Romanov Riches: Russian Writers and Artists Under the Tsars

Grigorovich particularly asked Tolstoy not to berate George Sand, for he had often heard the count attack the celebrated French novelist and feminist. They “fanatically adored” her at Contemporary, Nekrasov and his closest associate, the radical critic Nikolai Chernyshevsky, and the magazine’s constant contributor, liberal writer Ivan Turgenev.

Later Grigorovich recalled, “At first, the dinner went well; Tolstoy was rather taciturn, but toward the end he gave in. Hearing praise for Sand’s latest novel, he abruptly declared that he hated her, adding that the heroines of her novels, if they existed in real life, should be put in stocks and driven around the streets of St. Petersburg as a lesson.”³

Nekrasov was offended and wrote to a friend about Tolstoy’s outburst: “What nonsense he babbled at my dinner yesterday! The devil knows what’s in his head! He says such stupid and even nasty things. It would be a shame if these traits of landowning and military influence do not change in him. An excellent talent will be lost!”⁴

Turgenev was also outraged: “I almost quarreled with Tolstoy—really, it’s impossible for ignorance not to show in one way or another. The other day, at Nekrasov’s dinner, he said so many trite and crude things about G. Sand that I can’t even convey it all.”⁵

In our day, very few people read the novels of George Sand (she wrote almost sixty) with the same interest as progressive intellectuals all over Europe did at the time; people look at her books today primarily because they have heard about her notorious affairs with Chopin, Alfred de Musset, and Prosper Mérimée. But in the mid-nineteenth century, Sand’s works were perceived as more than romans à clef or entertaining super-romantic narratives; they were textbooks of life.

Dostoevsky recalled that he considered Sand then as the head of a movement for a radical social renewal of humanity. The adoration of Sand in Russia was particularly fervent, and Dostoevsky explained why: “Only this was permitted, that is, novels, the rest, practically every thought, especially from France, was strictly banned.” (According to Dostoevsky, the Russian censors made a huge error in allowing the works of George Sand.)

Turgenev was a “georgesandista,” and the most ardent Westernizer among them. He had read Shakespeare, Byron, and Schiller in their original languages as a child. Later, in St. Petersburg, he argued with Nekrasov and his other friends from Contemporary that even Pushkin and Lermontov, “if you look closely,” were only imitating European geniuses like Shakespeare and Byron.⁶

Early on as a writer, Turgenev focused on the West, measuring himself against Western literary criteria, and declaring, according to friends, “No, I’m a European at heart, my demands of life are also European! … At the very first chance, I’ll flee without looking back, and you won’t see hide or hair of me!”⁷

In order to realize his European ambitions, which were rather unusual even for his elite cosmopolitan circle, he needed a starting point in the West. The fulfillment of Turgenev’s dream, strangely enough, came via George Sand.

In early 1842 the Paris glitterati were excited: the new left-radical magazine La Revue indépendante started serializing George Sand’s sensational novel Consuelo, a story about the adventures of a fictional great singer in eighteenth-century Venice. The novel’s immediate success was due in part to it being a roman à clef: the readers easily recognized the heroine as contralto Pauline Garcia-Viardot, a close friend of the author.

Viardot’s life did resemble a novel, or a fairy tale. Born to a family of singers from Spain (her older sister was the famous mezzo-soprano Maria Malibran), she debuted in Paris in 1838 at the age of seventeen, stunning the public with her phenomenal vocal gifts (she had a range of two and a half octaves) and her exceptional musicality.

Pauline was not pretty, she was tiny with an enormous nose and mouth, bulging eyes, and wide hips, but the Romantic poet Alfred de Musset, enchanted by her talent and intellect, proposed to her. She rejected him and, taking George Sand’s advice, married the theater impresario and liberal journalist and translator (Dostoevsky read Don Quixote in his French rendering) Louis Viardot, who was more than twenty years her senior. Le tout Paris gathered in their salon, and the brilliant Pauline, who also played piano and composed, was its main star.

La Revue indépendante was an influential promoter of socialist ideas in France and Europe. Amazingly, by hook or crook, the journal reached St. Petersburg, where it was devoured by progressives. Given the Russians’ adoration of George Sand, the adventures of Consuelo/Pauline Viardot were a hot topics in the Russian capital.