In this his realism is finer than Tolstoy’s assertion of all knowledge and absolute judgement. A few months later the father has a stroke, persuades his wife to send ‘a considerable sum of money’ to someone in Moscow. We are left with a surmise and then he dies.

But for Turgenev, surmise is never the end: the storm sends out its ripples long after the climax has passed and they seem even to pass into timelessness and to spend themselves in a haunting sense of an endless space that appears to surround us and where we become nothing:

During the past month, I had suddenly grown much older, and my love, with all its violent excitements and its torments, now seemed even to me so very puny and childish and trivial beside that other unknown something which I could hardly begin to guess at, but which struck terror into me like an unfamiliar, beautiful but awe-inspiring face whose features one strains in vain to discern in the gathering darkness.

We hear of Zinaida’s death in childbirth:

So that was the final goal towards which this young life, all glitter and ardour and excitement…went hurrying along.

The love stories of Turgenev cannot be dismissed as ‘fairy stories’ remote from his concern with the ‘Russian situation’, though it is true that he became increasingly concerned with the frontiers of consciousness and with the imagination as it exists for its own disturbing sake. The habit of social diagnosis remains. Zinaida is a hapless déclassée, obliged to gamble with her beauty; she is not as worldly or as dishonest as the climbing Irina of Smoke – the daughter of a corrupt General – whose behaviour caused her to be written off contemptuously by the latest slang word ‘fantasque’. Nor is Zinaida an overwhelming intriguer in lust, like Maria Polozov in Torrents of Spring who has serf blood in her and has married a cynical landowner who is impotent and thinks only of his belly. Maria is Vénus toute entière a sa proie attachée, indifferent to those she destroys. She represents the anarchy inherent in society and her sexual passion is the poison that is the corrupter of conscience. She will drag her lover to Paris, away from his responsibilities to the people on his Russian estate.

Turgenev’s love stories are a progress through the aspects of love as it changes from generation to generation among the Russians of his time. The central character of A Lear of the Steppes is a free peasant who gives his property to his daughters and we see love in them connected with the greed for power and property. There is a period in which Turgenev is fascinated, both rationally and irrationally, by the vogue of spiritualism: but this has links with ancient Russian superstition, particularly with bewitchment in the sense of this being the hypnotizing power of the imagination. Such stories, like the excellent Faust and the strange Klara Militch, are examples of a moral curiosity about the part played by the unconscious. In his love stories he is deeply aware of love as a spell; he is the poet with a sensibility open to the value his people give to their own strangeness. He speaks for them as the great artist must, whether they are innocent, fated, self-sacrificing or grossly triumphant in sensual greed and without conscience. His gift is self-effacement and for a transparency through which they can be seen as inwardly and outwardly they are. One can almost say that one hears them, as if they were the notes of a haunting sonata passing from one movement to the next. Perhaps there – and not in his own self-love or his masochism – lay the strange bond with Pauline Viardot, and it is the great merit of Isaiah Berlin’s translation of First Love that the notes of the sonata are clearly and truthfully struck, by a writer whose knowledge of his own language and ours is impeccable.

V. S. PRITCHETT

 

The guests had left long ago. The clock struck half-past twelve. Only the host, Sergey Nicolayevich and Vladimir Petrovich remained in the room.

The host rang the bell and ordered supper to be taken away.

‘Well then, that’s agreed,’ he said, settling himself more deeply into his armchair and lighting a cigar. ‘Each of us is to tell the story of his first love. You begin, Sergey Nicolayevich.’

Sergey Nicolayevich, a round little man with a fair, plump face, looked first at his host and then up at the ceiling.

‘In my case,’ he finally said, ‘there was no first love. I began with the second.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Oh, it’s quite simple. I was eighteen when I first began to court a very charming young girl, but I did this as if it was nothing new to me, exactly as I later flirted with others. Actually I fell in love for the first and last time when I was about six, with my nurse, but that was a very long time ago. I do not now remember the details of our relationship – and even if I did, how could they possibly interest anyone?’

‘Well then, what are we to do?’ the host began. ‘There was nothing very remarkable about my first love either: I didn’t fall in love with anyone until I met Anna Ivanovna, my present wife, and then it all went perfectly smoothly. Our fathers arranged the whole thing. We soon grew fond of one another and married shortly after.