The writers began their evenings at seven, and the feast would still be going strong at two a.m. The loud-spoken Flaubert would remove his jacket, the others following his lead; Turgenev, who suffered from gout, would lie down on the couch.
At those moments Turgenev undoubtedly imagined himself on the literary Olympus, one of the masters of the cultural universe. I saw similar emotions on the face of the poet Joseph Brodsky when he appeared in New York in the company of Czeslaw Milosz, Octavio Paz, and Derek Walcott (four Nobel laureates!).
Everything Turgenev wrote was instantly translated into several languages. For good reason—and like Brodsky a century later—Turgenev considered himself an arbiter and connoisseur of what contemporary Russian literature would please foreigners and what would not. He was a bit condescending about Tolstoy: “Foreigners don’t appreciate him. Childhood and Adolescence was translated into English and did not do welclass="underline" it was taken for an imitation of Dickens. I wanted to translate War and Peace into French, but skipping all the philosophizing, for I know the French: they won’t see the good beyond the boring and silly.”
When Tolstoy rejected the radical editing, Turgenev was hurt, telling a friend, “Someone else translated it, and probably the French won’t read it.” Turgenev considered himself an excellent editor. He was particularly proud of his editing work on the books by two great Russian poets who were not so lucky with publications in their lifetime: Tyutchev and Afanasy Fet.
At a dinner in his honor in 1856 when he came to visit St. Petersburg, after many toasts, Turgenev responded with an allegedly impromptu gem:
All this praise is undeserved
But one thing you must admit:
I forced Tyutchev to unzip
And I cleaned Fet’s pants.
This auto-epigram was greeted with howls of laughter from the bibulous writers, who understood the references: Turgenev had persuaded Tyutchev, engrossed in political and social intrigues, to agree to issue his verse, to which he was rather indifferent. It was edited by Turgenev and Nekrasov.
As for Fet, he had also given Turgenev a free hand, but when the book appeared in 1855, Fet found it “as cleaned up as it was disfigured.”12 Tyutchev too felt that Turgenev’s editing was heavy-handed, and that “many of his corrections ruined things.”13
Turgenev was friendly with everyone, but he also quarreled with everyone at some point—Nekrasov, Fet, Ivan Goncharov, author of Oblomov, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy. Essentially, it was a conflict between a Westerner to the marrow of his bones and nationalists, whatever they may have called themselves. The suspicious Fet thought that Turgenev had become a Westernizer “under the influence of Mme Viardot.” Turgenev readily agreed: “I do not undertake anything important in my life without the advice of Mme Viardot.”
Turgenev’s Russian friends nagged him to return to his homeland to live, instead of just visiting. He assured them that he missed Russia very much, but he always found an excuse why he couldn’t move just then. He did admit once that he felt “family” was not Russians but the Viardots: “If they were to move tomorrow to the most impossible city, say, Copenhagen, I would follow.”14
The main magnet was Pauline Viardot, and not only for her vocal genius. She drew well, read five languages, knew Russian well, and had a sophisticated taste in art and literature. Viardot once confided in a Russian friend, “Not a single line of Turgenev’s gets into print without his showing it to me first. You Russians do not know how much you owe me that Turgenev continues to write and work.”
Turgenev entrusted the upbringing of his daughter (whose name he changed from Pelagia to Paulina) to the Viardots. When visiting France, the poet Fet listened in amazement as Paulina “quite sweetly declaimed Molière’s poetry; but because she looked just like Turgenev in a skirt, she could make no claim on prettiness.”15 The girl had forgotten how to speak Russian.
The girl’s upbringing led to a furious row with Leo Tolstoy that almost ended in a duel with rifles. Turgenev was boasting in company that included Tolstoy how Paulina did charity work: she mended the clothing of the poor. Tolstoy (whom Turgenev dubbed a troglodyte for his directness and coarseness) sarcastically countered that “a dressed up girl, with filthy and stinking rags on her lap, is playing an insincere, theatrical scene.”
The argument suddenly flew out of control, and although bloodshed was avoided it left a break in relations between the two writers that lasted twenty years. The true cause of the altercation was still the same: the Christian anarchist Tolstoy hated Turgenev’s liberal posturing, and the animosity was returned. The role of women in society was part of the conflict.
Turgenev’s ideal woman was a mix of the real Pauline Viardot, her depiction in the novels of George Sand, and a big dose of Pushkin’s Tatiana from Eugene Onegin. All of “Turgenev’s maidens” are like that—pure, idealistic, and strong. The men in Turgenev’s works were mostly weak and indecisive. A pervasive melancholy envelops Turgenev’s prose, but there is always an acute sense of the bigger social issues important for Russia. That’s what made Turgenev’s writing so topical, and his eye for a telling detail and fine craftsmanship ensured lasting success with Western readers. But his moderation was ultimately his undoing.
In June 1880, Turgenev appeared as guest of honor at the unveiling of the first monument to Pushkin in Moscow. As a natural centrist, he found himself at the crossroads of clashing political forces. Alexander II wanted on this occasion to send an encouraging signal to the Russian intelligentsia. The unveiling of the Pushkin monument was taken under royal patronage.
The progressive intellectuals also wanted to be heard. For the liberal elite, the event was an opportunity to stress the independence of culture. In this situation, Turgenev appeared to be the spokesman of choice for all parties concerned, since he was looked upon as Pushkin’s successor.
But in Russia, being a moderate liberal and Westernizer is the most precarious position, especially in tense moments. This is where Turgenev lost. At the solemn convocation in the auditorium of the Nobility Assembly, with le tout Moscou present, Turgenev gave a mellow speech in which he took neither the side of the government (which Alexander II had expected of him) nor the side of the opposition (as the students present had hoped).
For all his admiration of Pushkin, Turgenev praised him cautiously, since he knew that Pushkin was not particularly famous in the West. The disappointed audience reacted with little enthusiasm. Turgenev was perceived as one of his own indecisive characters. But the true blow came from Dostoevsky, who delivered his Pushkin oration the next day in the same hall.
In his fiery speech, Dostoevsky declared Pushkin a world genius who was greater than Shakespeare or Cervantes because of his special, somehow purely Russian quality of “universal receptivity.” That was exactly what the whole audience—conservatives and progressives alike—desperately wanted to hear.
Turgenev’s careful equivocations were rejected, while Dostoevsky’s emotionally charged exaggerations carried the day. The stark contrast between the big, handsome Turgenev and the small, emaciated, hunched, and ugly Dostoevsky, whose coat drooped as if on a hanger, worked in the latter’s favor: Dostoevsky was one of their own, a Russian sufferer, while Turgenev looked like a wealthy tourist from Paris.
The audience was spellbound by the extraordinary nervous energy of Dostoevsky’s delivery. When he concluded with the words that Pushkin “carried away with him to the grave a certain great mystery. And now we must uncover it without him,” a hysterical cry came from the crowd—“You have uncovered it!”—which was picked up by other loud voices: “You have! You have!”