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period:
    â€œLet us go and plunge into the gulf of real life; let us fling ourselves on the waves and pick up a pretty actress.”
    It sounds like a cry of exasperation at Turgenev’s wandering thoughts. Unhappily for their friendship Turgenev had fallen in love in a philosophical way with the sister to whom Bakunin was most attached and there was another difficulty in this: Hegelians believed that ideal love reached its most delicate manifestations in the brotherly and sisterly affections, which in this case had a disturbingly incestuous, though innocent, significance for Bakunin. What Turgenev afterwards called Bakunin’s “diplomatic habits” came at once into play. He concealed his violent jealousy by drawing Turgenev out, listening to his accounts of his feelings, analysing them, introducing doubts on the highest principles. He gave his sister the same analytical treatment. If Turgenev was an idealist at the time, he was also a hedonist and he began to find Tatyana’s conversation, and his own, when they all spent a summer at Tver, too metaphysical. The first shock in his friendship with Bakunin came when he discovered that Bakunin had read his love letters, full of extravagant phrases in German and he had to listen to Bakunin’s talking like a father to him. The second shock was the discovery that Tatyana had really fallen in love with him. Turgenev had been deluded by his bookish-ness and was dutifully reliving the painful story of
Eugene Onegin
in the compulsive fashion of his generation. He cooled. He remembered Stankevich’s warning against “the lie in the soul,” and learned how difficult it is to get out of such a situation without cruelty and guilt. Tatyana became ill, he hesitated for a long time and then broke with her in exalted German—it sounded more heartfelt in a foreign language—and the letter contained a psychological insight into this kind of platonic love which could have been put with more tact:
    It is for you alone that I wished to be a poet, for you with whom my soul is bound up in such an ineffably wonderful way that I almost do not feel the need to see you.
    So Pushkin’s
Eugene Onegin
was brought up to date. Tatyana’s laugh was bitter. Turgenev’s shame at his proneness to juvenile self-deception turned to anger with himself and her. A long time passed before the guilt—and the resentment of a feeling so uncalled for—worked its way out of him. Bakunin despised Turgenev, told him he himself had now stopped living in his imagination and was now living “in a more realistic manner,” and borrowed more money from him. The friendship was over. There is a double guilt—the one expressed in Turgenev’s story,
A Correspondence,
written a few years after:
    Falsehood walked hand in hand with us because it poisoned our best feelings, because everything in us was artificial and stained.
    Worse. There was the Russian disease:
    We Russians have set ourselves no other task but the cultivation of our own personality and habits of self consciousness distort the very striving for truth.
    It is noticeable that even in such an intimate “confession” he enlarges it by invoking the ever shadowy figure of Russianness. To be a Russian is a fate.
    From these happy, heady years in Berlin, these gifted young men who lazily despised the stolid Berliners as they drank up their philosophy eventually emerged and chose their different directions. Bakunin, the dynamo, never lost his habit of meddling and intrigue but now carried it flamboyantly into revolutionary politics and in a few years would be shackled to a wall in an Austrian prison, under sentence of death and, with a mixture of luck and cunning, would escape in middle age from Siberia. The petty destroyer of other people’s love affairs became the anarchist and enthusiast for the destruction of society. The gentle Stankevich went off to Rome and died, very young, of