The Gentle Barbarian Read Online Free

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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”:
    On his [Yakov’s] lips the words “goodness,” “truth,” “life,” “science,” “love,” however enthusiastically uttered, never rang with a false note. Without strain, without effort he stepped into the world of the ideal: his pure soul was ready to stand before the holy shrine of beauty.
    The two were soon “soul in soul as the saying was.” The language of romantic love had become the fashion under the German influence: it was a reaction from the correct, ironical, formal language of his mother’s and father’s generation. When Turgenev entered Moscow University the ideals of self-perfection and the sublime absorbed the students and became grandiloquent. His own mind had turned to poetry and there is one of his early attempts in a letter to his Uncle Nikolai, an affable gentleman who had settled on the family in Spasskoye in the easy-going Russian way, and who eased the difficult moments of life there. The poem is about the annual drama of the breaking up of the ice on the Moscow river in the thaw which always drew the crowd. These ice-floes “suddenly fly-bang!”—against the stone banks and are smashed to pieces.
    They swallow each other in the wrestling of the waters/
The ice-floes are born of other ice-floes/
A sea is born of another sea.
    Once more, one notices, his eye moving from moment to moment.
    His growing literary turn is seen in his reading. He has been “enraptured by reading Mirabeau” and the young linguist was soon moving into English literature: Shakespeare, Shelley and above all Byron whom he knows through Pushkin. Shakespeare and Pushkin became his lasting guides. There are no evocations of Moscow’s gilded Asiatic steeples and gilded domes in Turgenev’s wriing, but, as Gogol did, he was more likely to note oddities like the hundreds of crows perched on the crucifixes and cupolas. Life in Moscow was almost rustic. Alexandr Herzen, ten years older than Turgenev, and to whom one turns again and again for close social observation, says in
My Past and Thoughts
that the houses of the gentry were all huddled together and yet the inhabitants were not of a single type: they were specimens of everything in Russian history, living unhurried and easy-going lives. Therewas a spaciousness of their own within them which we do not find in the
petit-bourgeois
life of the West … the rank and file of this society was composed of landowners not in the service or serving not on their own account, but to pacify their relations, and of young literary men and professors. There was a fluidity of relationships not yet settled and of habits not reduced to a sluggish orderliness, a freedom which is not found in the more ancient life of Europe … the Slav laisser faire.
    This Moscow lived by its dreams of Berlin and Paris. The talk went on until two in the morning and since it was dangerous to talk about politics, the subject had to be embalmed in literary and philosophical argument. The Muscovites were far from the formal Court life of Petersburg and the brisk coldness of official manners.
    All the same, “democratic” speculations were heard among the older students and the professors who had been to Berlin, and Turgenev, in his eager way, picked up one or two opinions that caused him to be mocked as “the American”; the first sign of his private horror of serfdom.
    The boys came back to Spasskoye for the holidays and at fifteen—Ivan told the Goncourts—he had his first mistress.
    I was very young. I was a virgin and with