The Gentle Barbarian

The Gentle Barbarian Read Online Free PDF

Book: The Gentle Barbarian Read Online Free PDF
Author: V. S. Pritchett
my mother.” The anecdote got into the papers. Rather too pedantically Turgenev pointed out that since his mother had two sons he could not have said these words that had brought ridicule on him—but he did say it was natural for a green youth to be terrified of being burned alive or drowned. The story took on so thoroughly—Dostoevsky used it years later in the caricature of Turgenev that appears in
The Possessed,
a novel noteable for its pillorying of many literary figures—that it got to Varvara Petrovna, who wrote angrily that it was indeed not his fault that he was called
le gros monsieur,
but to have made such a spectacle of himself had marked him as a ridiculous coward. Hence, in old age, his attempt to tell “the true story” of his panic and the appearance of another possible
gros monsieur,
the tall general in the story. A reckless story teller himself, Turgenev invited malice in return for his witticisms. One possible witness is missing from the story: Porfiry, the half-brother and the serf-valet whom he took to Berlin—but perhaps he was not on the steamer and had been sent on by another route. But good came out of the disaster from Varvara Petrovna’s point of view when later on her son told his mother of the affair with Mme Tyutchev. A passing love affair with an intelligent married woman years older than himself, she wrote, was—as the French had taught her—just the thing to form a young man.
    In Berlin, Turgenev and Porfiry settled into a modest flat. Porfiry was a clever boy who had inherited the Turgenev habits of overeating and chasing girls. The two young men lived like school boys together rather than as master and servant. They sat about playing cards; they organised rat hunts and Turgenev wrote Porfiry’s love letters for him. He was also determined to force his mother to set Porfiry free; he sent him to a medical school in Berlin and when he eventually returned to Spasskoye he became her house-doctor, expert in calming her with his chief remedy—laurel drops. But she refused to give him his freedom and Porfiry himself refused it while she was alive; like many of the serfs he suspected that emancipation was a doubtful advantage and he enjoyed his power over the old lady.
    Young Russians who went to Berlin for a larger education than they could get in Russia—“that immense and sombre figure, motionless and masked like the Sphinx”—carried their Russia with them. They fell into two main groups: the politicals who thought of nothing but drastic social change, and the metaphysicals who were under the full influence of German idealism. In
My Past and Thoughts,
Herzen says both parties were endlessly trying to “get out of the Chinese shoes of German manufacture in which Russia had hobbled for 150 years and though they may have caused painful corns they have not crippled their bones.”
    Turgenev was at an age for rushing into more “soul-in-soul” friendships, and he found them in two very different men: the aesthete philosopher Stankevich—a few years older than himself—and the young Bakunin. Herzen gives one of his terse, detailed portraits of Stankevich:
    Stankevich, also one of the
idle
people who accomplish
nothing
… had made a profound study of German philosophy, which appealed to his aesthetic sense: endowed with exceptional abilities, he drew a large circle of friends into his favourite pursuit. This circle was extremely remarkable: from it came a regular legion of
savants,
writers and professors, among whom were Belinsky, Bakunin and Granovsky … Sickly in constitution and gentle in character, a poet and a dreamer, Stankevich was naturally bound to prefer contemplation and abstract thought to living and purely practical questions; his artistic idealism suited him; it was “the crown of victory” set on the pale, youthful brow that bore the imprint of death. The others had too much physical
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