The Gentle Barbarian Read Online Free PDF Page A

a mild assertion of liberal tendencies; and a shy, listening poet, dressed in a long-skirted, double-breasted frock coat, a short waistcoat with a watch chain of blue glass beads and a necktie with a bow, whose very ordinary Russian face suggested the self-educated artisan or house-serf.
    At nineteen, Turgenev, with his handful of unpublished poems, was the shy listener and so conventional in his tastes that he saw nothing beyond a crude joke in Gogol’s
The Government Inspector
which had been put on because it gave the Tsar himself a chance for one of his loud guffaws at lines like: “You’re taking bribes not according to your rank.”
    In his years at Petersburg Turgenev read widely and showed more signs of turning to academic life than of distinction as a poet. His mind was set on enlightenment in Berlin, and where he had no difficulty in persuading his mother to let him go.
    The day of departure came. The whole family went to Kazan cathedral to pray for him. With him went his valet Porfiry, a serf of his own age who was in fact his half-brother, the son of Turgenev’s father by a maid at Spasskoye. There were tears at the parting. The mother made him swear not to gamble, and as she was carried back to her carriage she fainted. His brother saw him on to the steamer for Lübeck. “I plunged,” Turgenev wrote in famous words, “into the German sea which was to purify me and when I emerged from the waves I discovered myself a Westerner.” The first venture towards expatriation had begun.
    And there was a literal plunge into the sea. Not long after the steamer left harbour and was still close to land it caught fire. It carried 280 passengers and 28 carriages, for before the railway age well-off Russians always took their carriages with them on the European tour. Turgenev had already forgotten his promise to his mother and was winning at cards when the cry of “Fire” went up and the ship listed, throwing the tables and his money across the saloon. Like most of the passengers, with the exception of the Danish sailors, the women and children and a Russian ambassador, the young man losthis head. In old age Turgenev gave his version of the affair and he turned it all into a frightening farce. There was a general who shouted, “We must send a courier to the Emperor.” Another gentleman, who was travelling with an easel and a portrait in oils, jabbed it through the eyes, ears and nose and mouth with his umbrella; a German brewer was in tears and called out to a sailor “Captain! Captain,” who replied, “I am the Captain. What do you want?” Seeing the water reddened by the flames, Ivan writes: “I said to myself, ‘So that’s where I shall die and at the age of 19.’” He says he rushed to the ship’s side, pretending that he was going to commit suicide, for he could not swim. From what one knows of him this may be true, for he was given to half-comic theatrical fits of extravagance. The story is confusing. One moment he is bravely clambering across the roofs of the burning carriages on the deck, the next he is hanging by a rope over the ship’s side and a fat woman jumps on top of him and they both tumble into a life-boat. He mentions a tall man, another general, who pushes a woman aside and jumps onto a boat which has capsized. There is really far too much detail in the report: it is written to settle the gossip about his absurd and cowardly behaviour that dogged him all his life.
    He got ashore safely in the company of a Mme. Tyutchev and her children—she was the wife of the poet—and somehow got them to Berlin by road and there he seems to have begun a long love affair with her.
    Unluckily a few weeks after the fire, malicious gossip about his antics on the steamer spread to the drawing-rooms of Petersburg: the fat young giant with the shrill voice had pushed past all the women screaming, “Save me. I am the only son of