The Gentle Barbarian (33 page)

This change is certainly felt and although one can say that Turgenev's effort of will in keeping in touch with Russian realities has some of the guilt of the absentee in it—a matter that was, as he put it, his fate—we know that he judged rightly when he said that the Populist movement was a pathos, that no root and branch change would take place for another twenty years at least. The central characters are nevertheless representative. The aristocratic young Nezhdanov has traits of Turgenev's character: like the young Turgenev, he is handsome and has chestnut hair (but he is an illegitimate son). He has a double nature: he is secretly a poet but ashamed of his poetry, his real interest is political activity. He is an idealist, passionate, chaste, timid; ashamed of these qualities, he even tries to be coarse in his language: “Life did not come easily to him.” His feelings push him forward, but beyond his power of performance. He is the Turgenevean mixture of Don Quixote and Hamlet, a throwback to “the superfluous man.” When he “goes to the people” and solemnly dresses up in workman's clothes, the workmen see through him at once and make him drunk on raw vodka. Another time he is “beaten up” and makes a mess of everything.

Marianna, the brusque upper-class girl whom he falls in love with when he is tutoring in the grand house of the wordy liberal Sipyasin, is as innocent as he, but she is the new kind of young girl. She is a rebel who has cropped her hair and (interesting when one remembers Turgenev's old-fashioned habits), she belongs to the generation who have also given up hand-kissing. When she boldly runs off with Nezhdanov to “go to the people” with him, she refuses to be married and they live together in chastity. Marianna is a rebel not a revolutionary—a rebel eager to leave her class, to be useful and to sacrifice herself. The real revolutionary is Mashurina, the unkempt, plain and awkward girl who silently loves Nezhdanov. She is quietly efficient in secret work, alert for traitors, spies and mistrustful of some of the hangers-on of the movement, for example of Palkin a cripple, a foolish yet far-seeing man, but a danger to the cause because he is an unstable and excitable chatterbox, easily flattered. It is Mashurina who will disappear deeper into conspiracy when Palkin's foolishness and swank give the group away.

The “hero” in Turgenev's eyes—although Palkin makes Turgenev's point in a prophetic speech about the dull, immovable men who will eventually rule Russia—is Solomin. Turgenev calls
him an American type—he knew no Americans but America had provided a Utopian dream for early revolutionaries (except Herzen who called Americans “elderly children”). Turgenev rejected the traditional Russian respect for Germans as the practical race; he looked back on the Germans as the guiding philosophers of his youth; so he turned to the English and made Solomin, the son of the despised priesthood, a man who had learned his trade in the cotton factories of Manchester and his politics from the English reformers of the industrial revolution and who may have a touch of Engels in him. Solomin is sympathetic to the conspirators, protects them loyally but advises caution and gradualism to the headstrong. He is strong, healthy, hard-working, generous, sober and resourceful, a man of sense. Inevitably he strikes one as being too good to be true; as a still portrait he is well enough done, but Turgenev can't make him move except in small helpful ways. Markelov, a retired artillery officer and landowner is the dour type of cantankerous conspirator, a lonely, unhappy man who can't farm his land effectively because he tries to run everything by giving orders in a military way. He is the same in conspiracy—too aggressive, given to acting independently and openly like a fanatical officer. He is certain to be arrested and to go grimly silent and still determined to Siberia.

These figures are well enough done in the first volume of the novel which deceived the censors, for they are seen in the setting that Turgenev can always do well: the still, timeless scene of the great country house where the family and the guests dine and talk, when Sipyagin, the host, is mellifluous at the table, where his pretty wife flirts with the tutor in her boudoir, where the rebel girl gazes at Nezhdanov and sulks before her aunt, where people walk in the gardens and the carriages come and go. It is the same sort of Paradise from the past as one finds in
A Nest of Gentlefolk,
in
Fathers and Sons
—but the characters are now hardened. Turgenev shows his contempt for the gentry openly, especially for the conceited and pompous young Kammerjunker, Kallomyetsov, who is an active “Red” hunter, vain of his certainty in spotting revolutionaries. He is far cruder than Pavel in
Fathers and Sons
or the other comical Frenchified asses of earlier novels. And Sipyagin, the bland, sporting landowner with his skin-deep liberalism is also ridiculed. The drawing-room quarrels become edgy when the egregious Kallomyetsov
says Sipyagin should be President of a Commission that would decide everything.

Madame Sipyagin laughed more than ever.

“You must take care: Boris Andreivitch is sometimes such a Jacobin …“

“Jacko, Jacko, Jacko,” called the parrot.

Valentine Mihalovna shook her handkerchief at him.

“Don't prevent sensible people from talking! Marianna, tell him to be quiet.”

Marianna turned to the cage and began scratching the parrot's neck which he offered her at once.

“Yes,” Madame Sipyagin said, “Boris Andreivich sometimes astonishes me. He has something … something of the tribune.”

“C'est parce qu'il est orateur,
” Kallomyetsov interposed hotly. “Your husband has the gift of words, as no one else has; he's accustomed to success, too …
ses propres paroles le grisent
… But he's a little off that, isn't he?
Il boude
—eh?”

“I haven't noticed it,” she replied after a brief silence.

“Yes,” Kallomyetsov pursued in a pensive tone, “he has been overlooked a little.”

It is all drifting to a row about Marianna being a Nihilist because at this time, before she runs off with Nezhdanov, she teaches in a village school.

The things we rely on Turgenev for are here: the naturalness of all kinds of talk and the silences in it—with him it is a pianist's gift—and his ear is just as fine when we get to the drunken and confused talk of the Radicals in the second volume. His summary penetration into character does not fail. Madame Sipyagin for example, is excellent.

She was clever, not ill-natured—rather good-natured of the two, fundamentally cold and indifferent—and she could not tolerate the thought of anyone remaining indifferent to her … Only, these charming egoists must not be thwarted: they are fond of power and will not tolerate independence in others. Women like Sipyagina excite and work upon inexperienced and passionate natures; for themselves they like regularity and a peaceful life … Flirtation cost Sipyagina little; she was well aware that there was no danger for her and never could be … With what a happy smile she retired into
herself, into the consciousness of her inaccessibility, her impregnable virtue and with what gracious condescension she submitted to the lawful embrace of her well-bred spouse.

Not until we get to the second volume does Turgenev break out of talk into dramatic scenes. Madame Sipyagin seems to be a development of Madame Odintsov in
Fathers and Sons
but done in acid. She spies on her niece, intercepts letters and exposes the girl's love for Nezhdanov to Markelov who had hoped to marry her. The point of this jealous intrigue is to show the extremes to which the apparently gracious Sipyaginas will go to preserve the unity of their class. At the moment when the defiant Markelov dashes to support a local riot of the peasants and the conspiracy is betrayed, the hypocrisy of Sipyagin's liberalism comes out. He is smoother than the violent Kallomyetsov and, in masterly fashion, Turgenev as the novelist of personal relationships shows these relationships being undermined politically. There has been an excellent scene at the end of the first part of the novel in which Markelov begins to have the force of a tragic figure. As a man of honour, reckless and incapable of spite or jealousy, indifferent to enemies, determined as an analyst and not deceived, Markelov does not spare his host:

“If we wait for the moment when everything, absolutely everything is ready, we shall never begin. If one weighs
all
the consequences beforehand, it is certain there will be some evil ones. For instance, when our predecessors organized the emancipation of the peasants, could they foresee that one result of this emancipation would be the rise of a whole class of money-lending landowners who would lend the peasant a quarter of mouldy rye for six roubles and extort them from him (here Markelov crooked one finger) first the full six roubles in labour and besides that (Markelov crooked another finger), a whole quarter of good rye and then (Markelov crooked a third), interest on top of that—in fact squeeze the peasant to the last drop. Our emancipators couldn't have foreseen that. And yet even if they had done, it was right to free the peasants and not to weigh all the consequences. And so I've made up my mind!”

And when Markelov is arrested at the end of the book he is obdurate and does not repent. It is one of Turgenev's excellences that he is
true to the basic character of people. Markelov is the incurable soldier when he reflects on his betrayal:

It is I who am to blame, I didn't understand, I didn't say the right thing, I didn't go the right way to work. I ought simply to have given orders and if anyone had tried to hinder or resist, put a bullet through his head! What's the use of explanations here. Anyone not with us has no right to live … spies are killed like dogs, worse than dogs.

Turgenev is hard to follow in the facts of the conspiracy: there are too many hints and shadow figures, but one is well done. This is Palkin, the vain, chattering and comic exhibitionist, the born mysterious contact-man longing to be trusted and knowing he cannot be; he is burdened by the knowledge of his own muddle-headedness. The scene in which Sipyagin flatters him, inflates his conceit, snubs him and slyly worms everything he wants out of him and dismisses him with contempt when Palkin is out to impress the Governor, is good. Into the mouth of this walking calamity, Turgenev puts shrewd prophecy. He defends Solomin to whom the intellectual revolutionaries are now cool: Russia needs sturdy, rough, dull men of the people.

Just look at Solomin: his brain is clear as daylight, and he's as healthy as a fish … Isn't that a wonder! Why do we Russians always have the idea that to be a man of feeling and conscience, you've got to be an invalid?

There are two more characters to whom a complete scene is given, who on the face of it have no relevance to the theme of the novel and who in fact seem to belong to a short story thrown in for relief. Turgenev was inclined to cut them out but was persuaded to let them stay. They are an elderly, childless pair of innocent, doll-like, eccentric creatures, called Fomushka and Fimushka, the oldest inhabitants of the town, who have preserved themselves and their house as untouched models of the life of lesser gentry in the eighteenth century. They blissfully ignore everything that has happened since that time. They still drink chocolate because tea had not come in, they play duets, look at old albums and sing sweet and old-fashioned songs about hopeless love in their cracked voices. They have one unbroken rule: they have never allowed their house serfs
to be flogged and if a servant turned out to be drunken and intolerable they bore with him, but after a while passed him on to a neighbour saying “Let others take their turn with him.”

But such a disaster rarely befell them, so rarely that it made an epoch in their lives and they would say for instance “That was very long ago, it happened when we had that rascal Aldoshka,” or “When we had grandfather's fur cap with the fox tail stolen.” They still had such caps.

The interesting thing is that this dream of an Arcadia in the past is often found in the Russian novel: in Oblomov's dream, for example; even in the talk of the senile Iudushka in Schedrin's
The Golov-lyov Family.
In Turgenev, it is more than one of his “old portraits” reminiscences; it is not antiquarian; it is really an incipient fairy tale or a fable without meaning which is budding in the depths of a people's mind. It is also a relief after the vulgar scene at the merchant's house that has preceded it, a holiday of the mind from the yearning for the future which rules the whole novel—the burden of Russia which the other characters bear. Formushka and Fimushka bear no burden.

If
Virgin Soil
has not the sustained serenity of
Fathers and Sons
because the people in the right and the people in the wrong are too blatantly stated, it is an impressive attempt to have a final say. It can hardly be called an old man's book, for Turgenev was in his late fifties when he wrote it. The strain, we feel, comes from trying to pack too much into it and not without artifice. To the critics who said that he was out of touch with the new Russia, Turgenev replied that he was closely in touch with the dozens of young people who came to see him in Paris; but although they may have revealed themselves to him they did not really bring their Russia with them and were more likely to present him with arguments than with intimacy. If what we read in Anna Dostoevsky's Diary of her life with her husband and, of course, in Dostoevsky's novels, the quality that was missing in Turgenev's young visitors was the fact that at home they lived in crowds, above all in one another's lives: their very homes in whatever class, were normally crowded, public to their relations and their friends. It is in the nature of Dostoevsky's genius to show that when one of his characters appears his whole life and
all his relatives seemed to be hanging out of his talking mouth. When Russians soliloquise they are never alone. Turgenev himself said that in Russia writing was easy for the novelist: the stories and people spring up around him and crowd in on him at once.