Romanov Riches: Russian Writers and Artists Under the Tsars

Turgenev took great pleasure in the monthly “Flaubert dinners,” held in a private room of a Parisian restaurant for five famous writers: two close friends, Flaubert and Turgenev, and Zola, Alfonse Daudet, and Edmond Goncourt. Daudet recalled that they spoke of their own works and those of others (each time at least one of the participants brought along a just-published book), about women, and also about their ills, “the body that is becoming a burden like a ball and chain on a convict’s leg. Those were sad confessions of men who had turned forty!”¹¹ Turgenev concentrated on the caviar, nevertheless.

The writers began their evenings at seven, and the feast would still be going strong at two a.m. The loud-spoken Flaubert would remove his jacket, the others following his lead; Turgenev, who suffered from gout, would lie down on the couch.

At those moments Turgenev undoubtedly imagined himself on the literary Olympus, one of the masters of the cultural universe. I saw similar emotions on the face of the poet Joseph Brodsky when he appeared in New York in the company of Czeslaw Milosz, Octavio Paz, and Derek Walcott (four Nobel laureates!).

Everything Turgenev wrote was instantly translated into several languages. For good reason—and like Brodsky a century later—Turgenev considered himself an arbiter and connoisseur of what contemporary Russian literature would please foreigners and what would not. He was a bit condescending about Tolstoy: “Foreigners don’t appreciate him. Childhood and Adolescence was translated into English and did not do well: it was taken for an imitation of Dickens. I wanted to translate War and Peace into French, but skipping all the philosophizing, for I know the French: they won’t see the good beyond the boring and silly.”

When Tolstoy rejected the radical editing, Turgenev was hurt, telling a friend, “Someone else translated it, and probably the French won’t read it.” Turgenev considered himself an excellent editor. He was particularly proud of his editing work on the books by two great Russian poets who were not so lucky with publications in their lifetime: Tyutchev and Afanasy Fet.

At a dinner in his honor in 1856 when he came to visit St. Petersburg, after many toasts, Turgenev responded with an allegedly impromptu gem:

All this praise is undeserved

But one thing you must admit:

I forced Tyutchev to unzip

And I cleaned Fet’s pants.

This auto-epigram was greeted with howls of laughter from the bibulous writers, who understood the references: Turgenev had persuaded Tyutchev, engrossed in political and social intrigues, to agree to issue his verse, to which he was rather indifferent. It was edited by Turgenev and Nekrasov.

As for Fet, he had also given Turgenev a free hand, but when the book appeared in 1855, Fet found it “as cleaned up as it was disfigured.”¹² Tyutchev too felt that Turgenev’s editing was heavy-handed, and that “many of his corrections ruined things.”¹³

Turgenev was friendly with everyone, but he also quarreled with everyone at some point—Nekrasov, Fet, Ivan Goncharov, author of Oblomov, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy. Essentially, it was a conflict between a Westerner to the marrow of his bones and nationalists, whatever they may have called themselves. The suspicious Fet thought that Turgenev had become a Westernizer “under the influence of Mme Viardot.” Turgenev readily agreed: “I do not undertake anything important in my life without the advice of Mme Viardot.”

Turgenev’s Russian friends nagged him to return to his homeland to live, instead of just visiting. He assured them that he missed Russia very much, but he always found an excuse why he couldn’t move just then. He did admit once that he felt “family” was not Russians but the Viardots: “If they were to move tomorrow to the most impossible city, say, Copenhagen, I would follow.”¹⁴

The main magnet was Pauline Viardot, and not only for her vocal genius. She drew well, read five languages, knew Russian well, and had a sophisticated taste in art and literature. Viardot once confided in a Russian friend, “Not a single line of Turgenev’s gets into print without his showing it to me first. You Russians do not know how much you owe me that Turgenev continues to write and work.”

Turgenev entrusted the upbringing of his daughter (whose name he changed from Pelagia to Paulina) to the Viardots. When visiting France, the poet Fet listened in amazement as Paulina “quite sweetly declaimed Molière’s poetry; but because she looked just like Turgenev in a skirt, she could make no claim on prettiness.”¹⁵ The girl had forgotten how to speak Russian.