He didn’t linger
P. J. Kavanagh
TWILIGHT OF LOVE: TRAVELS WITH TURGENEV by Robert Dessaix Scribner, £12.99, pp. 269, ISBN 0743263383 ✆ £11.99 (plus £2.25 p&p) 0870 800 4848 The Australian Robert Dessaix, a Russian scholar, chooses to regard himself, in relation to Western civilisation, as an ancient Greek might have considered a Phrygian or a Scythian — a barbarian outsider. This, he believes, brings him even closer to his beloved and Russian Turgenev, who spent most of his adult life outside Russia, but whom his lifelong love, the French opera singer Pauline Viardot, always regarded as ‘a barbarian’. This famous love leads Dessaix to speculate about the nature of love itself. It was ‘triangular’, in the sense that Viardot was married, and, in the manner of the 12th-century troubadours, it became a ‘courtly love’. Turgenev more or less followed her and her husband round Europe, living near them or with them, building houses next to them, at one time in their garden. Dessaix sees Turgenev as Viardot’s ‘troubadour’. Whatever intimacy he may have hoped for in the beginning, it ‘declined’ into passionate friendship, but only in the grammatical sense of ‘decline’; the noun remains ‘love’. Dessaix goes so far as to describe Turgenev as ‘mortal love incarnate’.
Just as Turgenev followed the Viardots, so Dessaix follows him, from Baden-Baden to Paris, to Pauline’s castle Courtavenel, and to Bougival where, in 1883, aged 65, Turgenev died, still within sight and earshot of his love. Dessaix also goes to Russia, to Turgenev’s estate at Spasskoye, and in all these places he observes and describes well, musing upon them to good effect (on the whole). All the time he is puzzling and picking at the word ‘love’, simultaneously believing and disbelieving in its possibility. This he does in a distracting way, because, never explicitly, he seems to associate Turgenev’s experience with his own: ‘If I could find the right word for what Turgenev felt, perhaps the love my own life is rooted in would grow even more luxuriantly.’ In the course of this pondering he comes up with the startlingly time-bound idea that the possibility of human love disappeared around the 1850s, with the loss of belief in the human soul, ‘as we used to call it’ (he presumes too often that he and any reasonable reader will be of the same mind). He looks, for example, at young people in Paris, in the Rue de Douai, near Turgenev’s (and the Viardots’) apartments, and tells us that the word ‘soul’ would have no meaning for them. They only see each other as ‘clusters of molecules, two-legged orchestras made up of billions of minuscule mechanical pianos ... You can enjoy the music, but can’t love in any meaningful sense a host of miniature pianolas, even if it has a face on top.’ This, he suggests, is how Turgenev experienced the world. But did he? Is it not, the reader suspects, the way Dessaix does? Surely this is not the flavour most readers taste in Turgenev’s writing: an uncloying sweetness, an acute sense of the complexity of human emotion, ‘Turgenev’s ear for emotion is so fine’, wrote Virginia Woolf (quoted by Dessaix), ‘that all is held together by the truth of his insight.’ She also coined a fine metaphor to explain how he achieved his effects: ‘He mastered the art of combining the photograph with the poem’ — what he makes a picture lingers, and swells with suggestion.
Perhaps this personal agenda becomes clearer when Dessaix visits Spasskoye and sees the Orthodox church Turgenev built ‘for his peasants’. ‘What a huge disappointment Western religion has turned out to be. We were expecting so much more.’ This odd book, part biography, part discreet autobiography, makes you want to read Turgenev again; but how that Orthodox building annoyed the writer: ‘Inside the empty church I was disconcerted to find a stall set up selling religious tracts — booklets explaining why the Orthodox Church is right and everybody else is wrong ... Bibles and so on.’ Has he ever been into a church that had no bookstall? Has he ever been into a church?
He turns on his heel. ‘I didn’t linger.’ He ends by hearing Turgenev tell him, ‘Love is never enough. It must always be enough.’ He might have found a similar message, as banal and timeless, in some of those tracts, those ‘bibles and so on’. However — Phrygian? time-bound? — he didn’t linger.
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