Lavretsky went out of the house into the garden, sat down on the bench that was so familiar to him – and in that dear place, face to face with the house where for the last time he had vainly stretched out his hands to the promised cup in which there bubbles and sparkles the golden wine of pleasure – he, a lonely, homeless wanderer, his ears filled with the gay shouts of a younger generation that had already taken his place, looked back upon his life. He grew sad at heart, but not oppressed and not ashamed: there were things to regret, nothing to be ashamed of. ‘Play on, enjoy yourselves, grow up, forces of youth,’ he thought, and there was no bitterness in his thoughts. ‘Your life lies ahead of you, and for you it will be easier: you won’t have to seek out your path as we have done, to struggle and fall and rise again in the midst of darkness; we had to strive to remain whole – and how many of us fell by the wayside? – but for you there are things to be done, there is work to do, and the blessing of us old men will go with you. But for me, after this day, after such sensations as these, it remains only to make you a final bow – and, if with sadness, but without envy, without any dark feelings, to say, in sight of the end, in sight of an ever-waiting God: “Welcome, lonely old age! Burn out, useless life!”‘
Lavretsky rose quietly and quietly departed; nobody noticed him, nobody detained him; the gay shouts rang out still more loudly in the garden beyond the tall green screen of limes. He sat in the tarantass and ordered his driver to drive home and not to whip up the horses.
‘And is that the end?’ the dissatisfied reader may ask. ‘What happened afterwards to Lavretsky? What happened to Liza?’ But what can one say about people who may still be living but have passed from the walks of life, why return to them? They say that Lavretsky visited that remote nunnery where Liza had hidden from the world – and he saw her. Passing from choir to choir, she walked close by him, walking with the gliding, hurriedly meek step of a nun – and she did not look at him; only the lashes of the eye turned towards him fluttered very slightly and she bent still lower her wasted face, and the fingers of her clasped hands, entwined with the rosary, were pressed more tightly together. What did the two of them think, what did they feel? Who can know? Who can say? There are such moments in life, such feelings.… One can but point to them – and pass by.
Notes
(These notes are taken partly from I. S. Turgenev, Sochineniya. T. VII, izd. ‘Nauka’, M.-L., 1964, upon which this translation has been based.)
CHAPTER IV
1. preference: A card game similar to Boston. Cards are distributed as at whist During every deal the player opposite the dealer should shuffle a pack to be cut by his right-hand neighbour and turn up a card for the first preference. The suit of the same colour, whether red or black, is styled the second preference, and the other two are common suits.
2. Oberon: The overture to the opera of 1826 by Karl Weber (1786–1826).
3. This poem, slightly modified, was originally written by Turgenev in 1840 and addressed to Alexandra Khovrina, whom he had met in Rome.
CHAPTER VIII
1. … beginning of Alexander I’s reign: Alexander I, Emperor of Russia, reigned from 1801 to 1825.
2. … crammed full of Voltaire: Jean Voltaire (1694–1778). French sceptic; Denis Diderot (1713–84), Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78), Guillaume Raynal (1713–96), Claude Helvétius (1715–71) – leading philosophical writers of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment.
3. …à la Titus: A short hair-style worn by the famous French actor Talma (1763–1826) for the role of Titus in Brutus and popular for its anti-Jacobin character.
4.… in honour of the holy martyr Theodore Stratelates: Theodore Stratelates (d. 319) is thought to have been a general (stratelates) in the army of Licinius, by whose order he was tortured and crucified at Heraclea in Thrace.
5. The Tilsit peace, concluded between Russia, France and Prussia in July 1807, led to a rift between Russia and Great Britain which doubtless meant, as Turgenev suggested in a letter of 1868 to W. R. S. Ralston, that Ivan Petrovich was immediately obliged to leave London for Paris.
CHAPTER XI
1. Symbols and Emblems: This book, originally produced in Amsterdam on the orders of Peter the Great in 1705, was apparently known to Turgenev in its 1809 or 1811 edition. The book was in the library of his home at Spasskoye. In a letter of 1840 he describes how, at the age of 8 or 9, he broke into an old bookcase and came across a ‘book of emblems’:
For a whole day I thumbed through my marvellous book and went to sleep with my head full of a whole world of troubling shapes. I have forgotten many of them; I remember, for example: ‘A roaring lion signifies great strength’, ‘A negro riding on a unicorn signifies craftiness’ (why?) and so on. That night it was awful! Unicorns, negroes, tsars, suns, pyramids, swords, snakes all went whirling round in my poor head. I became an emblem myself, I ‘signified’ things – I shone like a sun, was reduced to mist, sat on a tree, lay in a pit, raced in the clouds, stood on a tower and with all my sitting, lying, racing and standing almost caught a fever.
2. The year 1825 is notable for the Decembrist Revolt, an attempt by army officers and other members of the gentry class (dvoryanstvo) to overthrow the autocracy. The failure of the revolt led to the hanging of five of the ringleaders and the despatch to Siberia of more than 100 other participants.
CHAPTER XII
1. Mochalov: Mochalov (1800–48), Russian actor, famous for his playing of Hamlet.
CHAPTER XV
1. Mademoiselle Mars (1779–1847), leading actress of the Comédie Française; Mademoiselle Rachel (1821–58), famous French tragic actress; Odry (1781–1853), famous for his roles in French farces; Madame Dorval (1798–1849), celebrated for her romantic acting in works by Hugo, de Vigny, etc.
CHAPTER XVI
1. … your poet Pushkin: A. S. Pushkin (1799–1837), greatest of Russian poets. The words are taken from Zemfira’s song in The Gipsies(1824), set to music by A. Verstovsky.
CHAPTER XVII
1. Ivan IV of Moscow reigned from 1547 to 1584. He acquired his title as a result of the death and destruction he visited on his wretched subjects; nevertheless, he made a practice of praying for the souls of his victims, whose names were specially listed for this purpose. In such a list, Turgenev suggests, three Pestovs were named.
CHAPTER XIX
1. Catherine II, Empress of Russia, reigned from 1762 to 1796. Her ‘times’ were noted for French and neo-classical influences.
CHAPTER XXI
1. ‘Fridolin’: Schiller’s ballad of 1797 was entitled ‘Der Gang nach dem Eisenhammer’.
CHAPTER XXII
1. … surely this Fridolin… became her lover, didn’t he?; Fridolin, a young page in the service of a countess, is falsely accused of being the lady’s lover. The jealous count despatches him to an iron foundry where two workmen have been instructed to throw him in the molten metal. Fridolin goes first to the countess, who asks him to attend Mass and pray for her. He does this and is saved from the death planned for him by the count who, persuaded of Fridolin’s innocence, personally leads him to the unsuspecting countess.
CHAPTER XXVIII
1. ‘de populariser l’idée du cadastre’: The idea of assessing the value, extent and ownership of land for purposes of taxation.
2. Obermann: A novel in letters (1804) by E. P. de Senancour (1770–1846), which became extremely popular in the 1830s.
CHAPTER XXXIII
1. Lermontov: Mikhail Yurievich Lermontov (1814–41) composed Duma (The Thought) in 1838. It was a poem which indicted the passivity of Lermontov’s generation.
2. Khomakyov: A. S. Khomyakov (1804–60) was a leading exponent of Slavophilism.
CHAPTER XXXIX
1. Jouvin gloves:“Les Gants-Jouvin”, the leading firm of glove-makers at Grenoble. I am indebted for this translation to Patrick Wadding-ton’s excellent ed. of Dvoryanskoye gnezdo,Pergamon Press, 1969, 291.
2. Victoria Essence: Turgenev’s text has ‘Victoria’s Esse
nce’ in English, but this is most probably an incorrect translation of the French ‘Essence de Victoria’. See Patrick Waddington, op. cit., 292.
3. Herz: Henri Herz (1806–88), popular French pianist and teacher of music.
4. Fra poco: The aria from Donizetti’s opera Lucia di Lammermoor,1835.
CHAPTER XL
1. Metternich: Prince von Metternich (1773–1859) was Austrian chancellor and foreign minister, and ardent champion of the Holy Alliance.
2. ‘Son geloso’, duet from Bellini’s opera La Sonnambula,1831; ‘La ci darem’, duet from Mozart’s Don Giovanni,1787; ‘Mira la bianca luna’, duet from Rossini’s Soirées musicales,1835.
3. Thalberg: Sigismond Thalberg (1812–71), virtuoso pianist and composer.
4. George Sand: Turgenev has permitted certain anachronisms to arise in Varvara Pavlovna’s reading. In 1842 she would have known the works of the famous French novelists George Sand (1804–76) and Balzac (1799–1850), the French dramatist A. Scribe (1791–1861) and the very popular romantic novelist Paul de Kock (1793–1871). She might have known E. Sue (1804–57), whose work did not become really popular until after Les mystères de Paris of 1842. It is unlikely that she would have known the work of either Dumas père(1803–70), whose The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo did not appear until 1844 and 1845, or P. Féval (1817–87), whose first popular work, Les mystères de Londres(1844), was published under the pseudonym of Sir Francis Trolopp.
EPILOGUE
1. to be Madame Doche: Madame Doche (1821–1900), French actress, initially popular for comedy roles; she later became famous for her playing inLa Dame aux camélias by A. Dumas. Since this work was not staged until 1852, in strict chronological terms Varvara Pavlovna could not have seen Madame Doche in this role (which was no doubt what Turgenev had in mind) in 1850.
*Sketches from a Hunter’s Album, selected and translated by Richard Freeborn, Penguin Classics, 1967.
Ivan Turgenev, Home of the Gentry
(Series: # )
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