In 1881, while visiting Tolstoy at Yasnaya Polyana, Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev (1818-83) joined in the birthday merrymaking, much to the chagrin of his host who by this time was deep into his life of austerity. Firstly Turgenev confessed, in the spirit of the party game he was trying to encourage, ‘The most shining moment of my life naturally has to do with love. It is the one in which your eyes meet those of the woman you love and you guess that she loves you, too. That happened to me once . . . perhaps twice.’ Then, this big, well-dressed silver-haired sixty-three year old pranced for the company, demonstrating ‘the Paris cancan’. It brought the house down, but earned him only the following diary entry from his host ‘August 22nd. Turgenev – cancan. Pity.’
There are some novelists that loom so large in biographical terms, like Tolstoy himself, or Dickens, that they stand alongside their own fictions as creations of the writers and readers who are obsessed with them. Then there are others – a little less loud – who, with some prying on the reader’s part, reveal their lives to be symbiotic with the preoccupations of their fiction. Of these, Turgenev is my favourite. What attracts me to this cosmopolitan, nineteenth century Russian is ultimately his temperament, both as an author and as a man, that and the fact he writes so wonderfully.
Leaving behind the irascible Tolstoy, the openness in pursuit of social pleasure seem to have been among the qualities that made Turgenev an attractive figure, ‘such good company’ as Sofia Tolstoy recorded of the same evening in a later recollection. Meeting him in 1863, the novelist brothers Goncourt found him ‘a delightful colossus, a gentle, white-haired giant, who looks like a druid or the kindly old monk in Romeo and Juliet. He is handsome, but in an awe-inspiring, impressive way.’ Was there an element of calculation in Turgenev? As he observed in his novel, Home of the Gentry, (1859) ‘so long as a man is good-natured, no one can resist him.’
Yet monk and cancaneer, art and artlessness, are apt metaphors to capture the contradictions of the man and of the writer who has traditionally been a little obscured by those other great Russians, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, in what Henry James called ‘the great glazed tank of art’. After all, his novels lack the grand canvas sweep of Tolstoy, or the churned psychological depths of Dostoevsky. They tend more toward the novella, often sharing Jane Austen’s interest in the displacement caused by the introduction of a character into the ostensible calm of an estate. As a writer, Turgenev’s sense of the turbulence of his period is prescient, his creation of character deft, his observational powers acute and his descriptive skills poetical. In the novels and stories, he is always the educated observer. His realism is gentle and biased toward belief in human worth.
Two fascinating themes run through Turgenev’s work, biographical strands of his life. One is rooted in his intellectual preoccupations, the other in his personal relationships. The first is the study of the dichotomy between thought and action in the Russian character, which reflected his complicated nationalism. The second is his preoccupation with the power of love to enthral.
Turgenev was a conservative liberal with a Western outlook. Like Tchaikovsky, he was controversial in the Russia of his day, but an early favourite in the West, despite the fact his work was generally badly translated. He was particularly at home in France, where his literary friendships included Flaubert, George Sand and Zola. The urgency of Turgenev’s work is lost on us today, indeed he seems at first glance quite conventionally Victorian – he described himself in a late letter as ‘an old-style liberal in the English . . . sense’ – but in Russia his depiction of peasants and landowners was something new and risky. The point was made by John Reed, the author of Ten Days That Shook the World and subject of the 1981 movie, Reds:
The tremendous interest aroused by Turgenev’s books in Russia was partly due to the fact that they were all concerned with politics – that, beside their delicate and restrained literary art, through them all ran a strain of propaganda – that they dealt with the actual burning questions of the times.
The philosopher Isaiah Berlin, who translated two of Turgenev’s works, admitted similarly that the author’s popularity was as much a matter of his ‘social content’ as artistic quality.
In Turgenev’s day, Russia was an autocratic state which had made tentative steps towards European Enlightenment and retreated. It was strongly influenced by its Slavic history, religious and deeply conservative. Unlike the West it was a late industrial power. The modernising efforts of Peter the Great (1672-1725), furthered by those of Catherine II (1762-1796), had been welcomed but, in exempting the nobility from state service, the latter had inadvertently isolated them. After brutal success in the Napoleonic Wars, the ill-fated Decembrist Revolt of 1825, an attempt to liberalise the country, had unleashed reactionary forces. Yet by the time of the accession of Alexander II in 1855, the need for reform had become urgent again and the new Tsar abolished the serfdom of the twenty million, a third of Russia’s population. Vital as this measure was, the downside lay in the incomplete nature of serf freedom and the radicalism it inspired among disaffected intellectuals.
Indeed what is most compelling about Turgenev is his urge to dramatise the experience of the Russian intelligentsia from the 1840s to the 1870s. In the apathy of his male characters we see the country’s progress stymied. They tend to be Don Quixotes (active idealists) or Hamlets (crippled introspectives), to use the terms of a famous lecture he delivered in January 1860. In his fiction there are any number of them, all equally undone, the radicals with their populist incitement which founders on the indifference of others and the conservatives by their inability to countenance change. Turgenev himself was sympathetic toward the radicals, though by temperament understanding more clearly the latter.
These he describes as ‘superfluous men’, which are at once educated and aimless. In Rudin, (1857) the eponymous hero is typical of the type: his eloquence inspires others, but he himself lacks the commitment to change. His ‘thoughts seemed to be directed towards the future;; this lent them an air of impetuosity and youthfulness.’ In Turgenev’s greatest novel, Fathers and Sons (1862), the three Petrovich men are all superfluous. ‘They are the best of the gentry class and that is precisely why I chose them, to show their bankruptcy’, he explained in an 1862 letter to the poet, Sluchevsky. In contrast, Bazarov the novel’s active nihilist (a term Turgenev also popularised – meaning revolutionary) fulminates, but changes nothing.
This is the grim background to Turgenev’s writing, and Russian literature would really begin with Turgenev’s generation, building on the work of Pushkin and Gogol. It was writing ‘out of the profundities of a silent country’, as Richard Freeborn has noted. This was the result of the harsh censorship of the times. Whilst gradualists like Turgenev believed at one time in future concessions from above, radicals like his sometime friend, Herzen, believed in a revolution from below that would destroy bourgeois capitalism. More shrewdly, Turgenev saw capitalism in the heart of the very peasants radicals wished to incite. This is why in Virgin Soil (1877), an account of a group of misfit populists trying to take revolution to the uncomprehending peasantry, they are destined to fail.
Smoke, 1867 in particular, was Turgenev’s contribution to the great controversy between the Slavophiles and those who championed Western ideals for Russia. We might identify some of Turgenev’s opinions in his character Potugin, a retired government clerk who believes that Russians hate the West, but accept its superiority. To him they are possessed of unwarranted optimism, whilst never having achieved anything, the cultured classes being worthless, the people weak-minded. Warming to his theme Potugin concludes:
I am a Westerner. I am devoted to Europe . . . I am devoted to culture . . . and I love it with my whole heart and believe in it, and I have no other belief, and never shall have. That word, ci-vi-li-sa-tion . . . is intelligible, and pure, and holy, and all the other ideals, nationality, glory, or what you like – they smell of blood.
Turgenev’s love of the West preceded his living there. He was called ‘The American’ at Moscow University because of his admiration of democratic principles. He might have said, as he had Potugin say, ‘I both love and hate my Russia, my strange, sweet, nasty, precious country.’ Turgenev was born into the landowning gentry on the country estate Spasskoye-
Lutovinovo, one hundred and seventy miles from Moscow, where his childhood unhappiness was compounded by his mother’s ruthlessness with her sons and servants. He was educated at the universities of Moscow and St Petersburg. In 1838, leaving to complete his education in Germany, Turgenev was involved in a dramatic fire at sea, during which he scandalised his family by offering a sailor ten thousand rubles to save his life. As he explained many years later, ‘It is quite true that nothing can compare with the tragedy of a shipwreck or a fire at sea except its comedy.’
When he returned, ‘fizzing with Hegelism’, Turgenev began a career in the Russian civil service (1843-1845), but also came under the influence of the literary critic Vissarion Belinsky and his moral realism. He began to write for the liberal periodical Contemporary from 1847, filling the editor’s ‘miscellany’ column. Here Turgenev provided the first of his peasant sketches. In 1852 he was exiled to his estate, nominally for praising Gogol in print. In that year he expanded and gathered his Sketches from a Hunter’s Album, which made his name. Though these stories are the recollections of a member of the gentry, who viewed his class with implicit criticism, what was alarmingly new was the depiction of the serfs as sentient individuals. To the armchair British reader, raised to assume individual differences in peasant and lord alike, Turgenev seems apolitical. Yet the effect of the sketches was likened to that of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in its effect on the abolition debate.
Turgenev subsequently published Rudin, Home of the Gentry and On the Eve. All were contentious to different degrees, but with the storm of criticism over Fathers and Sons, which was held to be insulting by both radicals and conservatives, Turgenev left Russia to join the famous mezzo- soprano Pauline Viardot, whom he had first heard sing in 1843. He lived with her, her accommodating husband and their children for the rest of his life, first in Baden-Baden (1862-70) and then in France (1871-83). There is much speculation as to the real nature of this ménage à trois. As a young man Turgenev had fathered a child from a paid liaison with a seamstress in his mother’s service. A daughter was born, who Pauline Viardot took into her family. However, there was to be no closeness between father and daughter: ‘she does not like music, poetry, nature – or dogs – and that is all that I like.’
The second great theme in Turgenev’s novels, plays and stories involves the dangerous nature of love, its joys and particularly its enslavements. Turgenev was always ambivalent about love. In his play A Month in the Country (1848-50) the bored Natalya Petrovna, wife of another, thinks her friend Rakitin ‘too kind . . . you give way to me too much – you have spoilt me’. For him love is torture. As he explains to her new object of interest: ‘You’ll find out what it means to be tied to a petticoat, to be a woman’s slave, to feel the poison in one’s veins’. On the other hand, in On the Eve, ones of his characters suggests: ‘if at this moment you were holding the hand of a woman you loved, if that hand and all of her were yours, if you even saw with her eyes and felt, not with your own lonely feelings, but with hers . . . you’d find Nature itself would exult and sing.’
The novels frequently end in missed opportunities to love and it is inevitable that biographers would see Turgenev’s ambivalence as a reflection of his life with Mme Viardot. Yet they often overlook what Leonard Schapiro called ‘the sublimity of agape, when once, all passion spent, that can be attained.’ Devotion to a woman seems to have meant more to Turgenev than sexual love. What is indisputable is that the writer was terminally infatuated with Viardot. In a letter he wrote to her in December 1870, he expressed it thus: ‘Your absence gives me a sort of physical feeling of fear, just as if I had lacked air to breathe.’ More colourfully, he is said to have told a friend. ‘Even now, after fifteen years, I love this woman so much that I am prepared to dance on the roof, stark naked and painted yellow all over, if she orders me to do so’. My own favourite is his simple declaration, ‘A day which is not lit up by your eyes is lost’. Yet we may see him, as he saw himself, as Rakitin and all the frustrated lovers in his fiction. While his men may be superfluous in this sense too, his women characters are often admirable and fated, like the dedicated Elena Nikolayevna of On the Eve, or Liza Kalitina of Home of the Gentry, who became revered as a symbol of Russian womanhood.
Although Turgenev’s skill in character creation is traditionally indisputable, more recently his definitive approach has had its critics. Vladimir Nabokov suggested that like most authors of his time he was ‘far too explicit, leaving nothing to the reader’s intuition;; suggesting and then ponderously explaining what the suggestion was.’ There is some justice in this observation, but ultimately it is a matter of taste. I am equally comfortable with Turgenev’s tendency to conventionality in exercising that old, deceptive proverb that the eyes are the windows to the soul. In Rudin the man himself has ‘a liquid brilliance in his lively dark-blue eyes’. We also learn that the social climber Pandalevsky ‘was very affectionate, solicitous, sensitive and secretly voluptuous, had a pleasant voice, was a competent pianist, and had a habit, when talking to someone, of literally transfixing that person with his eyes.’ Of Volyntsev a little later we read, ‘In the features of his face he closely resembled his sister;; but there was less playfulness and vivacity in them and his eyes, handsome and tender though they were, somehow looked sad’. In each case, though the eyes have it, one comes away with a powerful sense of personality. I remember reading Turgenev’s novels one after another with a similar view to that expressed by the twenty three year old Isaiah Berlin, who wrote in a 1932 letter to Stephen Spender, that he was ‘reading him wildly in a sort of intoxication.’
Too great a focus on character can inhibit plot, which is why Turgenev is concise. Yet in his famous preface to The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James wrote of how his friend felt his subtlety at times was lost upon his audience:
I’m often accused of not having ‘story’ enough. I seem to myself to have as much as I need –to show my people, to exhibit their relations with each other;; for that is all my measure. If I watch them long enough I see them come together, I see them placed. I see them engaged in this or that act and in this or that difficulty. How they look and move and speak and behave, always in the setting I have found for them, is my account of them.
There are many wonderful conversation scenes throughout Turgenev’s work which would play well on any stage. There is also an intimate understanding of the life depicted, its manners and pastimes, in which he can be gently satiric: ‘Valentina Mihalovna flung the Revue des Deux Mondes on a little table, and leaning back on the lounge, she turned her eyes upwards and looked thoughtful, which suited her extremely’ (Virgin Soil).
When Sanin, the hero of Spring Torrents expresses his desire for the hand of her daughter Gemma, the widowed mother’s ‘transition from despair to sadness, and from sadness to quiet resignation, took place fairly rapidly’. In Smoke, we meet, ‘The poet Yazikov, who they say used to sing the praises of Bacchic revelry, sitting over a book and sipping water’. We also meet ladies ‘in whose arms Chopin died (the ladies in Europe in whose arms he expired are to be reckoned by thousands)’ and Princess Annette, ‘who would have been perfectly captivating, if the simple village washerwoman had not suddenly peeped out in her at times like a smell of cabbage wafted across the most delicate perfume’. There is more steel at times, as with the touching ingenuousness of the martyr in the story ‘Living Relic’: ‘I told the priest of it, only he said it couldn’t have been a vision, because visions are vouchsafed only to those of ecclesiastical rank.’
The other area of excellence in Turgenev’s prose is to be found in his poetic descriptions, which Nabokov called his ‘watercolours’. They are wonderfully alive to the senses. For instance, in Virgin Soil we have:
the willows rustled, gleamed, and rippled, everything was moving, fluttering, the peewit’s cry came whistling from the distant slopes, across the green ravines, just as though the cry had wings and was flying on them.
In On the Eve:
They turned away from the river and proceeded along a narrow sunken path between two tall walls of golden rye, which cast a blue-tinged shadow on them as they walked;; the radiant sunshine seemed to be skimming along the tops of the ears of corn.
And in Spring Torrents, the author writes, ‘A powerful, soporific scent of heather, ferns, pine resin and of last year’s decaying leaves pervaded the place.’
So, this is the Turgenev that I love. I do have to remind myself that I come to his work in translation, by several hands, and inevitably therefore some of the lyrical power of his rhythms and perhaps of his outlook may have been lost. He remains charismatically coherent nevertheless, and I end
with an anecdote that gives a Russian perspective. During the German army’s rapid advance on Moscow in the Second World War, Soviet writer Ilya Ehrenburg recounted how, ‘When Turgenev’s museum was being evacuated from Orel, the curator had to appeal at every station for the van carrying the museum material not to be uncoupled.’ Though people were at first angry, when the curator explained that the threadbare sofa was the one Turgenev loved to lounge on, they relented. Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev, long may he rest.