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

eyes: “You don’t want me to cross anything out. But just think: if I don’t cross anything out I may lose 3000 roubles a year and if I do—who cares?”
    There was bribery everywhere; serfdom; the army in the saddle; no courts of justice; the number of admissions to the universities had been reduced to three hundred; serious books could not be brought in from abroad; denunciations on all sides. What could be done?
    â€œWell,” said Turgenev, “you went to see Belinsky.”
    The friendship was long and there is no doubt Turgenev and his friends helped Belinsky with money. The fact that Belinsky thought nothing of the rest of his poetry, and when the first of the
Sportsman’s Sketches
appeared he was only a little more tolerant, did not affect the affection of the two men. Turgenev went to Salzbrunn and Paris with him but like many ardent Westerners, Belinsky was bored by Europe when he saw it, had not the slightest interest in European history and could speak no foreign language. Paris revolted him as it was to revolt Tolstoy. Belinsky used to call Turgenev “the gamin,” but what impressed him about “the gamin” was that he was an educated man.
    Belinsky’s friendship is a sign that there was a change in Turgenev’s character. He had come from Berlin snobbish, scornful and foppish and he was beginning to find by self-effacement his real powers.

Chapter 3
    What Turgenev needed in order to outgrow the dilettante self was not only a change of mind but, above all, a deepening of his power to feel. He had not yet known the force of passion.
    In November of 1843 Pauline Viardot-Garcia, the Spanish singer, came from Paris to Petersburg to sing the part of Rosina in
Il Barbiere di Seviglia
at the magnificent opera house which had been remodelled and which could hold an audience of three thousand people. Italian opera had not been heard there for a generation and the season aroused wild enthusiasm. It was a triumph for the young singer and for her middle-aged husband who was her impresario. She had succeeded in London but had been edged out of the Paris opera by the established prima donnas.
    The event was not one that a poet and young man of fashion could miss but Turgenev was in a bad way for money because his mother now refused to pay off his heavy debts and kept him to a very small allowance. She had been amused by
Parasha
as a personal present but she was not going to do anything for a common scribbler who dragged the family name into the papers. He could earn very little by his occasional writing, but he somehow got a cheap seat at the opera and saw on the stage a slight young married woman of twenty-two, three years younger than himself, with no figure and almost uglyto look at. She had black hair, a wide mouth, a heavy underlip that seemed continuous with her chin and a very long neck. The effect was of sullenness in a strong, gypsyish way, the hooded eyes were large and black, the pupils lifting in one of those asserting Spanish stares of mockery and pride; yet the stare would break into sudden vivacity, warmth and enticing smiles. And then the voice!
    Musset, who had known Pauline Garcia and had been in love with her when she was seventeen, said the voice had “the velvetness of the peach and youth,” and had written a poem in which the first verse runs:
    Oui femme, tel est votre empire;
Vous avez ce fatal pouvoir
De nous jeter par un sourire
Dans l’ivresse ou le désespoir.
    But the last verse contains the lines:
    Mais toute puissance sur terre
Meurt quand l’abus en est trop grand,
Et qui sait souffrir et se taire
S’éloigne de vous en pleurant.
    The extravagant words of Heine about her voice are well-known.
    Her ugliness is of a kind that is noble and, if I might almost say beautiful, such as sometimes enchanted and inspired the great lion-painter Delacroix… The Garcia recalls to your mind not so much the civilised beauty and tame