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smashed them.
    For years no one could persuade her to receive her eldest son or his wife. Even when, in a terrible year, the three children died, she was unmoved. But with Ivan her relationship took an exalted, passionate and curious turn. In her letters to him when he was in Berlin or Petersburg, and in her diary, strange words have been found. She wrote in the disconnected, sentimental way of a naïve school girl who is in love, or in the flirtatious manner of a worldly old woman. Mme. Zhitova says she once sat down before Ivan’s picture and wrote in her diary:
    To my son Jean…. Jean is the very sun of my life. I see only him and when his image fades, I am blind and don’t know where I am. A mother’s heart is never deceived, my instinct, Jean, is stronger than reason in me.
    In her letters, Yarmolinsky tells us in his biography, there are strange phrases where she addresses him as “
ma chère fille, ma Jeannette … vous êtes ma favourite
… ssh, for heaven’s sake, let nobody hear it!” She even calls herself his “most tender father and friend … Ialone conceived you, all that I am you are.” And she writes of a Queen Bee being dried by the drones: “She stretched her legs with an air of dignity, played the coquette, feigned extreme fatigue. Oh woman, you are the same in all creation, living to please and to be admired.” And then, sternly, to her son—“You are an egoist of egoists. I know your character better than you know yourself … I prophesy that you will not be loved by your wife. You will not love the woman but only your own pleasure.” Slyly she wheedled the story of his love affairs from him.
    But these intimacies, after he had finished with Berlin, were uneasy. She had sent dozens of letters to him while he was away: he had replied to very few of them. Indeed Nikolai had said “Ivan only writes when he wants money.” (This was true: he had run through 20,000 roubles in these student years and when she sent him money to buy her gloves or hats, he had pocketed it and forgotten to send them.) When she heard he was writing poetry she was scornful. There was worse. In Petersburg he had written one or two critical articles for a review. This was nothing short of a descent into “clerking” as she called it and not an occupation for a gentleman. It was like becoming one of the serf-clerks on her estate or some cheap foreign tutor. She despised Russian writers and when he persuaded her to read Gogol’s
Dead Souls
she had to agree it was “frightfully amusing,” but very improper: the impropriety lay in making fun of the gentry. She wanted Ivan to marry a woman of his own class and either to become important as a State official or to be a
comme-il-faut
man about town, doing nothing. She did not mind which. She thought his opinions about serfdom were puerile. In the meantime she flirted and quarrelled with him by turns. She despised his tender heart and if he annoyed her she could always threaten to beat or humiliate one of the serf boys or girls, so as to get even with him. If he did not bow to her she announced, with frank sadism, that she would take it out on others.
    Turgenev now returned to the idea that his philosophical studies might equip him for a professorship. The mother gave in, for the time being. He went back to Petersburg and sat for his exams and passed easily. He had only now to write a dissertation. And here he gave up. It was too simple to become a professor: one had merely to memorise the acceptable ideas of other people, and the end of the love affair with Tatyana had turned him against German idealism.He seems to have celebrated that apostasy by coming down to Spasskoye and getting a child by one of the seamstresses there. Varvara Petrovna was afraid that Ivan would follow the example of Nikolai and to stop that she agreed to have the child in the house, for Ivan soon went back to the