUT FELT NO ENVY, SAVE
OF THE YOUNG; A MAN WITHOUT ALLEGIANCE, EXCEPT TO REASON,
WITHOUT FAITH, EXCEPT IN BEAUTY AND VIRTUE, WITHOUT A FIRM
CONSCIENCE, SAVE WITH RESPECT TO THE CRAFT HE PRACTISED FOR
FORTY YEARS; ONE WHO SOUGHT, SO FAR AS HIS AGE AND HIS PEO-
PLE COULD REVEAL IT, TO KNOW AND UTTER THE TRUTH WHICH
SETS MEN FREE.
THE END
H
INDEX
NOTE: The titles of Turgenev's works are in italics.
Bolsheviks, 185, 187
Bonaparte, Joseph, 83
Börne, Karl Ludwig, 50
Botkin, Vasily, 59, 117, 119, 133, 148-9,.
151-3, 158-9, 181, 188, 196, 203, 205,
216
Abd-ul-Aziz, 291
About, Edmond, 127
Afanasy, 258
Aksakov, Constantine, 131-2
Aksakov, Ivan, 131, 218
Aksakov, Sergey, 131, 147
Aksakov, Vera, 131-2
Alexander II, 130, 174, 343, 346, 374
Alexander III, 140, 339
Anna, Empress of Russia, 7
"Anna Karenina," 349
Anstett, Frau, 237, 254
Annenkov, Pavel, 71, 91-2, 117, 128, 130,
137, 142, 149-50, 157, 161-3, 167, 182,
191, 196, 199, 202-3 215-16, 218, 220,
227, 231, 236-7, 242, 244, 252, 257, 263,
267, 276, 278, 294-5, 297, 300, 331, 372
Antokolsky, Mark 292, 339, 350
Aristophanes, 318
Arnim, Bettina von, 43-4, 90, 233
Asya, 36, 124, 150-1, 182
Auerbach, Berthold, 319
Augusta, Queen of Prussia, 231, 233
Bacon, 35
Baden, 229-30
Bakunin, Alexey, 61, 65
Bakunin, Lubov, 58
Bakunin, Michel (Mikhail), 48-50, 52,
54-5, 57-61, 67, 70, 72, 92, 96, 134, 148,
210-11, 214-18, 275, 299
Bakunin, Nicholas (Nikolay), 58, 61
Bakunin, Paul (Pavel), 67
Bakunin, Tatyana, 57, 59-62, 66-7, 312
Bakunin, Varvara (Vareñka), 52, 57, 59
Balzac, 103, 147, 334
Barrie, Sir James, 186
Bartenev, Piotr, 267-8
Bazaine, Marshal, 277
Beethoven, 122, 141-2
Beets, Dr., 280
Belinsky, Vissarion, 59, 74-80, 88, 90-1,
96, 104, 117, 126-7, 132, 166, 183-4, 187,
200, 263 265, 300, 305, 312-13, 321, 373
Benzon, Mr., 281
Benzon, Mrs., 281
Béranger, 107
Berlin, 41, 90
Berlioz, 145
Bernard, Charles de, 50
Bernhardt, Sarah, 369
Besant, Walter, 327
Bibi (Mme. Zhitov), 37-8, 73, 109
Bismarck, 233, 276
Böckh, Philipp August, 35
Boehme, Jacob, 35, 49
Bougival, 289-90
Boyesen, Hjalmar, H., 330
Brahms, 232
Brigadier, The 252
Brown, Madox, 327
Browning, Robert, 281
Bruère, Gaston, 255, 292, 370
Bruère, Mme. Pauline
(Turgenev's
daughter), 56-7, 111-12, 140, 163, 205-
6, 255, 292, 373
Bryce, James, 329
Buechner, Friedrich Karl, 186
Bulwer-Lytton, 19
Burns, 29, 224
Byron, 19, 28, 311
Calderon, 101
Carlyle, 69, 148, 326, 330
Catherine II, 14
Catullus, 205
Cellini, Benvenuto, 151
Chaikovsky, Piotr, 142
Chaikovsky, Nikolay Vasilevich, 324
Chalier, Joseph, 22
Chamerot, Georges, 287, 378
Chamerot Mme., see Claudie
Charcot, Dr. Jean-Martin, 370
Charpentier, 316
Chateaubriand, 312
Chekhov, 103, 105, 194
Chénier, André, 181
Chernyshevsky, Nikolay, 180-2, 184-6,
212
Chopin, 85
Chouchou (Mlle. Khovrin), 45, 377
Cicero, 127
Clara Milich, 337, 367, 370
Claudie (Mme. Chamerot, née Viardot),
84, 226-8, 280, 288, 290, 359, 371, 377
Coleridge, 1
"Confessions de Jean Jacques Rousseau,
Les" 28
Cooper, Fenimore, 83
Corot, 285
Courtavenel, 91, 97
Cratinus, 318
Crimean War, 134-5
Croquet at Windsor, 328
Daudet, Alphonse, 285, 312-13, 315-18,
320-2, 359, 370-1
381
382
INDEX
Daudet, Mme. Julia, 314
Daumier, 243
Decembrists, 41
De Quincey, 147
Descartes, 63, 225
Dickens, 19, 143, 199, 230, 326, 330
Diderot, 336
Didie, see Claudie
"Dinners of the Five," 317-19
Disraeli, 148
204
Dog, The 252
Dolgoruky, Prince, 217
Don Manoel, see Garcia, Manoel
Dostoyevsky, 80, 91, 105, 138, 196, 216,
262-73, 341, 346, 357
Dostoyevsky, Mme. Anna (Anya), 265-6
Dream, A, 241
Drouet, Mme., 316
Druzhinin, Alexander, 133, 222, 225
Dubbelt, Gen., 121
Dumas, père, 70
Duvernoy, Victor, 346
Duvernoy, Mme., see Marianne
Dmitriev, Ivan, 14
Dobrolubov, Nikolay, 179-82, 184, 186-7, Gogol, 29, 91, 105-6, 118-19, 128, 132,
148, 264, 277
"Going to the People,” 298-9, 338, 345
Goncourt, Edmond, 26-7, 315-20, 322, 370
Goncharov, Ivan, 133, 155, 158, 166-9,
218, 265
Gosse, Edmund, 335
Gounod, 123, 141
Edmond, Charles, 348
Eliot, George, 326
Elizabeth of Bohemia, Princess, 225
Elizabeth, Empress of Russia, 7
Emancipation of the serfs, 172-4, 198,
258
Emerson, 115, 332
End, An, 376
End of Chertopkhanov, The, 297
Enough, 240, 245
Erasmus, 205
Euripides, 281
Fathers and Children, 123, 168, 173, 175,
190-8, 207, 219, 239-40, 243-4, 246, 264
Faust, 35, 142-
"Femme de Quarante Ans, La," 50
Feoktista, 122
Feoktistov, Yevgeny, 371
Fet, see Foeth
Feuerbach, 64, 80, 90, 101
Fichte, 48, 64
First Love, 12, 26, 252
Flaubert, 13, 225, 276, 279, 288, 297-8,
300, 306-18, 320, 323, 329, 334-5, 340,
343, 370
Foeth (Shenshin), Afanasy, 121, 133,
140, 154, 172, 178, 181, 188, 193, 200-1,
205-7, 226, 260, 278, 280, 282, 288,
327, 351
Gambetta, 346
Garcia, Mme. Joaquina, 92, 141
Garcia, Manoel, 82-3, 141, 144
Garibaldi, 161, 210
Garshin, Vsevolod, 350
Fouquier-Tinville, Antoine-Quentin, 22
Franco-Prussian war, 274, 276-8
Freeholder Ovsyanikov, 4
Gautier, Théophile, 312, 317, 367
Gibbon, 190, 279
Girardin, Emile de, 317
Gluck, 142, 162, 230, 288, 311
Goethe, 41, 43, 48, 100, 274, 306, 314,
316-17

Granovsky, Timofey, 117
Grigorovich, Dmitry, 133, 375
Hamlet and Don Quixote, 165-6, 182
Hamlet of the Shchigry District, The,
105
Harte, Bret, 331
Hawthorne, 182, 330
Hegel, 35, 42-3, 45, 48, 75, 151, 186, 308
Heine, 85-6, 93, 102, 231
Héritte-Viardot, Mme., see Louise
Hérodias (Turgenev's translation), 320
Herzen, Alexander, 41-2, 67, 75, 92, 96,
99-100, 113, 124, 134, 148, 159, 174,
183, 200, 209-18, 244, 273-6, 310, 324,
356
Herzen, Mme. Natalia, 96-7
Heyse, Paul, 278
Higginson, Thomas Wentworth, 332
Hilferding, Alexander, 131
Hobbes, 35
Holt, Henry, 332-3
Homer, 34, 64, 84, 160
Homyakov, Alexey, 131
House of Gentlefolk, A, 30, 120, 155-7,
166, 168, 366
Howells, William Dean, 331
Hugo, 147, 242, 282, 311, 313
Humboldt, Friedrich von, 43
Huysmans, Joris Karl, 322
Ibsen, 330
“Idealists of the thirties,” 41-3, 45-6
Ivan, see Turgenev, Ivan S.
Ivanov, Alexander, 152, 155
James, Henry, 149, 191-2, 242, 279, 315,
318, 333-5, 340
Jean, see Turgenev, Ivan S.
Jowett, B., 282
។
383
INDEX
Kant, 48, 64, 351
Karr, Alphonse, 51
Katkov, Mikhail, 191-2, 219, 274
Keats, 19
Ketcher, Nikolay, 117
Kheraskhov, Mikhail, 16
King Lear of the Steppes, A, 252
Kiszinski, 256, 291
Kluchevsky, Vasily, 76
Koltzov, Alexey, 29, 180
Kravchinsky, Sergey, 299
Kropotkin, 299, 339
Krylov, Ivan, 14, 29
Kuo Hsi, 104
Lermontov, 52, 64
Lieutenant Yergunov, 252
Liszt, 44, 71, 83, 234
Living Relics, 297, 332
Livy, 21, 147
Ladyzhensky, Katherine, 136
Lamartine, 94, 147, 310
Lambert, Countess, 139, 149, 158, 160-1,
163, 170-3, 191-2, 220-1, 239, 241, 355
Lavater, Johann Kaspar, 190
Lavrov, Piotr, 299, 339
Lazarus, Emma, 332
Leconte de Lisle, 317
Légende de St. Julien l'Hospitalier, La
(Turgenev's translation), 320
Leibnitz, 63
Leighton, Sir Frederick, 329
Lenin, 345
Longfellow, 332
Longinov, Mikhail, 80
Lopatin, Hermann, 299
Louise (Mme. Héritte née Viardot),
84, 88, 97, 139, 141, 226, 290, 377
Lowell, James Russell, 331
Luther, 205
Lutovinov, Ivan, 4
Lutovinov, Ivan Ivanovich, 5-6
Lutovinov, Piotr Ivanovich, 4-5
Macaulay, 148
Maikov, Apollon, 196, 266-7
Malibran, la (née Garcia), 82, 84, 141
Marianne (Mme. Duvernoy), 226-7, 280,
288, 290, 302, 346, 369, 371, 378
Markovich, Marya (Marko-Vovchok,
pseud.), 177
Marx, Karl, 42, 186, 299
Maupassant, 319-20, 350, 376
Mendelsohn-Bartholdy, Felix, 122
Mérimée, Prosper, 147, 305
Meyerbeer, 85
Michel, see Bakunin, Michel
Michelet, 143
Molière, 69, 141
Moltke, von, Field-Marshal, 276
Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley, 92
Montaigne, 127
Month in the Country, A, 103, 363
Moomoo, 69, 120
Moore, George, 11, 189, 321
Moscow, 18, 77
Mozart, 122, 142
Müller, Max, 328
Musset, Alfred de, 84
Napoleon I, 6, 83, 100
Napoleon III, 144, 146, 162, 232-3, 277,
285
Nekrasov, Nikolay, 104, 118, 139, 149,
154-5, 179, 182-3, 198, 200, 218
New York, 82-3, 330
Nibby, Antonio, 44
Nicholas (brother), see
Turgenev,
Nikolay S.
Nicholas I, 72, 77, 118, 277
Nihilism, 185-8, 193, 195, 212, 246, 270
Offenbach, 232
Ogarev, Nikolay, 183, 209-11, 215-16
Ogarev, Mme. Natalia (née Tuchkov),
97, 209
Old Portraits, 337
On the Eve, 153, 159, 161-8, 179, 182-3
Orlov, Count, 121, 129
Orlov, Prince, 154
Ostrovsky, Alexander, 133
Ovid, 287
Panayev, Ivan, 179
Panayev, Mme. Yevdokiya, (later, Mme.
Golovachev), 70, 74, 80, 86-8, 119, 179-
81, 183, 200
Pascal, 101
Paskevich, Field-Marshal, 100
Pasta, 84
Paul I, 86
Payne, James 327
Parasha, 66, 72, 74, 259, 263
Parasite, The, 103
Pelagea, see Bruère, Mme. Pauline
Pellico, Silvio, 216
Perovsky, Sophie, 374
Peter the Great, 7, 16, 22, 76
Phantoms, 4, 252, 263
Pietsch, Ludwig, 196, 232, 234-5, 277,
284, 287, 294, 319, 378
Pisarev, Dmitry, 186-8, 245-7
Pisemsky, Alexey, 345, 355
Plato, 71
Pobedonostzev, 346
Poems in Prose (Senilia), 183, 288,
337-8, 363, 365, 377
Polonsky, Yakov, 347, 366, 371, 376
1

384
INDEX

Populists, 299, 301, 338-9, 344
Porfiry, 33, 35, 258
Prescott, William Hickling, 199
Pseudo-Demetrius, 7
Punin and Baburin, 17, 22, 297
Pushkin, 16, 20, 29, 72, 118, 128, 158,
180, 188, 214, 343, 345-6, 350, 352, 373
Rachel, 84, 95, 264
Racine, 141
Ralston, W. R. S., 323, 327, 332-3, 369
Razin, Stenka, 7
Ranke, Leopold von, 35
Raphael, 152
Rap-rap-rap, 252
Reckless Character, A, 337, 369
Rembrandt, 278
Reminiscences (of Life and Letters),
33, 226, 259
Renan, 289
Rietz, Julius, 143-4, 160
Rimsky-Korsakov, 142
Ritter, Karl, 35
Robespierre, 23, 119, 181
Rome, 44, 149, 151
Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 282, 327
"Rossiade," 16
Rossini, 83
Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 28, 199, 204
Rousseau, Théodore, 285, 335
Rubinstein, Anton, 282
Rudin, 42-3, 53, 79, 95, 133-4, 180, 182,
184
Ruskin, 329
Sainte-Beuve, 305
Saint-Saëns, 84, 140, 289
Sallust, 147
Saltykov, Mikhail, 300
Sand, George, 66, 84-5, 147, 200, 284,
288, 297, 305-8, 311-12, 317
Sand, Maurice, 306
Santayana, George, 261
Savelich, 29
Savin, Mme. Maria, 363-7
Scheffer, Ary, 87, 144-5
Schelling, Friedrich, 21, 35, 72, 90
Schiller, 19-20, 316
Schopenhauer, 212
Schroeder-Devrient, 84
Schubert, 151, 231, 281
Schumann, Clara, 230, 232, 277
Schumann, Robert, 142, 281
Scott, Walter, 19, 280
Scribe, Augustin-Eugène, 103
Seidelmann, 35
Shakspere, 19, 101, 117, 165, 200, 202,
288, 321, 326
Shelley, 19, 118
Sigmund, Dr., 153
Slavophilism, 75-8, 100, 131, 211-12, 244-
5, 266, 274
Smoke, 168, 176, 242, 244-6, 251, 253,
259, 260, 265-7, 273, 295
Sologub, Vladimir, Count, 70, 132, 363
Song of Triumphant Love, A, 241, 365,
369, 373
Spasskoye, 5, 9-11, 14-15, 55, 258-9, 310,
327, 365
Spengler, Oswald, 211
Spinoza, 63

Sportsman's Sketches, A, 102, 104, 107,
126-7, 136, 147, 150, 167, 183, 199, 240,
264, 297, 376
Spring Freshets, 252, 294-6
Spottiswood, William, 327
Stankevich, Nikolay, 43-9, 52, 58, 64,
75, 79, 151, 184, 276, 313, 377
Stasulevich, Mikhail, 300-1, 303, 328,
373
Steno, 27-8
Stepan, 129
Stevenson, Robert Louis, 335
Stich, Clara, 35
Stirner, Max, 52, 90
Storm, Theodor, 278
Story of Father Alexis, The, 336-7
Strange Story, A, 252-3
Strauss, David, 152
Suetonius, 147
Suvorov, Alexander, Prince, 217
Swinburne, 282, 314
"Symbols and Emblems," 16
Tacitus, 147
Taine, 320-2
Temptation of St. Anthony, The, 66, 312
Thackeray, 148, 204, 277, 332
Teniers, 292
Tennyson, 327
Terrorists, 338-9, 342, 374
Theognis, 249
Thiers, 285
Three Portraits, 4
Tolstoy, Alexey, Count, 129
Tolstoy, Leo (Lev Nikolayevich), 133,
137-8, 142, 148, 181, 198-207, 218, 260-1,
309, 312, 343, 348-57, 367, 374-5, 377
Tolstoy, Sophie, Countess, 349, 367
Tolstoy, Sergey Lvovich, Count 349
Traupmann's Execution, 271
Trepov, Gen., 338
Trip to Polesye, A, 149-50
Trollope, 327
Trotzky, 187
Tryst, The, 105
*
Tuchkov, Mlle. see Ogarev, Mme.
Turga, mirza, 7
INDEX
385
Turgenev, Ivan Sergeyevich,
adolescence, 20, 27-8
"ambassador of the Russian in-
telligentsia," 285-7, 319, 348
America and Americans, 22, 101,
329-33
ancestors, 4-7
appearance,
349-50, 359
40, 118, 133, 276, 344,
art collection, 292
Baden, 220-1, 229-36, 328
birth, 3
Bougival, 290
childhood, 9-11, 13-17
civil service, 66, 68
classics, interest in, 35, 64, 147, 287,
318
craftsmanship, 72, 78, 94, 102-3,
105-6, 124-5, 127-9, 142, 162,
166-7, 187-94, 242-3, 247, 252, 259-
61, 287-8, 296, 298-300, 312, 321,
331, 333-5, 342, 346, 352, 357,
371-2, 375-6
credo, 356
daughter, illegitimate, see Brùere,
Mme. Pauline
death, 378
degree conferred by Oxford Uni-
versity, 327-9
despondency, 127, 133, 146, 151, 153,
162, 177-8, 239-40, 257, 293, 296,
311, 334, 353, 355-6
early literary efforts, 27-9, 72-3
England and the English, 148, 279-
80, 326-7
epitaph, imaginary, 379
examinations for degree, 63-4
expatriation, 219-20, 239, 241-2, 247,
251-3, 282, 287, 298, 300, 304, 335,
343, 347, 352, 373
father, see Turgenev, Sergey Nik-
olayevich
financial affairs, 36, 38-9, 78, 80,
92-3, 97, 108-9, 117, 254-6, 291-2,
340
France and the French, 147, 156,
162, 171-2, 285, 321, 323-5, 350
Franco-Prussian War, 276-8, 308-9
Germany and the Germans, 156
Hamletic temper, 14-15, 27, 34,
71-2, 78, 95, 100-1, 114, 129, 139,
165, 188, 193, 197, 204, 218, 269,
306, 308, 310, 313, 319, 321, 323,
350, 360
health, 49-50, 100, 134-5, 146, 149,
151, 153, 159, 235-7, 284, 290,
310, 337, 360
hunting and hounds, 37, 68, 123,
159, 235, 281, 290-1, 344-5
imprisonment, and confinement at
Spasskoye, 119-24, 129
last illness, 370-2, 374-8
last projected novel, 323-4, 339-40,
376
last will, 373
lays down his pen, 133, 148, 239-40,
270, 297, 304, 336
librettist, 231-2
"literary agent," 319-20, 348, 373
literary judgments, 14, 119, 202,
264-5, 282, 312-13, 315, 317, 320-1,
330-1, 334-5, 348-9
love affairs, 12, 26-7, 49-52, 56-7,
122, 158, 177-8, 295, 352-3; see
also Bakunin, Tatyana; Ladyz-
hensky, Katherine; Turgenev,
Olga Alexandrovna; Vrevsky,
Julia; Savin, Mme.
mother, see Turgenev, Varvara
Petrovna
music, love of, 35, 121-2, 141-2, 230
Nature, feeling for 102, 104, 106,
123, 261, 312
Nihilism, see Nihilism
Paris, 285-9, 305-7, 314-6, 329, 358-9
plagiarism, accusation of, 167-9
plays, 103
Polish question, 217-18
political trial of, 215-17
Pushkin celebration, participation in,
343, 345-6
religion, 64-5, 101-2, 131-2 162-3,
252-3, 268-9, 353, 355-6, 368
revolutionists, 301, 338-9, 344 373-4
Revolution of 1848, 95-6, 99
Russian language, feeling for, 172,
231-2, 320, 338
schooling, 18-20
serfdom and emancipation, 13, 15,
69, 78, 80-1, 90, 105, 126-7, 173-6,
209
serfs, treatment of, 113-14, 130,
174-6
Slavophilism, see Slavophilism
socio-political views, 80, 91, 99-100,
127, 210, 213-14, 243-4, 246, 274-5,
301-3, 309, 324, 328, 330, 338-9,
342-7
student years in Russia, 21-4, 29,
abroad, 35-7, 41-9
theatre, interest in the, 31, 35-6, 77,
133, 141, 234
triumph of 1879, 341-3
verse, 72, 74, 328, 370
Viardot, Pauline, relations with, 86-
94, 96-8, 110-12, 123-4, 136, 138-45,
154, 159-60, 170-1, 220-9, 231-2,
247, 279-80, 283-5, 287-8, 309, 359-
60, 362, 365-6, 371, 373
386
INDEX
Walter Scott centennial, participa-
tion in, 280
Westernism, see Westernism
western trip of 1847-50, 90-2, 95-7,
99, 102-3
works, see individual titles
youthful traits, 39-40, 44-5, 47, 71-2,
78
Turgenev, Nikolay Ivanovich, 174
Turgenev, Nikolay Nikolayevich (Uncle
Nicholas), 25, 37-8, 73, 173, 255, 257,
291
Turgenev, Nikolay Sergeyevich (broth-
er Nicholas), 9, 11, 19, 22, 25, 56,
63, 70, 108-9, 139, 292, 340
Turgenev, Olga Alexandrovna, 137
Turgenev, Pauline, see Bruère, Mme.
Pauline
Turgenev, Sergey Nikolayevich (Ivan's
father), 6-9, 12, 16, 25-6, 50
Turgenev, Sergey Sergeyevich (Ivan's
brother), 9
Turgenev, Varvara Petrovna, nee Lu-
tovinov (Ivan's mother), 4-6, 8, 11-15,
25, 29-33, 35-40, 50-1, 54-8, 66, 68-70,
72-3, 108, 111, 120, 129, 175, 199, 256,
274, 377
Tyutchev, 121
Tyutchev, Mme., 121
Tyutchev, Fiodor, 135
•
University of Berlin, 22, 34-5
University of Moscow, 20-2, 41
University of St. Petersburg, 22-4, 33
Verdi, 288
Viardot, Louis, 84-5, 87-9, 97-8, 110,
140, 143, 148, 216, 220, 222, 225-6,
230, 232, 235, 257, 277, 280, 284, 287,
289, 356, 369, 371-2
Viardot, Paul, 149, 226, 233, 280, 287-9
Viardot, Pauline Garcia
appearance, 85, 87, 223, 289
career, 84-5, 230-4, 279
childhood, 82-4
Van Gogh, 247
Vanichka, see Turgenev, Ivan Sergeye-
vich
genius, 84-6, 230-1, 288-9
influence on Turgenev's work, 253-4
maried life, 84-5, 143, 230
parents, see Garcia, Manoel and
Garcia, Mme.
Vareñka, see Bakunin, Varvara
Varnhagen von Ense, 43
Varvara Petrovna, see Turgenev, Var-
vara Petrovna
Vereshchagin, 376
personal characteristics, 84, 86,
143-5
Wagner, 141, 376
"War and Peace," 309, 349
Watch, The, 297
Uncle Nicholas, see Turgenev, Nikolay Weber, Carl Maria von, 122
Nikolayevich
Weimar, 236-7
relations with Turgenev, see Tur-
genev, Ivan S., Viardot, Pauline,
relations with
Victoria, Queen, 328
Victoria, Crown-Princess of Prussia,
234
Werder, Karl, 43, 46, 52, 90
Unhappy Girl, An, 252
United States, 21-2, 75, 101, 212, 275, Westernism, 75-8, 244, 268, 270
324, 329-33
Weydenhammer, 18-19
Whitman, Walt, 331
Virgil, 34, 287
Virgin Soil, 291, 334, 336-7, 339-40
Voltaire, 8, 92, 131, 306
Vrevsky, Baroness Julia, 360-3
Yakov Pasynkov, 19
Yelena Pavlovna, Grand-Duchess, 152,
222, 278,
Zagoskin, Mikhail, 19-20
Zasulich, Vera, 338
Zhukovsky, Vasily, 29-30, 345
Zola, Emile, 311, 315, 317, 319-21, 359,
370
Zumpt, Karl, 35
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