Russia's Master of Seeing

By Stefan Kanfer

THE GENTLE BARBARIAN by V.S. PRITCHETT 243 pages. Random House. $10.

Dostoyevsky thought him a haughty poseur; the Goncourt brothers found him an amiable giant. He wrangled with Tolstoy, befriended Zola, intrigued Carlyle, enchanted Henry James. He was at once a hunter of game and celebrity, a well-traveled man of letters, and a provincial Russian. Ivan Turgenev's life is several lives, and by now several biographies should have recounted them. Yet, as Critic V.S. Pritchett notes, there has not been a definitive biography of Turgenev in any language.

Until now. This brisk, critical Life operates under a great handicap: Pritchett does not read Russian; literary and biographical sources come almost entirely from translations. But the author has the compensating virtues of insight and wit. Turgenev's oeuvre has long been accessible to an English-speaking audience; The Gentle Barbarian at last makes the neglected author as approachable as his work.

Unpredictable Virago. Ivan's father, an impoverished dandy, died in 1834 when the boy was 16--possibly to get away from his wife. Turgenev's mother was a wealthy, unpredictable virago who alternately punished and indulged her serfs and sons. "Children brought up under a tyranny," observes Pritchett, "spoiled one moment and beaten the next are likely to be evasive and to lead a double life." Ivan, Mama's favorite, always existed on two planes: the imaginative and the real. On the first he succeeded; on the second he foundered for six decades.

Turgenev began his career as a narrative poet. He was later to describe his verse as "dirty tepid water." But it served to attract influential critics, and propelled him to local prominence. Like many in his privileged caste, Ivan furthered his education in Western Europe. On the Continent, the perpetual bachelor commenced the affair that was to last a lifetime. Heinrich Heine provides the best description of Prima Donna Pauline Viardot: "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." She was married --and remained married--to Louis Viardot, a prosperous litterateur. Viardot and Turgenev met and found much in common: an interest in writing, bird shooting and Pauline.

An amalgam of these categories brought Turgenev his widest recognition. Enraptured by the Spanish singer, he reached back for lyric memories of his rural Russian youth. The Sportsman's Sketches provides a landscape with figures--peasants and hunters who wander in a remote and somehow doomed pastorale. The book was to become a profound influence on Hemingway, and Poet Randall Jarrell called its evocations of the countryside "the best of all possible worlds." Pritchett agrees. "There are two masters of seeing in Russian literature," he observes. "Tolstoy sees exactly as if he were an animal or a bird: and what he sees is still and settled for good. He has the pride of the eye. Turgenev is also exact but without that decisive pride: what he sees is already changing." A country daybreak, for example, with "torrents of hot sunlight, crimson at first and later brilliantly red, brilliantly golden. Everything began quivering into life, awakening, singing, resounding, chattering."

The Sketches provided an unsettling portrait of peasant life and may have influenced Czar Alexander II's emancipation of the serfs. Certainly it emancipated the 34-year-old author. In the 30 years that remained to him he elaborated his theory of personality--humanity is composed of Hamlets and Don Quixotes--and proceeded to illustrate that notion with a series of memorable novels and short stories: First Love, Smoke, Torrents of Spring, A House of Gentlefolk, Fathers and Sons. Something of his mother's temperament showed in Ivan's Hamletic-Quixotic behavior: he helped pay Dostoyevsky's gambling debts and consoled a fellow author with just the right touch: "Cheer up, old fellow. After all, you are Flaubert." But he also fathered illegitimate children in whom he displayed but glancing interest. The consuming passion of his life was saved for Pauline, whom he saw less and less as he traveled and wrote. In 1862 Turgenev provided his readers with a masterwork--and Pritchett provides his readers with a tragicomedy: "Turgenev had just finished Fathers and Sons and gave it to Tolstoy to look at. He lay on [a] divan in the drawing-room, began to read and fell asleep over it. Ominous. Tolstoy woke up to see Turgenev's back impatiently disappearing through the doorway."

Surreal Tales. The Tolstoyan reception was followed by more injurious attacks. Radicals interpreted the book's collision of Nihilists and Romanticists as a caricature of their movement. Conservatives accused the author of siding with the enemies of order. There was worse to come. In later years, resented for his Westernized style, Turgenev found himself lampooned in Dostoyevsky's The Devils as Karamazinov, a lisping, effeminate "Red." The portrait is not only malicious but wrongheaded. A constitutional monarchy was about as far as the apolitical Ivan was prepared to go. The man of affairs was interested less in the motion of politics than in the emotion of individuals struggling with incalculable forces of nature, history and erotic attraction. In his final years, white-haired and stooped, still involved with Pauline, still winning new readers, he began a series of surreal tales. Death, in A Living Relic, comes to a sick peas ant to report, "I am sorry I can't take you now."

"A story," says Pritchett, "which might be pious, sentimental and weepy is alight with the strangeness of life and told with delicacy, sense and compassion." Those characteristics are typical of Turgenev's writing -- and apply to this reflective and sinewy biography. On his deathbed, the Russian wept and imagined himself a peasant. It was only a delusion. Ivan Turgenev, as Pritchett shows, is an aristocrat of talent more than birth. His grave, in the remote Volkov cemetery, may be visited by few.

The Gentle Barbarian, his latest and most attractive monument, should be at tended by many. Its inscription reads:

"Cheer up, old fellow. After all, you are Turgenev."

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