Among the Russians(54)

Such things have endeared him to contemporary ideology—despite his pacifism, despite his religiosity. But even his personal and changing creeds withered in his own mental furnace, and one leaves these rooms—their generous spaces, their workmanlike cane and mahogany furniture—with the sense of a man too exacting for any stillness of belief.

Everything he loved or mentioned has been preserved. The huge, three-pronged trunk of his favourite oak tree still writhes, dead and smooth now, from the garden’s earth; and the school which he opened for peasant children in 1859—offering a profoundly un-Soviet individualist education—is a hushed museum. The woodland paths which he walked are still cut. I sat on his favourite bench. And he was buried as he wanted, without consecration, in a glade of his woods.

I followed a wedding party down the long forest path to the grave. It is a well-trodden way. Brides come to place their bouquets here, as they do on war memorials, looking for the god they have lost. And Tolstoy’s spiritual stature—even his beard-lapped and Pantocratic face—are as close an earthly substitute for God the Father as they may find. ‘Let no ceremonies be performed in putting my body into the earth,’ he had asked. ‘Just a wooden coffin and whoever wishes may carry it or cart it to Zakaz, opposite the ravine at the place of the “green stick”.’ More than three quarters of a century before, while he was still a small boy, he and his brothers had indulged a childhood fancy that there was hidden in this ravine a stick on which was inscribed the secret of lost happiness.

So he is buried under a grass mound in the woods. There is nothing more: no stone, no word. Someone had laid gladioli there, and a few oak and ash leaves were drifting over the grave. The bride looked embarrassed in the silent clearing, then placed her bouquet hesitantly against the mound. If there was a feeling of incompleteness, the party around her did not show it, but only lingered a moment, as if something might happen, while the yellow leaves went on falling in the glen.



It was almost dusk when I reached Spasskoye-Lutovinovo, the home of Turgenev. By contrast to Tolstoy’s house, it looked half deserted. The mansion where he lived had been swept away by fire, like so many of these wooden palaces, but one wing restored as he had known it. A caretaker found me peering through the curtained windows, and let me in out of hours. Much of the furniture had survived, elegant in rosewood and birch, and she pointed out each piece to me until what had started as a favour became a pleasure, then a passion. Here was the English grandfather clock mentioned in The Brigadier, she said; there was the author’s shotgun—had I read Sketches from a Hunter’s Album? On one wall hung the drawing of a strange, gnomic child: Ivan Turgenev, aged six. The body was that of an infant, whose feet could not touch the floor from the chair in which he sat, but the face was shockingly old. From its preternaturally big head the eyes stared out with a depthless watchfulness. They looked ancient as time. In fact it was not an infant who sat there at all, but a premonition of adult suffering.

Of his father, who had married for money and was often away, the boy remembered only aloofness. But his mother was a hideous, black-eyed barbarian whose own atrocious upbringing was visited on her children and servants. She dealt out punishment and favour with the stark capriciousness of the unloved. She smothered Ivan with a perverted possessiveness, alternately pampered and flogged him. Five thousand serfs groaned under her yoke. She ruled them in grotesque etiquette and rusticity. Once she even pretended to die, so that she could punish whichever looked pleased.

The boy fled to the parklands of the estate, which are magnificent still. The trees rise in their lordly hundreds. Huge, wind-pushed birches lean and stagger together, and giant lime trees draw their avenues across the woods. The fragrance of these trees, the noise of their orioles and siskins and nightingales, the violets and the broken circles of sunlight shed on the black earth, fill Turgenev’s novels with their sound and scent. The boy lay beneath them mesmerized by insects, birdsong; but it was under these trees, too, that the unequal duel between an adder and a toad first made him doubt the goodness of heaven.

At the park’s end the avenues merge into woods around a sunken lake. Here, where the melancholy child fed the fish by hand, nothing has changed. In the deepening twilight the pool lay stagnant and sinister. Its whole surface was glazed with a thick weed which creaked weirdly in the silence, and was broken only by concentric circles motionless in its centre, as if something important had risen or been dropped there centuries ago.

Although he spent much of his life in western Europe, following the woman he loved—the singer Pauline Viardot, dark and exotically ugly as his mother—Turgenev returned again and again to Spasskoye. He was exiled here in 1852 after composing a too-complimentary obituary on Gogol, and eked out his time in writing, shooting game and flirting with serf girls. By now his mother was dead, and the place filled with a half-bitter nostalgia. The remembered servants had wizened. Soon before his death he returned to a mismanaged estate—its garden grown silent, rooks cawing, ivy crawling over the verandahs. Even now he entertained passing affections—an aristocratic widow, and a young actress for whom he built a bathing-hut by the edge of the dark, Excaliburish lake; but his love remained a thing of distance and oblique sensuality, a fantasy, an endless goodbye.

Many of his contemporaries never forgave Turgenev for his expatriate life; it was like a personal affront. He is the most Western of the great Russian novelists, and for the Marxist he should be—but is not—an unacceptable hero. Communism’s socialist realism, like most religious art, celebrates a revealed truth. It precludes the shifting awareness, that sense of the unrealizable, which haunt the pages of Turgenev. His people can exemplify nothing so evanescent as a certainty. He is the poet of the spirit’s strangeness.