Turgenev was a “georgesandista,” and the most ardent Westernizer among them. He had read Shakespeare, Byron, and Schiller in their original languages as a child. Later, in St. Petersburg, he argued with Nekrasov and his other friends from Contemporary that even Pushkin and Lermontov, “if you look closely,” were only imitating European geniuses like Shakespeare and Byron.6
Early on as a writer, Turgenev focused on the West, measuring himself against Western literary criteria, and declaring, according to friends, “No, I’m a European at heart, my demands of life are also European! … At the very first chance, I’ll flee without looking back, and you won’t see hide or hair of me!”7
In order to realize his European ambitions, which were rather unusual even for his elite cosmopolitan circle, he needed a starting point in the West. The fulfillment of Turgenev’s dream, strangely enough, came via George Sand.
In early 1842 the Paris glitterati were excited: the new left-radical magazine La Revue indépendante started serializing George Sand’s sensational novel Consuelo, a story about the adventures of a fictional great singer in eighteenth-century Venice. The novel’s immediate success was due in part to it being a roman à clef: the readers easily recognized the heroine as contralto Pauline Garcia-Viardot, a close friend of the author.
Viardot’s life did resemble a novel, or a fairy tale. Born to a family of singers from Spain (her older sister was the famous mezzo-soprano Maria Malibran), she debuted in Paris in 1838 at the age of seventeen, stunning the public with her phenomenal vocal gifts (she had a range of two and a half octaves) and her exceptional musicality.
Pauline was not pretty, she was tiny with an enormous nose and mouth, bulging eyes, and wide hips, but the Romantic poet Alfred de Musset, enchanted by her talent and intellect, proposed to her. She rejected him and, taking George Sand’s advice, married the theater impresario and liberal journalist and translator (Dostoevsky read Don Quixote in his French rendering) Louis Viardot, who was more than twenty years her senior. Le tout Paris gathered in their salon, and the brilliant Pauline, who also played piano and composed, was its main star.
La Revue indépendante was an influential promoter of socialist ideas in France and Europe. Amazingly, by hook or crook, the journal reached St. Petersburg, where it was devoured by progressives. Given the Russians’ adoration of George Sand, the adventures of Consuelo/Pauline Viardot were a hot topics in the Russian capital.
By this time, Turgenev was a rather well known poet—tall, broad-shouldered, handsome, and a dandy (multicolored vests, lorgnette). However, his domineering mother thought he was too flighty.
His personal life was confused: he was having an affair with a sister of Mikhail Bakunin, later a notorious anarchist (Bakunin had more than brotherly feelings for her as well), but had a child with a serf laundress of his mother. He did not renounce his daughter, Pelagia, which would have been unseemly, given her strong resemblance to him.
Turgenev’s life changed in an instant when Pauline Viardot came to perform in St. Petersburg in the fall of 1843. She came to the capital because Nicholas I wanted a court Italian opera—he sang and played flute and trombone and loved Italian music. On his orders, the best singers were brought to Russia for huge fees. It was a cultural revolution for St. Petersburg, and the public went wild with heated arguments and endless gossip.
Viardot, who came with her husband, immediately conquered St. Petersburg; audiences “groaned with delight.” Turgenev, who had not been a major music lover before, began an adroit campaign on the famous singer. First he arranged to be in a hunting party outside the capital with Louis Viardot, who was as passionate about hunting as Turgenev; then he attended a performance of Rossini’s Il Barbiere di Siviglia with Viardot singing; and at last he was presented to the star—all in the course of a few days.
Many years later, Pauline Viardot recalled her first meeting with Turgenev with a laugh: “He was introduced as a young Russian landowner, a good hunter, splendid raconteur, and bad poet.”8 Turgenev was enchanted by her, but no one could have predicted that their relationship would last for forty years.
Avdotya Panaeva (Nekrasov’s outspoken common-law wife) disapproved: “He shouted about his love for Viardot everywhere, and among friends he talked of nothing but Viardot.” Even the critic Belinsky, who liked the writer, once reprimanded Turgenev: “Really, how can one believe in a love as voluble as yours?”9
Gradually, everyone believed in it, and most importantly, so did Pauline and her husband. A strange ménage à trois formed. Many assumed that it was purely platonic on Turgenev’s side, and that Louis Viardot had homoerotic feelings for the writer. The union turned out to be exceptionably stable, and wags hinted that it was fueled by Turgenev’s wealth (his mother died in 1850, leaving a large fortune) and fame.
Turgenev’s popularity increased rapidly. His A Sportsman’s Sketches, which attracted a lot of attention when published in 1852, was rumored to have hastened the abolition of serfdom in Russia. Rudin, Asya, First Love, Nest of Gentlefolk, On the Eve, and Fathers and Sons followed, each sparking a lively debate, and soon Turgenev was the recognized leader of Russian prose. But his life was forever tied to the Viardot family—he went wherever they did: France, then Baden-Baden, and then Paris, where Turgenev died in the Viardots’ summer villa in 1883, having outlived Louis Viardot briefly.
This union existed under the aegis of George Sand, who felt sincere amity for Turgenev, valuing him as a writer and human being: she thought him cheerful, simple, and modest (“He was extremely surprised when I told him he was a great artist and great poet”).
Leo Tolstoy’s opinion was rather different, as recorded in his diary in 1856: “His whole life is pretended simplicity.” Many other Russian observers described Turgenev as capricious, irresponsible, and vain. Foreigners, on the contrary, were all charmed by him: for them the gray-haired Russian giant was a fairy-tale character.
. . .
Turgenev wanted to live a life that was free, elegant, comfortable, and situated in the center of European culture. Before him, no Russian writer lived that way—nor has any since. Turgenev managed to achieve all this in no small part thanks to his relationship with the Viardots, whose salon was a magnet for French celebrities. One starstruck Russian woman described an evening she spent at the Viardots’, when the other guests included Gustave Flaubert, the violinist Pablo Sarasate, and the composers Charles Gounod and Camille Saint-Saëns: “White lacquered furniture upholstered in pale silk left the center of the room open. To the left of the grand piano two steps led to the picture gallery, illuminated from above. There was an organ in there and a few, but very valuable, paintings … Mme Viardot came to the middle of the room … After the aria from Verdi’s opera, came Schubert’s ‘Erlkönig,’ accompanied by Saint-Saëns.”10
Turgenev took great pleasure in the monthly “Flaubert dinners,” held in a private room of a Parisian restaurant for five famous writers: two close friends, Flaubert and Turgenev, and Zola, Alfonse Daudet, and Edmond Goncourt. Daudet recalled that they spoke of their own works and those of others (each time at least one of the participants brought along a just-published book), about women, and also about their ills, “the body that is becoming a burden like a ball and chain on a convict’s leg. Those were sad confessions of men who had turned forty!”11 Turgenev concentrated on the caviar, nevertheless.