V.S. Pritchett: The Gentle Barbarian: The Life and Work of Turgenev (Groot-Brittannië, 1977): 241 blz: Uitgeverij Vintage Books
V.S.
(Victor Swadon) Pritchett (1900-1997) was een Britse schrijver die
vooral bekend is geworden als schrijver van korte verhalen en als
literair criticus. Pritchett beheerste vloeiend Frans, Duits en Spaans,
maar geen Russisch. Behalve deze biografie over Toergenjev heeft
Pritchett ook een prachtige korte biografie over Anton Tsjechov geschreven.
Pritchett
is een welhaast ideale biograaf. Hij combineert in "The Gentle
Barbarian" een levensbeschrijving van Toergenjev met een kritische
evaluatie van zijn belangrijkste werken. Hij schrijft zeer economisch,
in een zeer prettig leesbare stijl en vertelt zijn verhaal in slechts
241 bladzijden. Hier zouden andere biografen, die vaak veel te lang van
stof zijn, een voorbeeld aan kunnen nemen. "The Gentle Barbarian" is wat
mij betreft een geweldige biografie over een belangrijke schrijver.
- His ear for French or German was remarkable: he was a born mimic and with a gift for play-acting and fantasy. His real education, as was apt to happen to the children of the gentry, was given him by the servants. He listened to their stories, knew the barbarous wrongs his mother inflicted on them; starved of the despised Russian language in family life, he heard it continually from them.
- I was convinced that in Russia one could acquire only a certain amount of elementary knowledge and that the source of true knowledge was to be found abroad. In those days there was not a single man among the professors and lecturers at the University of Petersburg who could shake that conviction of mine; indeed they themselves were imbued with it ...
-
Turgenev 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.
-
His letters of this time are the happy letters of a mind finding itself
and growing. It is a cultivated mind. It is endlessly curious. It is
spirited and critical: the letters are brilliant, changeable, discursive
talk, all personality.
- ... platonic love affairs live by words and not deeds.
- There was something, he said, that goes straight to the heart in being on one's native soil, among people who talk your own language and who, good or bad, are made of the same clay as oneself.
- It was always Turgenev's habit to start with models from real life and, as many writers do, to transfer them to other scenes or to add bits of other people and aspects of himself to them.
- Turgenev knew he could draw still portraits: he must somehow create the illusion of life rippling through them. He was by nature summary and intense. He now wrote down a list of the types that interested him, putting the real names of the persons, often several similar people compressed into one. Since he had no faculty for dramatic plot, he wrote a minute factual biography of each one, adding to it and noting every trait and gesture. His experience as a playwright led him to choose the closed scene in which people come in and go off, as on the stage; and his practice as a writer of short stories made him build his novels of short episodes complete in themselves, with a pause or interval between them, after which the next movement can begin in a new key.
Over Roedin:
- What captivates us is the simplicity, the easy grace of this novel, the tact with which he makes short chapters crystallise and contain the talk and the silences in which each character grows more clearly under our eyes.
- Turgenev reflected on Tolstoy's reckless, extrovert life of action and remorse and concluded that the fault of his own generation was that "we have little contact with real life, i.e. with living people, we read too much and think abstractly."
- Planning a novel is very fatiguing work, particularly as it leaves no visible traces behind it; you lie on the sofa turning some character and situation over in your mind, then you suddenly realise that three or four hours have passed and you don't seem to have anything to show for it ... to tell you the truth there are very few pleasures in our trade.
Toergenjew over zijn schrijfmethode:
-
I have heard it said ... not once but many times that in my works I
always "started with an idea or developed an idea" ... I never attempted
"to create a character" unless I had as my starting point not an idea
but a living person to whom the appropiate elements were later on
gradually attached and added. Not possessing a great amount of free
inventive power, I always felt the need of some firm ground on which I
could plant my feet.
- Reformers never do anything. All they talk about is art and parliaments when the important question is getting enough to eat.
-
The artist must serve the Muse, serve her and no one else. "An unhappy
marriage may do something for a talent, but a happy one is no good at
all."
- Biography has the fundamental weakness that it can rarely tell us what was was said or unsaid between the parties: it is a novel without dialogue.
- But Turgenev did not speak English well. He pitied the English, as Herzen had done, for their mania for work and rushing to the office; he despised English painting but he deeply admired English political institutions.
