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

weakness for aristocratic society. Even Varvara Petrovna, who was proud of the copy he sent her and even more proud that like a gentleman, he had paid for its publication and was therefore not a scribbler, enjoyed its light conversational tone and especially its descriptions of country life.
    â€œWe country folk,” she said, “love everything real. Your Parasha poem or story smells of wild strawberries.”
    She also picked up a social hint from the line:
“Kvas
was never served in the best houses” and banned the vulgar drink from Spasskoye—a pretty compliment. In her happy moments she was an engaging child and one can guess, in this respect, what Turgenev’s talents owed to her.
    The next step in Turgenev’s liberation came that summer when Belinsky became his friend and father-figure. There is a long and brilliant picture of him in Turgenev’s
Literary Reminiscences
, one of the best portraits which the master portrait painter ever wrote. Belinsky was already famous as a harassed and pugnacious journalist. He was the son of a doctor, his grandfather a priest—a class despised by the gentry—and since he came from Moscow he was a figure of ridicule in official Petersburg where he seemed as grotesque in his almost childish way as Gogol was. A shock of fair hair fell over his face, his nose was flattened, one of his shoulder blades stood out strangely, he was hollow-chested and he had a terrible consumptive cough and he had the habit of walking with a downcast head close to the walls of the street so that someone once said they had seen wolves like that in the forest, but only when they were chased by dogs. But he could be an enchanting talker, though when there were Slavophils present in a diplomatic or in a fashionable salon, he would break into roaring taunts and temper. Turgenev was captivated by his blue eyes which had golden sparks in them when he was excited.
    Belinsky was a poor man and earned his living by reviewing books and there was always a rush for his paper. He was obliged to review everything that was published, piles of stuff from cookery books upwards; but the attraction of his hurried writing lay in the sly way he had of slipping in his serious opinions on the state of Russia in the repressive reign of the Emperor Nicholas, in his cunning at getting round the severe censorship. His political commitment did not blunt his perceptions of the values of art—as happened ten years later among the didactic critics of the next generation. In speaking of Belinsky as a “committed” artist, Turgenev is also giving us the views he himself stuck to all his life:
    he was much too intelligent, he had too much common sense to deny art, to fail to understand not only its great significance, but also its very naturalness, its physiological necessity. Belinsky recognised in art one of the fundamental manifestations of the human personality, oneof the laws of our nature, a law whose validity was proved by our daily experience. He did not admit of life only for life’s sake; it was not for nothing that he was an idealist. Everything had to serve one principle, art as well as science, but in its own special way. The truly childish and, besides, not new but “warmed-up” explanation of art as an imitation of nature he would have deemed worthy of neither a reply nor of his attention … Art, I repeat, was for Belinsky as much a legitimate sphere of human activity, as science, as society, as the State … From art he demanded truth, vital, living truth.
    Turgenev had published
Parasha
at a bad time for writers; the censorship quibbled over every opinion and took a sadistic pleasure in annoying writers about their prose style. One of the censors was jovial. He used to say he did not “want to cross out a single letter in an article; all he wanted to do “was to destroy its spirit.”
    The censor said to me one day, looking with feeling into my