The Gentle Barbarian Read Online Free PDF Page B

vigour and too little poetical feeling to remain long absorbed in speculative thought without passing on into life. An exclusively speculative tendency is utterly opposed to the Russian temperament, and we shall soon see how the
Russian spirit
transformed Hegel’s teaching and how the vitality of our nature asserted itself …
    And he goes on to say how the scholarly, scientific jargon of the Germans was unsuited to the leading characteristic of the Russian language which has extraordinary ease in expressing
    â€¦ abstract ideas, the lyrical emotions of the heart, “life’s mouse-like flittings,” the cry of indignation, sparkling mischief and shaking passion.
    a sentence that conveys the kind of language that was forming in Turgenev’s mind and enabled him to become eventually a master of Russian prose.
    Bakunin, though deep in the same beliefs, was beginning to emerge and turn to politics.
    What was it touched these men? … They had no thought, no care for their social position, for their personal advantage or for security; their whole life, all their efforts were bent on the public good, regardless of all personal profit … The interests of truth, the interests of learning, the interests of art,
humanitas,
swallowed up everything.
    Turgenev himself evoked this period of his life when he came to write his first novel,
Rudin,
in which Stankevich—as Pokrovskyand Bakunin (as Rudin), are drawn from life. Stankevich had, Turgenev says, the magnetism of the saint. Self-perfection was the business of life and he rejected all political commitment. He deplored Turgenev’s frivolity and reproached him for telling lies.
    Bakunin was four years older than Turgenev. In
Rudin,
Turgenev writes of his domineering and flamboyant character:
    As we listened to Rudin [i.e., Bakunin], we felt for the first time as if we had grasped the general principle of the universe, as if a veil had been lifted at last. Even if admitting he was not uttering an original thought—what of that? Order and harmony seemed to be established in all we knew … he had a prodigious memory and what an effect he had on young people. (The young) must have generalisations, conclusions, incorrect if you like but still conclusions. A perfectly sincere man never suits them. Try and tell young people you cannot give them the whole truth and they will not listen to you.
    The friendship of Bakunin and Turgenev was a friendship of blue-eyed Slavonic giants. The Berliners were amazed by the sight of the two dandies, Turgenev in his green swallow-tail coat and Bakunin in his-lavender one, as they sat in the cafés, went to concerts and theatres and appeared in the fashionable salons, united by the teachings of Hegel. Turgenev was under the spell of Bakunin’s eloquence: on Bakunin’s side there was the passion for domination and also—since he was forming a lifetime’s genius for living at other people’s expense—a lavish if disinterested enjoyment of Turgenev’s money.
    Bakunin’s dominance, in these two years, had an additional grace: he was the ruler and protector of three sisters. Turgenev had fallen in love with the plainest one; Stankevich and the critic Be-linsky with the other two. The story is an odd one. Bakunin was the eldest of ten children born to a fairly wealthy landowner in the sleepy province of Tver and had organised his brothers and sisters into a kind of conspiracy of sensibility against the father he detested. He loved his sisters jealously and when they grew up he meddled in their love affairs or marriages, in order to keep his hold on them; indeed it is thought that failure in this was the private source of his turn to wild political conspiracy and to Anarchism. There is a strong suspicion that he was impotent and he was certainlya stern supervisor of Turgenev’s sexual morals. Herzen ironically reports Bakunin as saying to Turgenev in the proper language of the