The gentle barbarian: The life and work of Turgenev

by Jeffrey Lord

The distinguished English critic relates the events, quality, and complexities of the Russian master's life to the incidents, concerns, and complexities of his stories and novels

Genres: Biography

288 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 1971

About the author

A house pseudonym used by multiple authors including:
Manning Lee Stokes
Roland Green
Lyle Kenyon Engel
Ray Faraday Nelson
Richard D. Nolane
Christian Mantey
Arnaud Dalrune
Yves Chéraqui
Gerald Moreau
Paul Couturiau
Amelina Defontaine
Didier Le Gais
Yves Bulteau
Raymond Audemard
Nadine Monfils
Patrick Eris
Nemo Sandman

Reviews

[Illiterate · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good on Turgenev’s sensibility and style, particularly his use of dramatic structure and dialogue.

[N N · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some facts are conspicuously absent from Pritchett's account: for instance, while several times referring to his subject as a giant, he never mentions his exact height - 6 foot 4 (192 centimetres). Yet it does make a difference in the way that this indication of physical power often contrasts with Turgenev's childlike behaviour. But this only goes to show that any biographer approaches the subject's life more or less selectively, and the picture of the whole person is ever unlikely to emerge. Pritchett makes Turgenev a highly sympathetic character. Much is made of the importance of honour in his world-view; it is stressed that he was so well accepted in England because he was a gentleman. Goncharov's account is dismissed out of hand as paranoid. In fact, Goncharov does not really impress one as a paranoiac, and it seems likelier that Turgenev was a much more complex and ambiguous character than Pritchett is prepared to admit. His childhood, after all, must have been hugely traumatic; his behaviour towards the serf women that he fucked and towards his illegitimate children far from blameless (but mostly glossed over in Pritchett's account as par for the course at the time).

So it's hard to avoid the feeling that the account is somewhat one-sided. But where it does succeed splendidly is in conveying - perhaps not wholly intentionally - the rank absurdity of Russian political and literary life. The character sketches, even if incomplete, are outstandingly vivid. Most writers are treated benevolently, with the curious and glaring exception of Goncharov. But the overall effect is inescapable: Russian writers strut like bumbling puppets in an outrageous farce among the humourlessly insane revolutionaries, literary critics, Slavophiles, social conservatives and other entrenched zealots, all vaguely homicidal. Much of the book reads as if it were conceived by Waugh or Gerhardie and set in that kind of never-never land. And somehow all this sounds exactly true.

The least interesting parts cover Turgenev's lifelong relationship with the Viardots: the relationship is bizarre enough in itself, but somehow bloodless and uneventful; any mileage that can be extracted from it would be mostly material for psychoanalysis. Pritchett does not go that way, although it seems significant - if not striking - that throughout his life Turgenev was apparently unable to sustain, or perhaps even consummate, a sexual relationship with a woman of his own class. That does rather limit the dramatic aspects of the narrative and strengthens the farcical; although Pritchett is at pains to stress how much suffering his subject went through. No doubt Turgenev himself would be the first to agree, but as suffering goes, his lot does not seem excatly insupportable (granted that his last years were physically painful).

All this is not to quibble with the book, just to point out its limitations and idiosyncrasies. Much of it is fascinating, especially the numerous details and observations that by their nature would be unlikely to crop up with a Russian biographer: for instance, Turgenev burning sugar and sealing wax to mask the stench of his manservant's feet; or the way Belinsky, an ardent Westerner, despised Europe and had not the slightest interest in its history; Turgenev leaving his bedside rug to Pauline as a memento; Pauline sending him her nail clippings; etc.

I noted a couple of details that Pritchett gets wrong: strangely, both concern the poet Tyutchev. He states that after the famous fire at sea incident Turgenev had a long affair with Tyutchev's wife who had behaved, unlike Turgenev, with great personal courage during the ordeal. It seems, however, that within a couple of weeks she left for Italy with her husband, and within two or three months she was dead, so an affair, long or otherwise, is unlikely. Perhaps it was an affair in the sense of his other affairs with mature women - strictly platonic, passionately unadventurous. I have found no mention of it, though, in other sources. Secondly, Pritchett is under the misapprehension that Tyutchev was the agent hired by Turgenev to manage his estate. It is more likely to have been Nikolay Tyutchev, a non-writing member of Belinsky's circle, many times mentioned by Goncharov with vitriol as one of Turgenev's hangers-on; again, though, I have seen no other source to confirm this.

[Will · Rating 2 out of 5]

A very disappointing biography. Pritchett does not read Russian. He quotes from Turgenev's stories and novels as if they were all autobiographical expositions of his personal life and not, you know, fiction, and he masks this by not including citations, making them look like letters and diary entries. Pritchett also has the obnoxious habit of freely speculating what Turgenev and others were thinking when whatever happened to them, not merely their emotions but their actual inner deliberations and stream-of-consciousness processes. Whenever I find the latter, always a kind of stylized psychology, in a biography, I can't help but feel I'm reading the work of a shameless dilettante—as, after Pritchett, A.N. Wilson and George Steiner have done in their own cringe-worthy biographical "studies" and "portraits."

[Derek · Rating 3 out of 5]

A solid biography but Pritchett was better as an essayist than a biographer.

[Dulcie · Rating 1 out of 5]

God this was awful. How can Pritchett have turned as brilliant an author as Turgenev into such a flat colourless biography?
Only positive is that I will now go back and read A Sportsman's notebook.

[Paul Jellinek · Rating 3 out of 5]

V.S. Pritchett is one of the great English writers of the 20th century--especially his short stories--and Turgenev (the Gentle Barbarian of the title) is probably my favorite Russian writer of the 19th century. Yet somehow this biography didn't really work for me. It's just too dry and academic, and it lacks the warmth and humanity that make both Pritchett's and Turgenev's fiction so special.