Edge of The Nest , livre ebook

Troubador Publishing Ltd - Christopher Cruise

Découvre YouScribe en t'inscrivant gratuitement

Je m'inscris

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

421 pages

English

Vous pourrez modifier la taille du texte de cet ouvrage

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

A propos
Informations
Extrait

Description

The Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev lived in turbulent times. This fictional biography, solidly founded on historical and literary research, explores his life and work - from his childhood, dominated by his tyrannical mother, to his last years, in the tender care of Pauline Viardot, the Franco-Spanish diva who was the love of his life. Author Christopher Cruise offers insights into other affairs and flirtations, together with his ambivalent relationship with his illegitimate daughter Paulinette, the result of a half-hour liaison with a servant girl. The reader is transported to many parts of Europe, from the revolutionary streets of St Petersburg to the cultural salons of Paris. The intense generational clash of his era inspired his best-known work, Fathers and Children, while his mother's cruelty ignited in him a lifelong horror of violence and injustice which found expression in A Sportsman's Sketches, a book that contributed to Czar Alexander II's decision to emancipate the serfs. The influence of the radical critic Belinsky transformed Turgenev from a 'superfluous man' on the fringes of society, to a probing writer and thinker. His relationships with some of his fellow Russian writers - Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, Herzen and Bakunin - were often stormy, but in France he was admired and esteemed by many members of the French literary and musical worlds, including Flaubert, George Sand and Zola. Considered by his peers as a traitor to his class and by the radical left as a woolly liberal, by the end of his life he had won the respect - and even love - of the majority of young Russians seeking a democratic future for their tormented country.

Sujets

Historical fiction

Informations

Publié par	Troubador Publishing Ltd
Date de parution	28 février 2015
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781784629656
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0250€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

THE EDGE OF THE NEST
THE SOLITUDE OF IVAN TURGENEV
CHRISTOPHER CRUISE
Copyright 2015 Christopher Cruise
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.
Matador
9 Priory Business Park,
Wistow Road
Kibworth Beauchamp
Leicester LE8 0RX, UK
Tel: (+44) 116 279 2299
Fax: (+44) 116 279 2277
Email: books@troubador.co.uk
Web: www.troubador.co.uk/matador
ISBN 978 1784629 656
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd
To Pat, Jo Jo, Amanda, Lawrence and Oliver and in memoriam I.B., without whom
From the Dead, for him who is immortal .
Inscription on a wreath at Turgenev s funeral, for which political prisoners from all over Russia had subscribed.
PREFACE
Fictionalized biography is a dangerous genre: history purists chafe at anything that cannot be one hundred percent verified, while novel addicts perhaps lose patience with information that doesn t immediately carry the story forward or reveal new aspects of the characters. In an effort, if not to please, at least to mollify both parties, I can claim not to have tampered with the essential facts of Turgenev s life (e.g. where and with whom he was at any given time) but my interpretation of these facts has been coloured according to the dictates of my imagination.
I have tried always to bear in mind some lines Umberto Eco wrote on the subject of fictionalized biography: In order to give us a vivid image of a character, the author reconstructs dialogue that may not have taken place exactly as he described; we may accept this but we demand that the writer s reconstruction be based on documents which, if they do not confirm those conversations, at least do not render them implausible.
T he small, austere living room of a dilapidated apartment on the Fontanka Embankment in St Petersburg, some time in the winter of 1843, is filled with a dozen or so young men in their mid-twenties. There is barely room for them all: some perch on high-backed wooden chairs; others sit on the edge of tables, swinging their legs; one, the tallest and youngest, is sprawled out on a sagging sofa; the latecomers huddle on the floor, knees hunched up to their chins.
It is well after midnight and a tallow candle provides the only light. In a corner a samovar bubbles; tea, the only beverage available, is sipped out of tall glasses accompanied by dry, stale biscuits. Cigarette and pipe smoke makes the air thicker than the fog outside, stealing up from the Neva to add its murky contribution to the ill-lit streets of the city.
The host, from the vantage-point of his thirty-two years, guides, leads, dominates the conversation. Vissarion Grigorevich Belinsky, the brilliant, controversial, what would now be called engag critic, has for some years been the guiding spirit of a group of idealistic young men, all, in their different ways, seeking to break free of the stifling stranglehold of Czar Nicholas I s Russia. A few are of noble birth, the rest the sons of doctors, lawyers and government officials. Among them are Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev, Pavel Vasilovich Annenkov and Mikhail Aleksandrovich Bakunin. Turgenev - the one on the sofa - has just returned from three years at the University of Berlin and unenthusiastically taken a job as a minor functionary at the Ministry of the Interior. In his spare time, of which he takes care to ensure there is plenty, he has begun to write poetry, mostly on the twin themes of love and nature. A few literary journals have started to publish him, and it was as a young poet that he was first welcomed into Belinsky s circle.
Annenkov, who is to remain a lifelong friend, comes from an affluent landowning family and, apart from a brief period as a civil servant, will spend his life as an inspired dilettante; his unrufflably affable nature enables him to remain on friendly terms with many of his contemporaries who will later become bitterly divided by political differences.
Bakunin no longer forms part of the circle, having quarrelled with Belinsky five years earlier. The eldest son of minor nobility from the province of Tver, northwest of Moscow, he and Turgenev had met in Berlin, where for several months they had shared rooms and plunged enthusiastically into the alluring whirlpool of German idealism. During a holiday at the family estate of Premukhino, Turgenev had formed a romantic attachment with one of Bakunin s four sisters, Tatyana. But by the end of the summer he realized that, whereas he had been intrigued by a close intellectual affinity, she had fallen passionately in love with him. His attempt to extricate himself by means of a rather clumsy letter left the girl distraught; but her brother, who happened to be heavily in debt to him, showed no signs of resentment and for a while their friendship continued as before.
This was not the case with Belinsky who, on a previous visit to Premukhino, had fallen in love with another of the sisters. But Bakunin had resented his plebeian guest s wooing of the beautiful Aleksandra and, accustomed to being the dominant figure in any gathering, was jealous of Belinsky s superior intellect. Their unlikely friendship had ended in a violent quarrel.
This night, as always at these nocturnal gatherings, the arguments have ranged around the same three or four topics: social injustice, Russia s relationship with Western Europe, literature, the future of humanity At this moment there has just been a lively exchange of opinions about a review Belinsky has written for the monthly Otechestvennye Zapiski (Annals of the Fatherland) of a recently published romantic novel. Someone, the gentle Annenkov perhaps, has expostulated that it was too scathing, too cruel: After all Vissarion Grigorevich, to write such things is not a crime.
You are wrong. Belinsky leaps up and paces from one corner of the room to another, waving his arms, the helter-skelter flow of his words flowing uninterruptibly and frequently ungrammatically from his thin, slightly twisted mouth which rarely smiles - though when it does, as his closest friends know, it reveals the inherently sweet nature that belies his nickname of the furious Vissarion . You are quite wrong. A crime is exactly what it is. A crime against thought, a crime against feeling, a crime against humanity.
Against humanity?!
Yes, against humanity. What are all these noble sentiments, these fervent declarations of undying love, these pious pronouncements, these trials you know will be overcome, these reconciliations you know are pre-ordained, these treacly happy endings with church bells tolling and gently falling snow? They are an insult to intelligence, and as intelligence is all we have, that s an unforgivable sin. They are soft viscous pap to smother over the harsh outlines of reality, to lull the reading public into a sense of mindless apathetic somnolence, to prevent them from ever questioning, even in the privacy of their own minds, the fiat that all is eventually well, that our dear rulers are looking after us like wise and kindly grandfathers, chiding us gently from time to time, punishing us ever so slightly once in a while, but always for our own good everything for our own good
A violent burst of asthmatic coughing brings a temporary respite. Katkov, who was a contemporary of Turgenev s at Berlin University, takes the opportunity to goad Belinsky and embarrass the young poet, of whom he is secretly jealous.
And yet you were one of the very few to praise our dear Ivan Sergeyevich s poetic effort, Parasha . Hardly a beacon of modernity! A pure young girl suffering the pangs of adolescent love, a hero - if you can call him that - afraid to commit himself to any decision more binding than choosing between beef and pork, a mariage de convenance which leaves everyone vaguely dissatisfied but - ah, you know how it is - life must go on You remember what your colleague Panaev called it: A weak dilution of Pushkin with a couple of spoonfuls of tepid Lermontov . But you lavished superlatives on it. You, the prophet of the new, the plain, the unadorned, wrote of the poem s piercing sense of observation, its profound thought, its delicate, gracious irony .
Belinsky s brilliant blue eyes, usually half-hidden behind heavy lids, widen and flash from his pale, bony face, now mottled from the exertion of trying to control his coughing. I would have thought that you, Mikhail Nikiforovich, would have been able to read beyond the words. What I was praising in that review was not the poem but the potential. The writer of the drivel we have just been discussing is fifty-four and - we may hope - nearing the end at least of his creative life. But Ivan Sergeyevich was only twenty-five when he wrote Parasha , and it was his first narrative work. Before that, just a handful of poems, no better and no worse than so many others. But here, for all the conventionality of form and expression, was an acuity and a sensibility which could go on to finer things. Here was a tender young talent to be nurtured, not uprooted. If, along with all the others, I had destroyed the poem, I might have destroyed the poet. And that, I think we can now all agree, would have been a pity.
Turgenev, who up to now has tried to maintain the languid, indifferent manner he affected in those days in the face of criticism or praise, cannot resist a grateful smile in the directio