The Gentle Barbarian by V. S. Pritchett

Author:V. S. Pritchett
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 1977-03-03T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 9

The attacks on Turgenev by Goncharov and Tolstoy were personal attacks on his honour and dignity as a man; he was by nature excitable but his irony and judgment soon restored his balance. In the next few years he found himself in the middle of a quarrel with Russia itself, both with the educated élite of Right and Left and with young men of humbler class who had become vocal after the Crimean War. Confusion and extremism appeared on the scene and he was at once in the difficult position of the man of strong, committed liberal principles who has to meet the usual charges of being a waverer.

He was in Paris in 1861, because he was concerned about his daughter who wanted to get married but could not make up her mind about her suitors, when the Emancipation of the serfs was proclaimed and he went to the Thanksgiving Service at the Russian Church and, like many others, wept with joy. Herzen, the exile who could not return, told him that the author of The Sportsman’s Sketches ought to be in Russia. Turgenev had, however, settled matters with his own peasants before the proclamation. He had given them a fifth of his land for nothing and at Spasskoye itself—the most intimate part of his estate and his home—he had given them the land on which their houses stood, and was soon building a small hospital, a home for the aged and had started a school.

All over Russia the peasants were bewildered by their freedom and often suspicious of the new dispensation. Many preferred the old ways to which they were accustomed. At Spasskoye they continued their traditional sport of stealing wood and, knowing Turgenev was an easy man, they grazed their horses on his flower beds. Elsewhere there were rows about the size of individual holdings and the redemption money. There were family rows between husbands and wives, and between brothers. The peasants were illiterate and often refused to put their mark on legal papers. They found they had to pay taxes and many regarded Emancipation as a landlord’s trick—and among the bad landlords so it became. Many peasants sold their strips and left the land and there were not enough hands left to get in the harvest. Presently in Petersburg there were outbreaks of fire which were thought to be the work of terrorists belonging to the Land and Liberty League who, without any clear idea of policy, were calling for Revolution. The new Tsar had begun as a liberal but was now in panic; Radicals were arrested and sent into exile.

These events are in the background of the new novel Turgenev had written, Fathers and Sons, the tragedy of the conflict between two generations. The book set off a storm that was to last the rest of his life. It is his masterpiece. To foreign readers the savagery of the quarrel has seemed incomprehensible until recent times. In his brilliant Romanes Lectures given in Oxford in

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