Smoke (Alma Classics) Page 23

  p.169, d’un galant chevalier: “Of a gallant cavalier” (French).

  p.172, police spy: The Russian word kaplyuzhnik is Petersburg thieves’ cant for police spy.

  p.173, À tout venant je crache: “I spit at all-comers” (French). Turgenev notes that this statement is a “historical fact”.

  p.173, Whom God Helps No Man Can Harm: A version of this proverb occurs in Chapter 8 of Pushkin’s novel The Captain’s Daughter (1836).

  p.173, fifteen people on their courses: Turgenev adds his own footnote: “Litvinov’s premonitions came about. In 1866 there were thirteen Russian students in Heidelberg for the summer term, and, for the winter term, twelve.”

  p.176, Arbitrators: See first note to p. 19.

  p.176, a Solon or a Solomon: The King of Israel and the Athenian lawmaker and reformer were both renowned for their wisdom.

  p.179, Arzamas geese: In the nineteenth century a breed of goose from Arzamas, a city 250 miles east of Moscow, was particularly highly regarded.

  p.181, actually secret: An untranslatable pun on Deistvitel´nyi tainyi sovetnik, the second highest civil-service rank. Usually translated as “Actual Privy Councillor” but could be rendered as “Actual Secret Councillor”.

  p.182, Voulez-vous une tasse de thé?: “Would you like a cup of tea?” (French).

  p.182, Mysterious Drop by F.N. Glinka… missions in the East… fraternities in Belorussia: Mysterious Drop is a very long mystical poem, written in the 1840s by Fyodor Nikolayevich Glinka (1786–1880). The “missions in the East” are a reference to the Russian Orthodox Mission in China, the collective name for a series of proselytizing missions to China, from the seventeenth century onwards. The fifteenth such mission, led by Archimandrite Pallady took place in 1858. The “fraternities in Belorussia” were monastery-based anti-Russian groupings in Belorussia (Belarus). The leading Slavophile Ivan Aksakov had published an article in 1864 warning of the need for Orthodoxy to combat the spread of Catholicism in Belorussia.

  p.182, Elle n’a pas la foi: “She has no faith” (French).

  p.182, qu’elle a… qu’elle a le embittered mind: “That she has… that she has an embittered mind”. The inadequate French of the speaker, who has to complete her sentence in Russian, is the reverse of Hippolyte Kuragin’s linguistic inadequacy in the fourth chapter of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Kuragin has to switch to French to complete an anecdote begun in Russian.

  p.182, C’est une âme égarée: “She is a lost soul” (French).

  Extra Material on Ivan Turgenev’s Smoke

  Ivan Turgenev’s Life

  Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev was born in the Russian city of Oryol on 9th November 1818 (all dates in this section follow the Gregorian calendar). His mother, the wealthy Varvara Petrovna Lutovinova, according to many reports was an extremely capricious and cruel woman. Her baronial estate of Spasskoye contained twenty villages, and she had control of five thousand serfs; she is reported to have had some of her serfs deported to Siberia because they did not take their hats off in her presence, and to have regularly inflicted corporal punishments on them. She came into her inheritance at the age of twenty-six, and three years later married a twenty-three-year-old army officer, Sergei Turgenev, from an ancient family of aristocrats who had fallen on hard times: he possessed only one village and had just a hundred and thirty serfs. He married her presumably for her money: he seems to have taken very little interest in her afterwards, spending his time in numerous affairs with women, mainly serf girls at Spasskoye and his own estate, Turgenevo.

  Ivan Turgenev had an older brother, Nikolai, who was born in 1816, and a younger brother, Sergei, who was born in 1821; very little is known about this last child, but it appears he was partially paralysed, epileptic and mentally retarded; he died in his teens.

  Varvara Petrovna’s already unpleasant personality became, it seems, progressively worse as a result of her husband’s philandering, and Ivan recounted later that he and Nikolai had been whipped and beaten almost daily during their childhoods, frequently as a result of a whim on their mother’s part.

  As in most Russian upper-class families of the time, French was spoken as the language of preference; indeed, Russian was considered among this class to be a barbaric language. Therefore Turgenev was from an early age fluent in French, and also acquired a good knowledge of German from private tutors. Fortunately for his career as a writer in Russian, his parents almost totally ignored their sons, leaving Ivan ample time to roam around the locality getting to know the peasants and play with their children. It was from them that Turgenev learnt spoken Russian: he later claimed that he was taught to read and write Russian by his father’s valet.

  By 1827 the whole family had moved to Moscow, where the boys were enrolled at a private academy. However, after a couple of years, Nikolai was transferred to the Military Officer Training School in Petersburg, and Ivan was brought back home to have his education completed by tutors who would prepare him for the university entrance exams. By the age of eleven, Turgenev was being given lessons in French, German, Maths and Philosophy, and already trying his hand at writing poetry and dramas in the “sublime” style of pre-Pushkin Russian authors.

  Turgenev entered Moscow University in 1833, but lasted there only one term. Just before entering university, he had been bedridden for some months by an unknown illness, probably of a hypochondriac nature, and having missed too much time from his initial term he was transferred in autumn 1835 to the Philological Faculty of Petersburg University. On 11th September of that year, when Turgenev was only sixteen, his father died.

  Although intending to become a university academic, probably in Philosophy, he was already writing Romantic poetic dramas in the manner of Byron. When he sent one of them to a leading literary magazine, it was rejected, but with some encouraging words from the editor, and in 1838 he did have two poems published in this periodical. As part of his studies, he had now begun to learn English, and he attempted to translate extracts from King Lear, Othello and Byron’s Manfred. Besides English, Turgenev was devoting a great deal of his time to studying Latin and Ancient Greek. He also took private lessons in painting and drawing, and became an accomplished artist and caricaturist.

  Turgenev graduated from the Faculty of History and Philology in June 1837. His mother thought that the true fount of all learning was outside Russia, so in May 1838 she sent him to do extra study in the subject at the University of Berlin. On the crossing from Stettin to Berlin the ferry caught fire, and Turgenev offered some of the sailors large bribes to let him embark on a lifeboat before anybody else, including women and children – an incident that was to haunt and embarrass him for the rest of his life.

  In Berlin he devoted himself intensively to the study of Philosophy, History, Latin and Greek. He fell under the spell of Hegel’s philosophy, and soon became involved in the seething discussion groups regularly held by the students. There were a large number of young Russians studying in Germany: the vast majority of these were social progressives who wanted a total transformation of the social and political situation at home – often by violent revolutionary means, including assassination. Among the people he met in Berlin was Mikhail Bakunin, one of the founders of the Russian anarchist movement. Although Turgenev held intense philosophical discussions with him, and was at first attracted by Bakunin’s charismatic personality, he managed to keep his distance intellectually and maintain a moderate stance in regard to the methods of achieving social change. Some contemporary critics claimed that the figure of Rudin, the eponymous hero of Turgenev’s first novel, was a portrait – in fact, a caricature – of Mikhail Bakunin.

  In the spring of 1841 Turgenev returned to Russia. In the meantime, his mother’s mansion at Spasskoye had been burnt down by a fire, apparently caused by a peasant woman performing a propitiatory ritual with hot coals. Only one wing was left, and Turgenev had to be content with one room there until
the end of the summer. In the winter of that year, his elder brother Nikolai married one of his mother’s parlour maids. Varvara Petrovna immediately stopped his allowance, and Nikolai was forced to resign his officer’s commission in the army and get a lowly job in the civil service. She severed all contact with him for many years. Ivan enrolled again at Petersburg University and began to study for a Master’s in Philosophy which would have enabled him to gain a university post. He moved into his brother’s flat and, after a period of intense studies, passed the exams successfully in June 1842. He then travelled to Moscow to apply for the vacant Chair of Philosophy at Moscow University.

  However, he never submitted this application, as Turgenev’s personal life underwent a dramatic change. In May 1842 he had had a brief affair with a sempstress employed by his mother. She became pregnant by him, and his mother threw them out of the house. He found a room for her in Moscow, and settled an allowance on her. She soon bore him a daughter who was given the humble peasant name of Pelageya. At the same time, Turgenev met in Moscow Bakunin’s sister Tatyana, who was even more imbued with Hegelian ideals than her brother. She claimed that, though she loved Turgenev, she simply wanted to be his “sister” and his “friend”. This Platonic relation lasted for two years, by which time it seems Turgenev had become thoroughly disillusioned with Tatyana, Bakunin, Hegelianism and philosophy in general.

  Turgenev gave up any ambition of becoming an academic, and took a civil-service job at the Home Office. But he also began now to devote more time to writing, and one of his first mature works was a long narrative poem entitled Parasha. The poem, written in clear and simple language, in imitation of Pushkin, tells the tale of a love affair among ordinary peasant folk. The Romantic subjects and flowery style of his younger years had been left behind – as it turned out, for ever. Parasha was published in 1843 at the author’s own expense, and the renowned critic Belinsky described it as one of the most remarkable productions of the year. Following this, Turgenev and Belinsky became close friends, and the critic introduced the author into the literary circles of Petersburg and Moscow.

  Reprimanded by his office superiors for being often late for work or not turning up at all, Turgenev decided to resign his job and devote himself entirely to literature. His mother, in disgust, cut off his allowance and all contact with him for several years. During this period, Turgenev had to live on practically nothing, in unheated rooms, even during the Russian winter.

  In 1843 occurred an event that was to prove the decisive turning point of Turgenev’s life, and that caused him to spend much of the rest of his life outside Russia. The world-renowned Spanish opera singer Pauline Viardot, née García, visited Petersburg to sing at its opera houses. She was married to Louis Viardot, a man twenty years older than herself. Turgenev met her for the first time in November 1843, and became immediately infatuated with her. This passion was to remain with him for the rest of his life, making it difficult for him to form a stable relationship with any other woman. During Pauline’s first visit to Russia, Turgenev had only a brief contact with her, as she was constantly monopolized by her many other long-standing admirers. Turgenev was able to see Pauline again when she came back to sing in Petersburg the following year, but he was once more almost ignored by her, though he inveigled himself into a long and animated conversation with her husband.

  In February 1845 Turgenev went abroad, allegedly to consult an eminent oculist, but in fact to follow the Viardots to Paris, having received an invitation from Pauline to spend a short time at her country chateau of Courtavenel. He was by now writing affectionate letters to her; her letters to him were far more intermittent and reserved.

  Turgenev spent much of the next few years abroad. While in France in 1845, he began to write, from his own experiences, stories of Russian peasant life, portraying the cruelty suffered by serfs from their landowners. These sketches, for the most part originally printed in Russian literary journals, were finally collected and published in volume form in August 1852 as Memoirs of a Hunter.

  Turgenev once again saw Pauline singing in Petersburg in 1846, and then left Russia with the Viardots in early 1847. From then on, for the rest of his life, he would spend long periods of time with Pauline and her husband in France, Germany and Britain, always remaining on friendly terms with her husband. There is little evidence as to whether Pauline and Ivan ever consummated their relationship. Paul, the child born to Pauline in 1857, may well have been Turgenev’s son, although she frequently had other lovers.

  Turgenev was in Paris for the latter part of the 1848 revolution. The first upheaval had seen the monarchy being overthrown and replaced by a bourgeois government. Afterwards there had been further turmoil on the streets when the workers, in their turn, tried to obtain concessions from the new administration. Turgenev, while declaring at first his full sympathy with those who brought down the monarchy and then with those who tried to establish a more democratic government, was sickened by the needless violence of the intellectual revolutionaries who incited the working classes to man the barricades, leading to many of them being slaughtered by government troops.

  In the summer of 1850, Turgenev finally left Paris and went back to Russia. In the preceding years he had written most of the sketches for Memoirs of a Hunter as well as several plays, which are generally considered to be among his weaker works, with the exception of A Month in the Country. The play, heavily cut by the censor, was published in a drastically altered version in January 1855 and premiered in its fuller, uncensored version in Moscow only in 1872.

  While Turgenev was in France, his mother had repeatedly appealed to him to return home, and when he refused, she had devised a vicious way of punishing him, forcing his daughter Pelageya, now seven years old, to work in the kitchen with the other servants. When he returned home and discovered the situation, Turgenev immediately withdrew Pelageya from Spasskoye, and wrote to Pauline Viardot asking whether the singer could accept his daughter into her family. Pauline accepted, and Pelageya was dispatched to France, promptly renamed Paulinette, provided with tutors and brought up as a French lady.

  Varvara Petrovna became suddenly ill and died on 10th December 1850. The estates and wealth were divided between Ivan and his elder brother Nikolai, leaving the writer with the whole of Spasskoye. Proving the sincerity of his democratic ideals, he emancipated all his serfs and gave them reasonable financial severance payments – a move that was considered revolutionary at the time. If they wished to remain on his land they could pay him a moderate rent and farm it for their own profit, rather than having to turn over most of their produce to him.

  In March 1852 the famous writer Gogol had died, and Turgenev published a brief obituary in the press. Although by the end of his life Gogol had become profoundly reactionary and Turgenev’s article contained nothing of a political nature, but simply spoke glowingly of his works, the Tsarist government reacted angrily and sentenced Turgenev to a month in prison. At the end of that term, he was sent back to Spasskoye for a two-year period of house arrest. Turgenev spent this time writing, reading and hunting on his estate. In April 1853, he wrote to the Crown Prince Alexander acknowledging his guilt and asking for permission to leave the estate in order to consult doctors. The permission was finally granted by the Tsar in November that year, meaning that Turgenev had only served sixteen months of his sentence. However, he was kept under police surveillance until 1856.

  In August 1852 Memoirs of a Hunter had appeared in volume form, and it was an instant success. One alarmed aristocrat described it as “an incendiary work”, and the Tsar, Nicholas I, dismissed the censor who had authorized its publication.

  Turgenev now began to experiment with longer forms, such as novellas and novels. On 17th June 1855, he sat down to write his first novel, Rudin, and completed it in only seven weeks. It was published, with considerable additions, in the January and February 1856 issues of the literary journal Sovremennik (The Contemporary).

 
In 1856 Turgenev spent the summer at Spasskoye, then travelled to France to be with the Viardots. His time there was embittered by the realization that Pauline was having an affair with the artist Ary Scheffer. Possibly as a result of Viardot’s unfaithfulness, Turgenev was often ill with what appears to be some kind of psychosomatic illness, of which a major symptom was agonizing pains in his bladder. He suffered from this illness for many years afterwards, and there is speculation he may have become impotent as a result of it. He and Pauline had a big argument towards the end of 1856, and his affliction became even worse, plaguing him for another sixteen months or so. Turgenev lost his interest in writing and was plunged into despair, possibly suffering a mild nervous breakdown. He spent most of this period lodging in Paris, with occasional visits to Germany, Britain and Italy. On a visit to London in May 1857, he had repeated contact with such luminaries as Disraeli, Thackeray, Macaulay and Carlyle: by this time his English was competent enough for him to engage in long conversations on literature and politics with those he met there.

  In October 1856 Turgenev began to write Home of the Gentry. Owing to his mental and physical sufferings, work proceeded very slowly, and the novel was completed only in the autumn of 1858. It was published in January 1859 in Sovremennik and was an immediate success. On a brief return to Russia, Turgenev found himself lionized in literary society.

  In June 1858, Viardot’s lover, Ary Scheffer, died suddenly. Although Turgenev wrote to her a couple of times soon afterwards expressing his condolences, he did not send her any more letters until April 1859, just before he returned to France, perhaps because relationships between them had greatly deteriorated. Even when he did return, he saw little of Viardot, and she kept him at a distance.

  During this period, Turgenev was able to begin a new novel, On the Eve, which was almost finished by the time he went back to Russia in October 1859. It was published in the January and February 1860 editions of the periodical Russkiy Vestnik (Russian Herald). Generally approved by the critics for its style, the novel was criticized by some for the absence of any social viewpoint and for not attempting to stimulate readers to improve the social conditions surrounding them.