The Gentle Barbarian by V. S. Pritchett Read Free Book Online

capital and the child, called Pelagea—her name was later changed to Paulinette—was a useful item of emotional blackmail. When Ivan seemed to be obedient the little girl was brought from the servants’ quarters into the drawing-room; when he was not, she was sent back to the servants and he was thereby punished.
    The only means Varvara Petrovna now had of ruling her sons was to keep them short of money. Nikolai had been totally cut out; now Ivan was taught a lesson, if not as severely. To placate his mother he took a job in the Ministry of the Interior. His chief—who may have had more influence on him than has been noticed—was Vladimir Dahl, a schoolmasterly writer of Danish origin who had written a standard work,
A Reasoned Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language
in four volumes, but he was also a writer of anecdotes or sketches in the “natural” or documentary style. Ivan had entered the office to appease his mother, but really in order to spend his time writing long narrative poems of his own. His official task was to write a report on the needs of Russian agriculture. He knew that his report would lead to nothing: it was an exercise and would simply be filed away with dozens of others and be forgotten. He made the safe conventional criticisms of serfdom as other officials had done: one had to be careful not to say serfdom should be
abolished.
One simply lost the subject by going into speculations about reform. It was obvious to Dahl that the young dilettante was a useless civil servant whose work could not be relied on and that he was using the office for doing his own writing and, when he was not doing that, going off into Society to play the dandified drawing-room poet. Yet, from the point of view of the artist, no experience is lost. Writing the report was a help in due time when he came to writing the views of Lavretsky in
A Nest of Gentlefolk,
many, many years later. There is a passage from the report (quoted by David Magarshack in his
Life)
which makes the dangerous comparison of the genuine aristocracy of the free Norman Knights of England with the Russian nobility who were mere servants of the Tsar.
    It was 1843. He was twenty-five, and it was a decisive year forTurgenev. At his own expense he published the narrative poem
Parasha
he had been writing in office hours, and he came under a lasting influence: he met the great critic Belinsky.
    In a very few years, when he became famous, Turgenev grew to detest his poetry and did his best to keep it from the public eye and raged when anyone mentioned it. It was, he said, second-rate and like “dirty tepid water.” Yet
Parasha
marks a turning point: Belinsky wrote a long article praising the poem.
Parasha
is a closed book to those of us who cannot read Russian; nearly 100 years later Prince Mirsky in his
History of Russian Literature
says it is not contemptible. Belinsky was older than Turgenev but, like him, had passed through the same phase of German idealism and had become the father of “commitment” in Russian literature, which, for better or worse, has lasted with intervals until the present day, and one can understand what had pleased the critic. It was a long narrative story placed firmly in Russian life. Instead of Italianising his people, Turgenev has taken his pair of young lovers from Pushkin’s
Eugene Onegin
and has turned them into simple, puzzled young Russians of his generation. The hero is a scornful, careless young gentleman—another Lensky, or Turgenev himself; the heroine Tatyana is a simple, natural, devoted girl. They marry happily and are lost in the dullness of provincial life. The tone is now lyrical, now bantering and ironical. Gracefully Turgenev seems to be mocking his own disconcerting feelings about Tatyana Bakunin, particularly—as David Magarshack says, in the line:
    â€œI do not like ecstatic young ladies… I dislike their pale round faces”
    and also his own