The Gentle Barbarian (2 page)

From his father's sayings, Turgenev took these words:

“Take what you can yourself and don't let others get you into their hands; to belong to oneself, that is the whole thing in life”… On another occasion, being at that time a youthful democrat, I embarked on a discussion of liberty … “Liberty,” he repeated. “Do you know what really makes a man free?”

“What?”

“Will, your own will, and it gives power which is better than liberty. Know how to want, and you'll be free, and you'll be master too.”

Before and above everything, my father wanted to live—and did live. Perhaps he had a premonition that he would not have long in which to make use of the “thing in life”; he died at forty-two.

And at the end of the story when the father is dying, he says to his son, words that Turgenev repeated in many of his stories throughout his life:

“My son,” he wrote, “beware of the love of women; beware of that ecstasy—that slow poison.”

The love the boy Turgenev had most to fear was his mother's love: he was the favourite son.

Varvara Petrovna's command of the passions, in all their manifestations, was inexhaustible. She was a round-shouldered woman with large, glaring black eyes under heavy brows, her forehead was wide and low, the skin of her face was coarse and pocked, her mouth large, sensual and cruel, her manner arrogant and capricious. She was as self-willed as a child, though like many ugly women she could be fascinating and charm her friends, and was very witty. Her history is pitiable. She was the child of violence in a family who had got much of their wealth by means little short of robbery. Compared with the Turgenevs the Lutovinovs were barbarians. The portraits of one or two of them hung on the walls of Spasskoye which Varvara Petrovna had inherited. They had flogged their way forward and Turgenev has described two or three of these ancestors. In the
Freeholder Usyanikov
there is one who grabbed a parcel of land from a neighbour and flogged him into agreement when the man threatened to take the crime to court. Another was a scoundrelly young Guards Officer and a thief who stole his father's money from the family chest where his bags of coins were kept. His portrait hung beside the picture of a young woman with her hair done in the high style of the eighteenth century. Beside it was the picture of an amiable young man whom Turgenev calls Rogatchov, who has a hole in the breast: the Guards Officer had seduced the young woman who was about to be married to Rogatchov and murdered him. The true story is worse than Turgenev made it: the girl was the murderer's
sister. In the story called
The Brigadier,
the mother of Varvara Petrovna appears. The old lady was paralysed, yet in a fit of temper, she knocked her page boy unconscious and, frightened by what she had done, is said to have somehow got the boy to a chair, put a cushion over him, suffocated him and had him buried secretly.

This grandmother had been twice married. In her second marriage to a widower called Somov who had grown-up children, she turned against Varvara Petrovna who was the child of the first marriage. When the mother died the drunken stepfather not only beat the young girl but attempted to rape her. She escaped from the house with a nurse and walked twenty miles to an uncle's house at Spasskoye. All this is described in
The Turgenev Family
by Mme. Zhitova who, as an orphan baby, had been adopted by Varvara Petrovna in 1833. (Mysterious orphans appear again and again in the annals of the gentry families. Alexandre Zviguilsky, in
Ivan Turgenev: Nouvelle Correspondance,
dubiously suggests that Mme. Zhitova was a child born of an affair between Varvara Petrovna and a doctor, Andrei Bers, the father of Leo Tolstoy's future wife.) Varvara Petrovna once took the girl to see the stepfather's house which had become an empty ruin. Pictures still hung on the wall. In the hall was the bust of her Lutovinov father. They passed down an empty corridor and came to a door that was boarded up and when the child played with the handle, Varvara Petrovna dragged her away screaming:

“Don't touch it. There is a curse on that room.”

The room was her stepfather's. When she calmed down she said to the girl:

“You don't know what it means to be an orphan: you are an orphan but you have a mother in me … to be an orphan without mother or father is hard, but to be an orphan in the sight of your own mother is horrible: that is what I suffered, my mother hated me.”

As a young girl Varvara Petrovna had not been much happier at Spasskoye, for her uncle was irascible and stingy: she had the stubbornness of the injured and unloved and grew up to be a mannish young woman in the company of rough squires, and in his rages the
uncle varied his fits of benevolence with drunken threats to throw her out of the house. He intended, she claimed, to disinherit her. His sudden death made her an heiress who, until she was thirty, was unable to get a man to look at her. Her tragedy was that when she did marry she adored the husband who had to be forced into the marriage.

Varvara Petrovna is one of those Russian Cinderellas who once they get their Prince avenge themselves for the wrongs of childhood and become tyrants. Mme. Zhitova was nevertheless devoted to her, found her generous and tender, and, while not denying her tyrannies, was inclined to pity her and say that her savage rule of her serfs was common form among some women of her class in the eighteenth century and that if rage was at the heart of her nature, she was really a country eccentric.

Mme. Zhitova's account of Varvara Petrovna's character begins when she was taken into the house. By then Ivan was sixteen and of the two brothers he is the peacemaker who tries to soften his mother's temper. In their boyhood she made both her sons feel the birch and indeed once when she was beating the older one she did it with such frenzy that she fainted and the naked boy had to call to the servant standing there, “Water, for Mama.” Mme. Zhitova confirms that Turgenev's story of Varvara Petrovna and the dumb servant called
Mumu
is founded on fact, although Turgenev attributes it to his grandmother. In
Punin and Bahurin
there is a scene which certainly occurred; Varvara Petrovna was in the habit of going out in the park in the afternoon to see that her serfs were working and one day she noticed a half-starved unsmiling youth in rags who was gaping at her and not putting his back into his job. His name was Yermil.

“I have no need of people with scowling faces like that,” she said, for she required deferential smiles from her workers and ordered him to be sent off at once to a “Settlement.” She often threatened servants with Siberia or prison. The sentenced man or woman had then to be led past her drawing-room window and to bow as he or she was taken off. Turgenev writes in the story:

Yermil stood without his cap, with downcast head, barefoot, with his boots tied up with a string behind his back; his face, turned towards the seignorial mansion, expressed not despair nor grief, nor even
bewilderment, a stupid smile was frozen on his colourless lips, his eyes dry and half closed, looked stubbornly on the ground. My grandmother was apprised of his presence. She got up from her sofa, went with a faint rustle of her silken skirts to the window of the study and holding her golden rimmed double eye glass on the bridge of her nose, looked at the new exile.

Her clerk, the Baburin of the story, protested and she replied:

“That is of absolutely no consequence to me—among my subjects I am sovereign and answerable to no one, only I am not accustomed to have people criticising me in my presence and meddling in what is not their business… You too do not suit me. You are discharged.” And turning to her steward she told him to pay off the clerk and get rid of him by dinner time. “Don't put me into a passion,” she said. “What is Yermil waiting for? I have
seen
him. What more does he want?”

And, says Turgenev, she shook a handkerchief angrily out of the window.

After such a scene she would go back to her chair, her rage satisfied, and go on playing patience or reading the latest French novel. She despised Russian writing—except for a few lines of Pushkin.

Varvara Petrovna's husband seems to have behaved with formal indifference and amused himself with his love affairs or his shooting. Perhaps he too was afraid of the virago he had married, although it is said his concern was to preserve an illusion of decorum in the tormented house. He drifted into ill-health and a long illness. The two sons sat by his bedside when he died. Varvara Petrovna was away in Italy. Ivan was sixteen.

An early drawing of Turgenev in his boyhood before the tragic loss of his father—it appears in Yarmolinsky's
Life
—is of a decorous but slyly staring gnome-like little creature, with a large head too big for his body. The forehead is high and fine, the eyes are intently watchful and dead-still with mischief. He sits in a trance-like state as if memorising every inch of what he sees. He was noted for his precocious and unabashed remarks to distinguished guests which got him
into trouble. He perhaps picked up banter from his mother. Children brought up under a tyranny and who are spoiled one moment and beaten the next are likely to be evasive and to lead a double life and lie their way out when in difficulty. He wandered about a large house that always had guests and hangers-on in it, and had some of the too-forward characteristics of the hotel-child of the restless European and American rich of later times. He knew very well that he and his older brother were the young masters; but in old age he said all he remembered was the birchings he got from his mother; and the cowed serfs and the severe German and French tutors. His ear for French or German was remarkable: he was a born mimic and with a gift for play-acting and fantasy. His real education, as was apt to happen to the children of the gentry, was given him by the servants. He listened to their stories, knew the barbarous wrongs his mother inflicted on them; starved of the despised Russian language in family life, he heard it continually from them.

Varvara Petrovna—who was an efficient ruler of her household—saw to it that her favourite serfs were taught to read and write, and one youth who had a taste for reading used to go off to the library secretly with Ivan to find a book. The library was not much more than a storeroom where the books were tied up in bundles that smelled of mice. They found an astonishing popular work called
Emblems and Symbols,
a sort of Russian
Iliad,
Turgenev called it, of fantastic verses about unicorns, kings, negroes, pyramids and snakes. There is a recollection of this discovery in
Punin and Baburin
when Punin

shouted the verses out solemnly in a flowing outpour through his nose like a man intoxicated and beside himself with ecstasy … In this way we went through not only Lomonosov, Sumarokov and Kantemir … even Kheraskov's
Rossiada …
There is in it, among others, a mighty Tatar woman, a gigantic heroine: I have forgotten her name now but in those days my hands and feet turned cold, as soon as it was uttered. “Yes,” Punin would say … Kheraskov he doesn't let one off easily.”

The story of
Bunin and Baburin
was one of the things Turgenev wrote in the last years of his life and one is immediately struck by the minuteness of his observation and his feeling for solitude as a
boy. To the child brought up in such a place Spasskoye was a timeless, boundless country: the immense gardens and distances of the estate would seem to be Russia itself; he would know few if any children of his own class and, if any did arrive, they would seem totally outlandish. His natural affections and play were with the children of serfs among whom he would be pleased yet irked by the sense of his own privilege. His childhood, as with so many rich children, was a training for the innocence of the rich who take private life to be the whole world. At a very early age and as the favourite, he found that he had two roles to play. The household was a sort of secret society containing the quarrels between a passionate mother and a cool husband and the infinite quarrels and intrigues of the hierarchy of tale-telling servants: he listened and he would try to keep the peace by charm and being funny. Watching was a necessity and an amusement. Very early he stared at faces and learned to read the moods and history that were built into them; and when, for self-preservation, he could get away he went out into hiding places in the gardens and the woods to watch the things of nature build
their
history, from minute to differing minute: to gaze at a leaf or a bird waiting for it to move, to listen to the differing sounds of his boots as he walked over leaves, over grass, through hemp fields, to notice every change of light and shadow and the movements of cloud in the sky as the moments of the morning or the afternoon passed.

I raised my head and saw at the end of a delicate twig one of those large flies with emerald heads and long body and four transparent wings… For a long while, more than an hour, I did not take my eyes off her. Soaked through and through with sunshine she did not stir, only from time to time turning her head from side to side and shaking her lifted wings—and that was all.

He had the eye of a naturalist; that is to say, there is no day-dreaming in it, no Wordsworthian moral content. He is already a collector of the events of the hour as it changes.

When they were nine or ten, the Turgenev brothers were put into a prep school in Moscow for a short time, then into a high school where they met mostly boys of their own class. At fifteen Ivan entered Moscow University, which was not much more than a secondary school to whom all, except serfs, were admitted. After a year or so there he advanced to Petersburg University with the fashionable intention of proceeding to the University of Berlin. This prosaic education was to fit young men of his class for high rank in the Tsarist civil service or life in the Army or at Court.

In Moscow Ivan drank his first draught of German idealism. The philosophy of Hegel turned young men of his generation to metaphysics and literature. At the prep school run by a cheerful old German, the students lived
en famille
and spelled out Schiller during the week, played forfeits or charades on Sundays and went in for passionate friendships. Later on in his stories Turgenev recalled these lofty attachments: in
Yakov Pasinkov,
for example, he tells of his feeling for Yakov, the ugly duckling of the school, who had sharply pulled him up for his very Russian habit of telling lies: he told them partly out of an impetuous bent for fantasy and also from a pleasure in swaggering, but he was always quick to repent of his exaggerations. He responded to Yakov's “goodness”: