The Gentle Barbarian Read Online Free Page B

in the household he fell into the part of the soother, the peacemaker, the slave of her moods. When he was there—as Mme. Zhitova says—Varvara Petrovna forgot her violence, but at the same time, even he had to watch and calculate the moment when he could intercede. For she was capable of punishing the servants for whom he had tactfully spoken: it was a way of punishing him.
    He went back to Petersburg to the familiar Arctic Venice with its enormous palaces, its wide, windy, dusty streets down which the cold winds of the Baltic blew; and where, when they were not blowing, the fog of the marshes on which Peter the Great had built the city made the air leaden. It was a city made for hypochondriacs, dangerous to the weak chest and the throat. Its famous staring white nights were hard on the nerves of the sleepless. The capital seemed, as Herzen said, a façade, a screen, an inhuman artifice.
    One had to visualise behind the screen, soldiers under the rod, serfs under the lash, faces that betrayed a stifled moan, carts on their way to Siberia, convicts trudging in the same direction, shaven heads, branded faces, helmets, epaulettes and plumes.
    What Petersburg really meant to Turgenev was that it was the stepping-stone to Berlin and Europe. In his
Reminiscences
he wrote:
    I had long dreamed of that journey. I was convinced that in Russia one could acquire only a certain amount of elementary knowledge and that the source of true knowledge was to be found abroad. In those days there was not a single man among the professors and lecturersat the University of Petersburg who could shake that conviction of mine; indeed they themselves were imbued with it … The aim of our young men … reminded me of the search by the Slavs for chieftains from the overseas Varangians.
    There was no order in Russia. Everything he knew about his country disgusted him. He was for “plunging headlong into the German sea,” as soon as he could. He was ready for the Greek and German classics. And in his third year he showed Pletnyov, his professor, a laborious attempt to write a Russian
Manfred:
a play called
Steno
in iambic pentameter in the required Italian setting—“a perfectly preposterous work.” The professor invited him to his flat and made gentle fun of it and he met a little literary society and caught sight of Pushkin, the demi-god, at the theatre.
    I remember his small, dark face, his African lips, the gleam of his large teeth, his pendent side-whiskers, his dark, jaundiced eyes beneath a high forehead, almost without eyebrows and his curly hair.
    Not long after the poet was dead, killed in a duel, and he saw him lying in his coffin. He does not mention that his distant Turgenev kinsman was one of the only two persons permitted by the Tsar to escort the body by sleigh to his grave at Pakov.
    The times were bad for literature. Writers were still suffering from the effects of the repression that had begun twelve years before, after the aristocratic revolt. There was no free press—indeed to start a new paper or journal was forbidden—no public opinion, no personal freedom. The only outlet lay in private conversation in small gatherings and even then conversation was restrained. Turgenev gives an account of an evening at Pletnyov’s flat—most people lived in flats in Petersburg—and gives one or two exact thumbnail sketches of the forgotten writers who gathered there.
    To begin with, the notorious Skobelev, author of Kremnev, afterwards commandant of the St Petersburg fortress… with some of his fingers missing, with a clever, somewhat crumpled, wrinkled, typical soldier’s face and a soldier’s far from naive mannerisms—a man who had knocked about the world in short.
    There was an editor, “an equerry in the uniform of a gendarme,” and Guber, translator of
Faust,
an officer in the Transport Department, with tousled side-whiskers which were, in those days, taken to be