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tuberculosis. His death affected Turgenev deeply, for Stankevich’s conversations, his contemplative idealism, had had a lasting influence on him. Turgenev was the slowest to find his way. Rich and lazy—lazy and hesitant in disposition, but not inintellect—he had read enormously in English, French and German literature and in the Greek and Roman classics and was likely to become, and indeed did become, the most cultivated Russian in Europe; but he was lost in the Romantic dream, writing his lyrical poetry which was no better than anyone else’s and was half-inclined to take to academic life. He knew he had brains enough to master that with his eyes closed. He was wavering, as he wavered when he listened to the Russian Hegelians who had moved towards politics in a theoretical way, believing that the hopes of the French Revolution were still alive; one day he would be carried away by them, the next day he was the sceptic. He was an apolitical young poet with one passionate political conviction: the son of the despotic owner of five thousand serfs was convinced that serfdom was a cruel and corrupting form of slavery and was at the root of Russian inertia and backwardness. The one gain from “the plunge into the German sea” was, he said, that he had become a Westerner for good. Peter the Great, who, in the eighteenth century, had forcibly introduced administrative reforms and the need for science, was Turgenev’s hero; and he rejected for good the doctrines of the Slavophils, who held that the traditional religions and peasant culture of Russia and the Tsar who ruled it should stay withdrawn from the corrupting taint of Western ideas.
    He had been home once or twice in the Berlin days. He had travelled for a year in France, Italy and Switzerland. He had marched over the Alps, alone, thinking of himself as Manfred. He had been comically drunk on German wines and had fallen briefly for girls in German inns. On his first return to Spasskoye in 1839 he ran into two domestic dramas. For one a superstitious serfwoman was responsible. She had been fumigating a sick cow in the stable by burning herbs on a shoe and burying the shoe under the floor. The place went up like tinder and Spasskoye caught fire. Most of the fine furniture went and, apart from the stone gallery corridor, there was only a wing left. Varvara Petrovna watched it all from an armchair on the lawn, surrounded by what could be rescued. One of her personal maids, a German girl called Anna, rescued a chest containing 20,000 roubles from a serf who was going off with it: the brother Nikolai courageously rescued the bedridden nurse who hadhelped Varvara Petrovna escape from her stepfather when she was a girl. Nikolai was the hero and he and the strong-minded German maid presently became lovers and the secret was soon out. Unlike Ivan, Nikolai was a serious lover; that was intolerable to Varvara Petrovna who had no objections to her sons going to bed with servants—she would simply send their babies away—but she told Nikolai firmly to remember the duties of his rank and not to be carried away by the empty
“promesses des passions: elles évanouissent
…” The tortured Nikolai married Anna secretly. Varvara Petrovna raged when she eventually discovered this and cut him off. He had by this time become a civil servant and for years she left him to struggle on a poor clerk’s income and refused to see him or his wife or their children. Ivan did all he could, as usual, for reconciliation, but the sixty-year-old mother was obdurate. Nikolai lived in misery on his pay for many years but when he was the father of three, she did at last put on one of her staged scenes. She agreed to go to Petersburg, to look at the three children—but in the street outside his house. She stared at them and went off asking for their pictures to be sent to Spasskoye. Reconciliation? No. When the pictures arrived she took them to her room and