arts｜Sun Dehong
The Russian writer Turgenev, who is good at describing love, has never been married. He is full of contradictions about love: hesitating contains firmness, firmness and hesitation, and living the aesthetic process of pursuing the ultimate love into a rough and persistent life.
one
Turgenev, who has written countless other people’s love stories in his life, what about his own love?
I first liked Turgenev because of his writings about grassland, sky and love and friendship: delicate, clean and comfortable, filled with a touch of sadness and warm compassion, like a rainy day, a blue sky Such as the washed sky, there are pictures, there is music, there is the flow of life, and there is a trembling of the soul…
Turgenev’s own love story, much like these beautiful and sad words of his, but far more surprising – in this Russian writer who has spent his life writing stories about the earth and the sky and imagining the human heart, in these Behind the beautiful and sad words, there is his own life and love – both ups and downs, hesitation and disappointment, but also persistence, compassion and warmth.
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In 1838, at the age of 20, Turgenev came to the University of Berlin to study philosophy.
It was in Germany that Turgenev got acquainted with two people who would later have a major influence on him and Russia as a whole: one was Herzen, who was six years older than him – who later wrote “My Past and Thoughts” Herzen. At this time, Herzen was expelled from Russia because he often organized political activities and spoke too much, and was living in Germany. The other was Bakunin, who was also living in Berlin at the time, four years his senior. At this time, Bakunin was basically a moderate anarchist. During this period, they were basically followers of Hegel.
The young Herzen, Bakunin, and Turgenev had a vague sense that Hegelian philosophy was to their liking, and theoretically provided them with the legitimacy of a “revolution” against the absolute monarchy— – If Hegel’s statement that “whatever is real is rational, and whatever is rational will become reality” is the truth, then the revolutionary as a real person is also a part of history, “if the existing society If order has been justified by reason, then all struggles against the existing social order, from the moment of its existence, are equally natural.”
However, quite different from these “revolutionary” friends, Turgenev did not eventually become a professional revolutionary, but a professional writer. In the eyes of some people, Turgenev is a great writer who basically only writes about love, and “specially writes” rather “weak” and “failed” love stories.
But Turgenev himself did not think so. In his opinion, writing about love is because only through the exploration of love with mysterious power, can we thoroughly find the source of misfortune and pain in life… Turgenev’s love begins here – because Baku Ning, and Turgenev, who later returned to Russia, met Bakunin’s sister, Tatyana Bakunin. So, they talked about a vigorous love.
Turgenev attacked with passion, and Tatyana, who also has high spiritual pursuits, responded with the same, or even greater enthusiasm… But soon, the “weak” Turgenev found himself It was really unaccustomed to this warm emotion, which even frightened him. So, he stepped back.
He said he was talking about a “spiritual love”: “I’ve never loved a woman like yours. Even for you, I’m not someone I love with all my heart and soul. However, my The mind is inconceivably and inexplicably united to you. For you, and only for you, I wish I was a poet. Oh, if on a spring morning we could both walk a long line in a linden tree If I could hold your hand and feel our hearts mingle with each other…”
As a result, Tagiana was frustrated, disappointed, and held a great deal of contempt for him: “For a woman, when her whole heart is throbbing violently in her chest, and her heart is like a bottomless ocean, it is very important to be alive. There is nothing more pleasing than to feel such love… He is such a young man: absent-minded, somewhat capricious, and indiscreet about virtue.”
Then, this woman, who has almost the same rational thinking as the thinker’s brother Bakunin, angrily rebuked Turgenev, the “Master of Love”: “He is as cold as ice, but he goes to great lengths to pretend to be enthusiastic… I have to blame him for him. He lacks sincerity in dealing with people, and can’t be sincere… He even treats the most sacred things as playthings. Doesn’t he understand what truth and love are?”
The end of this love can be imagined.
However, it is from Turgenev’s love story that we seem to see a certain “source” of the love stories in his works: almost all the heroes and heroines in Turgenev’s novels who still seem to have distinct personalities today are almost the same. Here’s what it looks like—men are talented and affectionate, yet weak, withdrawn, and neurotic, women are innocent and sacrificial, men are thoughtful, but indecisive, and women are passionate, strong-willed, and especially trusting in life. Those female figures are basically Turgenev’s lovers and his ideals. And the male figures such as Luo Ting seem to be Turgenev himself. Therefore, some critics believe that this is the real manifestation of some of Turgenev’s “petty-bourgeois weakness” in the “revolutionary era”…
It is of course untenable to equate the characters in the work with the writer himself.
So, in Turgenev’s other, almost lifelong love story, we see “another” completely different Turgenev.
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November 1, 1843, just one day after the last love affair with Bakunin’s sister.
On this day, 25-year-old Turgenev met the true love of his life: the French singer Pauline.
At this time, Pauline was already married, and her marriage to her husband Viardo was managed by George Sand, a French writer whom Turgenev respected all his life. But the fanatic Turgenev couldn’t handle this at all… From then on, he was loyal and almost stalker… Finally, the female singer allowed Turgenev to come to her dressing room after her performance every night go.
I was amazed by this detail: on the parquet floor of Pollina’s dressing room was a large white bear skin, and Pollina sat languidly in the center in her white bathrobe. She gave the honor of sitting on the four bear claws to four men: a general, an earl, a son of the manager of the Royal Theatre, and one Turgenev… Then, each has The audience wants to tell the singer an “interesting” story… This kind of “storytelling” trick, of course, our great writers often come out on top.
For Turgenev’s “bear claw” story, I am afraid that it cannot be simply defined as a momentary slap in the face because of his youthfulness, because our great writer has a crush on this married female singer, Madame Viardo, That’s definitely a lifetime follow for 40 years – I’ll go wherever you go, and I’m part of the Viardu family! And, to the death. The singer’s family moved to Baden, along with Turgenev, who built a house of his own next door. Later, the singer and his wife briefly moved to London, and of course, Turgenev still went with him…
Such love stories, whether moving or puzzling, are the truth.
40 years! Turgenev never married and lived in France most of the time, living near Bolina’s house – eating and chatting at Bolina’s house almost every day, like a family!
To outsiders, although this relationship does not seem to be easy to understand, the fact is that the parties involved are getting along relatively well – even so, the sensitive writer who writes about love is actually quite embarrassed himself. Of course he knew what other people were saying about him, but he was puzzled: “What’s wrong with Viardo?” He complained to Paulina: “I hate him by living here. Is it? . . . I sat there looking bleak like a dog, feeling mocked, blinking in the blinding sunlight, looking around blankly out of the corners of my eyes.”
Turgenev’s “grievances” and “complaints” seem to be difficult to understand.
Probably, this is the legendary “true love” – ”pain and happiness”, right?
Love is not smooth, but fortunately there is still friendship.
During the 40 years of following Paulina, Turgenev lived in France for most of the time, and most of his works were written here. During this period, although the pursuit of love was fruitless, it gained a lot of friendship. He met many French writers and became good friends.
Once a month, Turgenev and these French writers would have dinner together, and good friends would chat freely, of course, more about literature. In their correspondence or later memoirs, they often describe each other. They called the gathering the “Flaubert Luncheon,” and sometimes, self-deprecatingly, “The Boozed Writers’ Luncheon.”
Of these French writers, Turgenev and Flaubert had the deepest friendship—Dude, the author of The Last Lesson, described the pair of writer friends: “It was George Sand who brought them together. Flaubert likes to rhetoric, to censure, to speak harshly, to observe things with a powerful air of irony, with a Norman demeanor, a quixotic figure. He is in this so-called ” In a perfect marriage, there is a man with courage. Turgenev is a burly man with two tangled eyebrows and a broad and flat face. But who would have guessed that this burly man was ‘ Where is the wife of this marriage? ‘This wife’ is the kind of sensitive, tender and considerate woman that he himself describes in his writings… In this noisy, huge and messy human factory, The soul is often disguised in the wrong way, the soul of a man is thrown into the body of a woman, and the soul of a woman is thrown into the body of a giant.”
Here in Dude, Turgenev in his life is very much like the woman who “feels keen, tender and considerate” in his novels. Turgenev, however, did not seem to be at all unhappy about this: “My life is full of female characteristics. For me, books or anything in the world cannot replace women… How to explain this situation? I think, Only love can produce a certain joy that nothing can give…”
In those dinner parties and all kinds of close interactions, they discussed issues, wrote about friendship, teased each other, and admired each other – it is estimated that these friendships largely warmed Turgenev, who was frustrated in love.
However, as time went on, the atmosphere of these gatherings became more and more melancholy – the death of friends cast a shadow over these gatherings, and finally, gradually ended their gatherings. Whenever a friend dies, Turgenev, who firmly believes in the grief and fate of people, will think that he is also nearing death. The death of George Sand makes Turgenev’s emotion finally break out: “Dear George ·Ms. Sang, this poor fellow, what a kind heart she has! She has no vile, intolerant, hypocritical feelings at all; what a good person she is! Now everything is at rest, she has been sleeping in this ghastly horror , insatiable, silent and stupid cave, but this tomb has no idea what it devoured! Forget it, everything is irreparable, let us try our best to keep our chin out of the water for a while.”
The pain of love, the pain of friendship… and the pain of wandering!
Due to living abroad for a long time, the pain of the wanderer also tormented Turgenev from time to time. This “Russian wanderer” whose “motherland and hometown” complex has been deeply rooted in his bones, although it was his own choice to leave the motherland, this does not alleviate his inexplicable pain as a writer about leaving his native language-the last book he published before his death In the last article “Russian Language” of the collection of prose and poetry “Old Age”, “In those days of doubt and anxiety, in those days of painfully thinking about the fate of my motherland – I was encouraged and supported only by You, the great, powerful, sincere, and free Russian language! How could it not have been heartbreaking to witness what is going on in the country without you? Yet such a language would not belong to such a great Nation, that is incredible!”
The pain of wandering is not only condensed in his flesh and blood of his mother tongue, but also externalized into his creative method. He described his writing habits in France to the Goncourt brothers: “I can only write in winter, and I must be like in Russia in the frozen land, the bone-chilling cold, and the trees full of crystal icicles. Under the circumstances, I can write…”
Love is tangled. Friendship is sad. The wanderer is lonely. All of these, almost constitute the whole of Turgenev’s life. Also, fate is helpless…
Four
In Turgenev, love and life are actually a “smoke”.
A few days ago, a friend who specializes in nineteenth-century Russian literature suddenly asked me this question seriously: “If Pollina agrees to Turgenev’s pursuit and is willing to elope with Turgenev, then , what will happen to Turgenev?”
I was taken aback. This question is tough enough.
But I know, this might really be a “good question”.
Of Turgenev’s six novels, the penultimate one is entitled “Smoke”. The story goes that a young man named Rickvinov was on a trip with his fiancée when he ran into an ex-girlfriend who had married a general. Previously, the ex-girlfriend was going to marry him, but eventually abandoned him and climbed up the branch. The unexpected encounter between the two aroused thousands of annoyances in the heart of the ex-girlfriend, and wanted to reconcile with him… The young man knew that his current fiancee was much friendlier than the ex-girlfriend, but he was still hard-hearted. Betrayed his fiancée and was ready to run away with his ex-girlfriend. But at the last moment, the ex-girlfriend stayed by her husband’s side… A few years later, the young man married his fiancee. A few years later, the young man and his ex-girlfriend met again at a train station, and the ex-girlfriend had become an “unfortunate rich woman” before getting old… Here, can we see the reality A possible “answer” to Turgenev’s love?
Taking advantage of this last encounter, Turgenev’s “answer” was first a scene and a psychological description—
The wind finally blew toward the train; the steam, sometimes like white fog, sometimes like black smoke, rolled past the window. Rickvinov began to look at the steam. They come endlessly, sometimes rising, sometimes falling, tangled in grass blades, hanging on small trees, extending out and disappearing into the moist air…
Rickvinov stared, stared silently, and suddenly a strange thought came up… “Smoke! Smoke!” Yes everything in Russia is just smoke. It was all just smoke and steam, he thought… Rykvinov recalled what had happened before his eyes in recent years, with a lot of noise, not without a sensation… “Smoke,” he murmured, ” cigarette.”
Love, life, is a “smoke”, a “smoke” of “fate”.
Behind this “smoke”, Turgenev arranged such a story ending, which you can also see as the “answer”: the young man and his wife returned to their hometown to cultivate the land. The wife is kind to the peasants in the village, and runs a clinic and a pharmacy for them… Vibrant real life, dispelling the emotional fog, the real world at this time disappears, the outline is clear, warm and beautiful, just like the dawn of the countryside , When the morning sun is rising in the sky, the morning mist also rises up, and then slowly disappears…
This “answer” is a metaphor for a certain expectation of “Turgenev’s love”, right?
Turgenev’s love is full of contradictions: there is firmness in hesitation, and hesitation in firmness: one moment is real life, another moment is artistic imagination; one moment is joy, another moment is depression.
Although Turgenev himself was never married, and had repeatedly advised young people not to get married, Turgenev, in his later years, said to young people: “Get married, young man. You can’t imagine what a bachelor’s old age is like. Desolate. When you have to go against your will and sit beside another man’s nest, accepting someone else’s love as if accepting alms, when you have no mercy because your master doesn’t like you and doesn’t show any sympathy. When you have to wander around like an old dog that has been kicked out and wander around, you will taste the pain of old age.”
Omg! If it hurts to the core, it is the real portrait of Turgenev’s soul, right?
Turgenev’s real life consciously or unconsciously chose artistic imagination, and he turned art into real life. As a result, we can see the colorful and delicate real life and complex human nature in his artistic imagination.
For a master of the human mind who has seen and written thoroughly about love and emotion all his life, it may not be appropriate to speculate like ordinary people—or, for the painful feelings he spoke in his later years, he just hoped that more young people would not “repeat the same mistakes”. “That’s all, but he himself “rejoices” – those principles that ordinary people can understand very well, can’t the master understand it?
Of course Turgenev understood. However, the master has his own way of living. Tolstoy has a very intriguing saying: “Turgenev is not in love, he just likes to be in love.” That’s why I boldly speculate that Turgenev’s “living method” may lie in: “love” It is already the “aesthetic object” of his life, and the experience of love is his “aesthetic process”. Although he struggles with pain and even hurts himself, he enjoys the “beauty” of this “process”, and this “beauty” , is the true ideal of his life.
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In 1883, in the last year of his life, Turgenev, 65, was suffering from spinal cancer.
In August of this year, Turgenev was no longer able to write, and he dictated and was recorded into a short story by the French Madame Viardou, the French singer Pauline, who was the love of his life. “Doomsday”, and in June of this year, Paulina also wrote the short story “Fire at Sea”. Yes, it was the lady who was Turgenev’s “love of life” who stood by his sickbed as he died.
Turgenev called Madame Viardou to the bed, with tears in her eyes: “I want to write down a story that is brewing in my mind, but it will make me too tired, and I can’t do it. arrive.”
“Then please dictate to me,” said Madame Viardou. “I don’t write very well in Russian, but if you are patient, I think I can write it down slowly.”
“No, no,” said Turgenev hastily, “if I were to dictate in Russian, I would probably pause in the middle of every word and sentence in order to choose a phrase. I don’t think there’s anything I can do to exhaust my energy like that. No way. Do it. I want to dictate the story in every language you and I know, with phrases that I don’t have to bother with that are the most catchy.”
The novel was written, about the sinking experience of a physically and mentally declining Russian aristocrat, and the title was “Doomsday”.
“Down” and “Doomsday” – this is definitely another metaphor.
A metaphor for the life of a Russian aristocratic writer who was deeply in love with serfs.
A helpless metaphor for the love of the earth but unable to escape the fateful tragedy.
Turgenev, a great writer and a master of German classical philosophy, turned real love and life into “artistic aesthetics”, and the result was interpreted as “metaphor”…
Although he had been at odds with Turgenev for a long time, Tolstoy had a lot of admiration for Turgenev’s love: “I never thought he would love him so deeply.”
Another great French writer, who was also Turgenev’s best friend for most of his life, as I mentioned earlier, Flaubert, the author of Madame Bovary, had a sigh that stunned me: “Think about Turgene. Nev, I may really not understand love!”
In the first four years of writing the “Doomsday” of “Sinking”, Turgenev, whose life has entered the countdown, still has a relationship.
In 1879, at the age of 61, Turgenev met a 25-year-old actress, Maria Savina.
This Savina, for her role as a supporting role in Turgenev’s comedy “A Day in the Village”, was greatly rewarded by Turgenev. At first, Turgenev thought, “There’s nothing to play in this little supporting role,” but when he saw Savina radiantly play this poorly written character, “It’s Is that the character I wrote about? Savina is much more wonderful than her”… Soon, the 61-year-old Turgenev fell into the passion of love again.
The young Savina is bright, charming and radiant. This revived old Turgenev’s youth and rejuvenated his youth – all of which gave him the courage and passion of love again.
The later stories are also more complicated, and the plot has many twists and turns, but the result is that Turgenev’s love ended soon.
One day more than 30 years after Turgenev’s death, the staff of the Turgenev Memorial suddenly discovered that someone had placed a bunch of fresh roses in front of Turgenev’s statue, and for a long time every day Come and put on a bouquet of flowers.
This flower giver is an elegant woman in her sixties. She is – Savina.
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Concealed and meditated, Tagiana, Paulina, Savina…
Love, the love in reality, and the “aesthetic” love of “pain and joy” created by Turgenev himself have immeasurable significance in his life’s creation.
In 1880, when Turgenev, who was 62 years old at the time, had completed all six novels, he returned to Moscow from Paris to visit Tolstoy on the occasion of the 80th anniversary of Pushkin’s birth…
Now, Turgenev is standing leisurely in the woods outside the Tolstoy Manor, dressed in hunting gear.
Turgenev constantly adjusted the angle of the shotgun, waiting for the prey to take off.
At this time, Mrs. Tolstoy, who also came with him, asked Turgenev: “We all love your works so much, but why haven’t you written for so long? How long are you going to make us wait?”
Turgenev looked around, the childlike sly look on his face, and he told the countess in a frank and charming tone: “No one will hear us? Well, I’ll come. Tell you…every time I’m going to create, it’s when I’m blown away by the frenzy of love!” Then he sighed again, “Now that’s over, I’m old and can’t love anymore. , can’t write anymore.”
At this time, Mrs. Tolstoy, the prototype of Jidi in “Anna Karenina”, who also sees love as big as the sky, and sees love as absolutely not allowed to interfere with anyone or anything, was surprised at first, then lol.
There are many kinds of life stories in the world, some are joyful and ecstatic, some are sad and desperate, and maybe more are just a piece of chicken feathers, and they can only live by… However, some people are not willing to do this, they are full of passion and heart Save the lofty goals, or you can’t help it, you have to. They let themselves go, dare to love and hate, even if they are scarred, even if they hurt others and themselves, they have no regrets or regrets. Subjectively, they are of course the result of their tenacious pursuit of “beauty”, but objectively, they can only enjoy this difficult process of “beauty” in a mixture of joys and sorrows… Probably, Turgenev’s life is relatively close This kind.
Turgenev’s last moments were spent half-dreaming.
From time to time he muttered some verses or aphorisms intermittently, and sometimes he fell into a coma. Even though he was surrounded by French people, his muttering was in Russian—yes, Russian, the language his parents had left him.
He regained consciousness a few minutes before he died. At that moment, he recognized Madame Viardo-Polina from the crowd beside the hospital bed. Next, the great writer who has created so many beautiful and sad love stories in his life and who has been in love all his life, said to his “lifelong love”: “She is the queen of queens, she is What a good thing…”
On August 22, 1883, Turgenev, who had never married, died in Paris, far from his motherland.
Turgenev’s 65-year-old life is over. The soul finally returns to the frozen Russia forever, and finally never has to leave again.
(This article was published in the 6th issue of “Essays” in 2022)