posted on 17 Mar 2018

Home of the Gentry by Ivan Turgenev

Reading the recent piece that Letterpress carried about how intimidating the great Russian novelists are – “monstrous brutes” and swaggering “biblio-bullies” who jeer at us for not being able to meet the demands made by nineteenth century Russian literature – made me think it was about time I revisited something Russian. Having said this, I too share a fear of some of these gargantuan books – with their vast casts of characters, their sometimes barely comprehensible strangeness, the rustling thickets of patronymics which make it almost impossible to keep track of who’s who.

For some time now my gateway to Russian literature has been Chekhov. Admittedly, Chekhov is a short story writer, and while not everyone gets on easily with short stories Chekhov’s virtues are numerous. Compression, clarity, economy, restraint, subtlety, delicacy; his astonishing range, his humanity, his sympathy for the frail human creature – Chekhov is justly revered by almost more short story writers than you can count. He even appears as a character in some of the later stories of American writer Raymond Carver.

But there is a Russian novelist who I think shares some of Chekhov’s virtues, and that is Turgenev. I always felt he stood  somewhat apart from the “monstrous brutes” so I decided to test this idea by reading Home of the Gentry in a superb translation by Richard Freeborn. It was a really eye-opening experience.

What makes Turgenev special is what might be called his socio-historic approach. That sounds daunting and it isn’t meant to. All I mean is that Turgenev’s novels are always rooted in a view of Russian society and arise out of and are illuminated by social or political trends in Russian society. But – rather like Chekhov – this is not done didactically, but with great delicacy and economy.

In Home of the Gentry, Lavretsky, a provincial landowner and nobleman, returns to his country estate and sees friends and family in the nearby town. He has been wandering Europe and is widely seen as having been disgraced by his philandering and promiscuous wife. He falls in love with the young daughter of a cousin. She eventually rejects not only Lavretsky but also an obnoxious dandy and somewhat rakeish man-about-town who is also pursuing her. She abandons any idea of marriage and eventually enters a convent. In a deeply moving epilogue, Lavretsky revisits the house the girl once lived in. Most of the family and friends he knew who lived there have died and the house has passed to a younger generation who are respectful but barely know who he is.

That is the essence of the story and it is relatively simple. What brings it alive is its emotional depth, its melancholy lyricism – and Turgenev’s withering (but not, one feels, pitiless) critique of the drifting, enervated serf-owning noble class (to which he belonged, of course).

For even when inspired by European culture and enlightenment values, Turgenev’s aristocrats still seem depleted, rudderless, vain. They may to some degree want social progress, but not if it comes at the expense of their positions at court or their sinecures in the imperial administration. And while they hanker after European culture, their application of it is inept and philistine and extends little further than social fashion – the ability to turn suave and amusing phrases in Russian, French and English, as social convention demands.

Turgenev’s characters are not necessarily good or even socially useful people. But in a sense I think this is the point. In Turgenev’s hands we still care what happens to them, and their failures and heartbreaks and frailties matter to us and are intelligible to us, which isn’t always the case in Russian fiction.

What we get with Turgenev is an acuteness of observation, a social dimension and – when served by someone like Richard Freeman – a deceptively simple and limpid prose style that seems capable of registering the greatest nuances.

I recommend Home of the Gentry because it’s a marvellous read, but also because it may help you too find a gateway to the Russians. (And while I’m about it I would also recommend William Trevor’s novel Reading Turgenev, which somehow, magically, seems to capture the atmosphere – the experience – of reading Turgenev.)

 

Alun Severn

March 2018