The Other Side of a Frontier, page 68
In the final act, Bazarov packs up once more and while he does so he tells Arkady that their friendship is over. Not because of the trouble he has caused but because Arkady, he says, has changed. Arkady, who had also been sentimentally in love with Madame Odintsov, has been drawn to her younger sister whom she has dominated in her regal way. In this Turgenev shows his subtlety in showing the two sisters in another light. Madame Odintsov’s idle, exalté mind veils a managing, possessive nature. Bazarov sees that Arkady has been clear-headed in love when he himself is still suffering from the romantic disease and has failed. He is not rancorous but he tells Arkady that in accepting the conventions of marriage he has lost the Nihilist spirit.
‘There’s no audacity in you; no venom … Your sort, the gentry, can never go farther than well-bred resignation and that’s futile … you won’t stand up and fight … you enjoy finding fault with yourself; but we’ve had enough of all that – give us fresh victims! We must smash people!
Bazarov returns to his parents. This is the moving finale of the novel. The old people realize that their son has changed and dare not ask him what is on his mind. They are relieved when they see him taking an interest in helping his father in doctoring the peasants from time to time. The father listens with admiration to his son’s talk of new knowledge in medicine. The doting mother restrains her effusive love and is in awe of him. But an accident occurs. Bazarov goes off to perform an autopsy on a peasant who has died of typhus and in doing so makes a small cut in his finger. He comes back asking for silver nitrate. There is none in this backward part of the country and Bazarov understands – and so does his father – that he is a dead man if he has caught the infection.
The scene of Bazarov’s death is famous. It is one of the most moving and beautifully observed things that the great observer ever wrote – Chekhov admired it as a doctor and as an artist who himself was a master of recording human sorrow. The power of this narrative owes something to the hypochondria and sense of the presence of death which Turgenev felt so continuously in his own life; and in this the writing is one of those cleansings which a great artist achieves in his maturity. If the death, by such a small misadventure, may strike one as trivial and therefore not tragic – the point made by hostile critics – it has its own ironic logic: for Bazarov the Nihilist cannot object to accident or the random hostility of nature. When the death occurs, Turgenev writes, the experience of life on earth is not altogether in our hands. The last lines that describe the visit of the parents to Bazarov’s grave are devastating:
Vassily Ivanych was seized by a sudden frenzy. ‘I said I would rebel,’ he shouted hoarsely, his face inflamed and distorted, waving his clenched fist in the air as though threatening someone – ‘And I will rebel, I will!’ But Arina Vlassyevna, suffused in tears, hung her arms round his neck and both fell prone together. ‘And so,’ as Anfisushka related afterwards in the servants’ rooms, ‘side by side they bowed their poor heads like lambs in the heat of noonday …’
In the years that follow, the two frail old people support each other as they walk, year after year, to the cemetery, kneel at their son’s grave, yearning over the silent stone.
The storm caused by Fathers and Sons was violent and went on rumbling for years. The Right did not enjoy the ironical portrait of Pavel Kirsanov and Turgenev’s tolerance of Bazarov. The word ‘nihilist’ had caught on – very much as the idea of ‘the superfluous man’ had done years before – and the Radicals thought the portrait of Bazarov a libel on the young generation and their views. Bazarov is indeed silent on what he and his friends would do once the task of destruction was done; whereas those among the Nihilists who did think about this had a belief in some kind of Populist democracy which was too vague to become an effective Cause. Turgenev was in the impossible situation of being an apolitical man, a detached diagnostician in a period when the politically minded called for polemic and propaganda. Turgenev made matters worse by his comments. To the Conservative Countess Lambert he wrote:
The convictions of my youth have not changed. But I never have been and never will be occupied with politics. It is alien and uninteresting to me. I pay attention to politics only in so far as a writer who is called upon to depict contemporary life must. You do wrong to demand from me in literature what I cannot give – fruits that do not grow on my tree. I have never written for the people … I have written for that class of the public to which I belong.
To others he wrote that he found himself agreeing with most of the views of Bazarov, except his views on art and literature. That sounds harmless enough but it was damaging, for under Russian despotism, with political discussion subject to censorship, art and literature had a peculiar covert political prestige. All literature was judged – as it continues to be in Russia today – by its social ‘tendency’. But for Turgenev, as Sir Isaiah Berlin says, ‘acts, ideas, art, literature were expressions of individuals, not of objective forces of which the actors or thinkers were merely the embodiments. The reduction of men to the function of being primarily carriers or agents was as deeply repellent to Turgenev as it had been to Herzen or, in his later phase, to his revered friend Belinsky.’
Politically Bazarov was not a revolutionary but a pre-Revolutionary; a type thrown up by a period which seemed ‘on the eve’ of perhaps violent change: the peasantry were eighty per cent of the population of the country. Bazarov thought them stupid. Two objections to him have some point: first, he was not, in the Nihilist sense, a true type, for he was not really an urban figure – as the active politicals inevitably were. Secondly, his ruling interest was not in politics but in natural science. Had he been a writer he could have been prophetic of Chekhov who, as a doctor, also stood outside the philosophical and literary influences which had formed the main stream of Russian novelists – including Turgenev himself.
The only weakness of the novel – it seems to me – is in the chapter on the visit to Madame Odintsov. It has some of that over-scented claustrophobic sentimentality into which Turgenev sometimes falls. She is the standard dissatisfied rich woman, but there is an embarrassing lushness in his writing when he tries to probe her mind:
Sometimes, emerging all warm and languorous from a fragrant bath, she would fall to musing on the futility of life, its sorrow and toil and cruelty … Like all women who have not succeeded in falling in love she hankered after something without knowing what it was. In reality there was nothing she wanted, though it seemed to her that she wanted everything.
It is not hard to believe that Bazarov would feel the angry sensations of lust in her presence, but that he could have endured all those long, educative walks in the woods and the solemn conversations in her drawing-room is hard to believe, although we take the ironic point. We suspect Turgenev of one of his bouts of self-castigation for the long drawn out ‘ideal’ love for Pauline Viardot and his chats with Countess Lambert, and that here the book suffers from the blur of autobiography unassimilated.
Of course there were critics who defended Turgenev, even among the political young; but the attacks wounded him deeply. He had been looked upon as a leader by the young of his generation, now the new generation of young people despised him. They were indeed supplanted in their turn but for one who drew so much from the springs of youth as he did and who regretted the loss of his youth so bitterly – as the early pose of precocious old age shows – the blow was terrible. The effects lasted into his real old age.
As he said in Rudin, the young require simple answers even if they are illusory. The irony is that Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, who were hostile to radical politics, were treated with respect. The reason – apart from the fact that their range and strength as novelists was far greater – was that they were obsessed men. They had their missions which, in their different ways, were aspects of the feeling that Russia had an untainted Messianic role to play in the world; both had their religion and indeed in Dostoevsky’s journalism the idea of mission was politically imperial: the Russian right to Constantinople. Turgenev had no mission: he thought Dostoevsky’s large talk of humanity mere rhetoric. Like Pavel Kirsanov, though not in his arthritic way, he stood for ‘civilization’ spelled out letter by letter, for what had been a long, patient, intricate growth.
…
Turgenev v. Dostoevsky
In August 1867, Dostoevsky and his new wife, Anna, arrived from Dresden. She was the young stenographer to whom he had dictated The Gambler and Crime and Punishment (which had not long been published), and who had rescued him from his dead brother’s predatory family and from the son of his first wife who had encumbered him with debts to the tune of 20,000 roubles. With the money of her own dowry and with the help of his publisher, she had got him out of Russia and into Europe, where they were to travel for four years while he entered on his long struggle to write The Idiot. After the misery of his imprisonment in Siberia, the death of his first wife and his destructive affair with Polina Suslova, Dostoevsky was entering on the finest creative period of his life. He had been in Europe before and, like so many Russians, had taken to roulette at the German gambling tables. He was at the height of the gambling fever when he reached Baden-Baden, where he had come solely to play. He had lost every penny: Anna had been obliged to pawn her wedding ring and her earrings, her furs and a lot of her clothes. The couple had once or twice been obliged to live only on tea. After a short euphoric stay at an expensive hotel, they were driven to living in two cheap rooms over a blacksmith’s on the outskirts of the town, where the noise of the anvil and the screams of the children were wrecking Dostoevsky’s easily damaged nerves. He was soon out on the streets looking for a fellow Russian to borrow from.
He ran into Goncharov, the dour hermetic chief censor, himself afflicted with the paranoia which had caused him to accuse Turgenev of plagiarism a few years before. Goncharov lent him ‘a piece of gold’ and, perhaps not without malice, told Dostoevsky that Turgenev had seen him at the tables the day before but had not spoken to him because there was a convention that one must not talk to a man while he was playing. Of Dostoevsky this was certainly true: ill-luck, he always said, came to him for personal reasons. He had only to catch sight of some cool Englishman or German at play, to see the man as an evil omen, a devil personified, who would make him forget his system. The novelist drew everyone he met into a conspirator in his own drama. That, in itself, marked the ominous difference between himself and Turgenev, as artist and man. Honest Anna persuaded her husband to call on Turgenev because, on an earlier visit to Baden, he had borrowed fifty thalers from him and Turgenev would think he was ashamed of not paying back his debt. A meeting was arranged, but Dostoevsky’s pride was already fermenting: he mistook the time and arrived at Turgenev’s flat in the Schillerstrasse while he was eating his lunch. What happened is known from Dostoevsky’s brilliant novelistic account of it in a letter to his friend, an eminent literary figure called Maikov. He wrote:
I went to him in the morning at twelve o’clock and found him at lunch. I tell you frankly: even before this I didn’t like the man personally. Most unpleasant of all, I owe him money from 1857 [in fact it was from 1863] from Wiesbaden – and have not returned it yet. Also I don’t like his aristocratic, pharasaic embrace when he advances to kiss you, but presents his cheek. Terrible; as though he were a General.
Turgenev had the French manner of kissing. There sat Turgenev, the rich writer whom Dostoevsky had, as he said, ‘adored’ when he was young as the model aristocrat and man of genius, now waited on by a butler in a frock coat, eating a cutlet and drinking a glass of wine. Dostoevsky had read Smoke and disliked it and began to nettle Turgenev at once, telling him that it wasn’t worth while to be as wounded by the critics as Turgenev was.
It is not easy to tell truth from fiction in what happened in the next hour. One can only say that Turgenev was apt to lose his head. It seems likely that he did say he was going to write an article denouncing Russophils and Slavophils. In a moment the two were at loggerheads about their convictions. Dostoevsky’s hysteria was, as Solzhenitsyn has written in another connection, an evasion of his conflicts. He may not have quoted Potugin’s own words from Smoke that the only contributions Russia had made to civilization were ‘the best shoe, the shaft yoke and the knout – and hadn’t even invented them’, but at the height of the wrangle, with Turgenev’s temper rising – Dostoevsky said he kept calm and ironical – he hit upon one of those small phrases that turn dispute into farce. If Turgenev was trying to write about Russia, he said, he had better get a telescope.
‘A telescope,’ said the startled Turgenev. ‘What for?’
‘Because Russia is a great distance from here. Train your telescope upon Russia and it will not be difficult to see us distinctly.’
On his decision to settle in Baden-Baden with the Viardots, Turgenev was sensitive. He understood Russian malice. He praised the Germans to Dostoevsky and spoke of the debt his generation owed to German philosophy. At which Dostoevsky said he had found the ordinary Germans a collection of cheats and swindlers. Turgenev denied this and said with rage:
You insult me personally. You must know I have settled here and that I consider myself a German.
Dostoevsky said he did not know that, but if it was the case, he apologized and left, exalted by indignation. A German!
Such naked combats about convictions, as Mochulsky says in his book on Dostoevsky, rose from the endemic ‘self-consciousness’ in the Russian nature which, more accurately put, is a spontaneous consciousness of the self as an absolute, extended to the universal. (It resembles that capacity of the Spaniard to leap suddenly from his ego into a universal expansion of it.) Dostoevsky believed, as he often said, in going to extremes, in pushing beyond the limit in search of revelation, in going to the brink of the precipice. He was at the beginning of his vision of the Russian Christ, the mission of the Russian people to rule the whole Slav world and under the leadership of the Tsar to save mankind from the corruption of the West – even ‘with rifles’. But, as Mochulsky suggests, the difference between Turgenev and Dostoevsky as artists was fundamental and irreconcilable.
Turgenev was a fatalist lacking in will and saw history as an impersonal, predetermined process. Dostoevsky affirmed freedom of will and the power of personality. Turgenev wrote: ‘Is there a God? I don’t know. But I do know the law of causality. Twice two is four.’ Dostoevsky, with the frenzy of despair, fought against the law of necessity and by a volitional act ‘acquired’ faith in God.
Dostoevsky was the spiritual gambler: his greatness as a novelist lies in dramatizing to the limit the swaying conflict between ‘knowing’ and ‘not knowing’.
The quarrel was part of Dostoevsky’s development. He needed an imagined enemy at the roulette table to reanimate his genius. On Turgenev it had no effect but of disgust and the feeling that Dostoevsky was a sick soul. But it had a disagreeable aftermath. After his trajectory from self-abasement to exaltation, Dostoevsky often fell into cunning and double-dealing. He had his report of the quarrel copied and sent to be preserved for posterity ‘in the archives’; obviously it would be publicized. Turgenev wrote to his friend Polonski in 1871:
I have been told that Dostoevsky has ‘unmasked’ me. Well, what of it, let him enjoy himself. He came to see me in Baden five years ago, not to pay back the money he borrowed from me, but to curse me because of Smoke which, according to his ideas, ought to be burned by the executioner. I listened to his philippic in silence – and what am I finding out now? That I seem to have expressed every kind of offensive opinion which he hastened to communicate to Bartenev. (Bartenev has written to me about it.) It would be out and out slander if Dostoevsky were not mad which I do not doubt in the slightest. Perhaps it came to him in a dream. But my God, what a petty dirty gossip.
Worse followed. If Turgenev had caricatured the Radicals in his portrait of Herzen’s friend Ogarev in Smoke, Dostoevsky caricatured Turgenev in The Devils; he became the shrill, lisping figure of Karmazinov and a ‘Red’. The portrait is spiteful. Karmazinov is an effeminate, vain, ageing celebrity who is mocked from the floor at a public reading; the Baden lunch is more fully guyed, but we learn that Turgenev did at any rate offer him a cutlet and sat with his knees under a plaid rug because, although it was August, he found Baden cold.
Turgenev is made to say, ‘I still cling to honour but only from habit … Granted it’s from timidity; you see, one must live somehow what’s left of one’s life.’ The malice, indeed the hatred, reach their height when he parodies Karmazinov giving a reading of Phantoms. Karmazinov says that he has helped the town council to lay a new water pipe.
I felt in my heart that this question of water pipes in Karlsruhe was dearer and closer to my heart than all the questions of my precious Fatherland.
And then goes on to parody Enough, which he called Merci, in which Karmazinov says he is laying down his pen for good – as indeed Turgenev often did say – and if angels from heaven or the best society were to implore him, he would not change his mind. Dostoevsky’s humour is broad. He underlines his jokes with a heavy hand. But when he parodies Phantoms as an account of Turgenev’s first kiss, he is very funny indeed about the political tour of the earth. The lovers are sitting near a gorse tree – look up your nature notes – there is a touch of purple in the sky:
Suddenly they see Pompey or Cassius on the eve of battle and both are penetrated by the chill of ecstasy. Some wood nymph squeaks in the bushes. Gluck plays the violin among the reeds … Meanwhile a fog comes down, everything disappears and the great genius is crossing the Volga in a thaw, such a fog – it was more like a million pillows than a fog. Two and a half pages are filled with the crossing and yet he falls through the ice. The genius is drowning – you imagine he was drowned? Not a bit of it: this was simply in order that when he was drowning and at his last gasp he might catch sight of a bit of ice, the size of a pea, but pure as crystal ‘as a frozen tear’. And in that tear was reflected Germany, or more accurately the sky of Germany and its iridescent sparkle recalled to his mind the very tear which ‘Dost thou remember fell from thine eyes when we were sitting under the emerald tree and though didst cry out joyfully “There is no crime!”‘ ‘No,’ I said through my tears, ‘but if that is so there are no righteous either.’ We sobbed and parted for ever.
