{"id":130110,"date":"2018-10-19T11:00:37","date_gmt":"2018-10-19T15:00:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=130110"},"modified":"2018-10-19T09:48:54","modified_gmt":"2018-10-19T13:48:54","slug":"surviving-unrequited-love-with-ivan-turgenev","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/10\/19\/surviving-unrequited-love-with-ivan-turgenev\/","title":{"rendered":"Surviving Unrequited Love with Ivan Turgenev"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I found out about Ivan Turgenev\u2019s existence at a crucial moment. There had been a very small leap for me between obsessing over Anna Karenina <\/em>in my midteens and deciding that learning Russian was my destiny. There was, unsurprisingly, an even smaller leap between becoming obsessed with learning Russian and becoming obsessed with unsuitable men who spoke Russian. This culminated in my acquaintance with a man whose name\u2014Bogdan Bogdanovich\u2014translated as \u201cGod\u2019s Gift, Son of God\u2019s Gift.\u201d In many ways, he lived up to his name.<\/p>\n

He was a man whom I loved with the passion that Anna Karenina first feels for Vronsky, but he regarded me with as much affection as Levin holds for the ladies who stink of eau de vinaigre<\/em>. This is where Turgenev comes in. No one writes better about unrequited love. Real life is about quiet, slow, awkward moments of humiliation. And what greater humiliation is there than loving someone far, far more than they love you? This is the kind of embarrassing, self-inflicted fever that Turgenev is brilliant at describing.<\/p>\n

In August 1994, I was twenty-one years old and spending the summer by the Black Sea in Odessa, Ukraine. It was the last few months of my year abroad. That summer was a blur of strong cigarettes, black bread, tea and jam, and whispered invitations on a Saturday night. I spent a lot of time drinking samogon <\/em>(moonshine), eating pig fat, and being in love. He was in a rock band. They played songs in terrible English with titles like \u201cI\u2019m Not Drunk, It\u2019s Only Fucking Funk.\u201d I was his groupie. He was my world. We went everywhere together. We kissed. We laughed. We ate pig fat. I was drunk a lot of the time, but I was never too drunk to know that God\u2019s Gift, Son of God\u2019s Gift, did not love me in the same way that I loved him.<\/p>\n

Luckily, while I was plowing my way through Tolstoy with a dictionary, I also happened to be reading in translation Turgenev\u2019s play A Month in the Country<\/em>. It is a cruel and hilarious cautionary tale about unrequited love. Turgenev himself experienced this unhappy state for more or less the entirety of his sixty-four years. From around the 1840s to the end of his life in 1883, Turgenev adored the married opera singer Pauline Viardot. The exact nature of their relationship is hotly debated. But it seems to me to be one of the most extreme examples of one-sided love in history. Turgenev represents his complicated feelings about this state of being through the mournful, resigned, comically self-pitying character of Rakitin.\u00a0<\/p>\n

No character illustrates Turgenev\u2019s state of hopeless anticipation better than Rakitin. He is described as a thirty-year-old friend of the family. You have to wonder if Turgenev was making his own little joke here, as he frequently referred to himself as a friend of the family when explaining his connection to Viardot. I now can\u2019t hear the expression friend of the family<\/em>\u00a0without thinking that the person is trying to intimate that they are having an affair with someone in the family. Which is awkward, as it\u2019s a fairly common expression to describe a completely innocent relationship, and now, whenever I hear it, I adopt an involuntary expression that says, Oh, no one believes you. There is clearly something else going on here. Friend of the family, indeed.<\/p>\n

Written as a comedy in five acts,\u00a0A<\/em>\u00a0Month in the Country<\/em> is set at the country dacha of the Islayev family. The husband, a wealthy landowner, Arkady, is thirty-six. His wife, Natalya Petrovna, is twenty-nine. Yes, Turgenev lists the exact ages of the protagonists. It\u2019s common to give age guidelines for characters in plays (Chekhov does it, too) but it\u2019s unusual to do it for every single one, as Turgenev does. It makes you feel like he\u2019s making a bit of a point. He wants to underline the age differences and generational rivalries.<\/p>\n

This is already a mildly disastrous love triangle between two old friends (Islayev and Rakitin) and Islayev\u2019s wife, Natalya. Largely indifferent toward her husband, Natalya is not interested in Rakitin either, although she toys with him a little, as he\u2019s better company than the man she is married to. There can\u2019t just be one pocket of misery, though. With two men already pining for a woman who doesn\u2019t return their affection, why not even things out with an attractive twenty-one-year-old tutor, Alexei Belyaev, imported into the house to teach the Islayevs\u2019 ten-year-old son, Kolya? Of course Natalya is going to fall in love with him. And he won\u2019t love her back. Or will he? This is the dramatic tension in the comedy. Naturally, Natalya needs a rival: seventeen-year-old Vera, the family\u2019s ward, taken in as an orphan and so close to marriageable age that a proposal is imminent from Bolshintsov (age forty-eight), a neighbor and friend of the family\u2019s doctor, Shpigelsky (age forty). (Turgenev really does give an age to every single person on the cast list. This is either very annoying or very helpful to casting directors.)<\/p>\n

More instances of unrequited love are added into the mix so that in the end, it\u2019s a merry-go-round of people sighing over people looking the other way. Islayev and Rakitin love Natalya. She doesn\u2019t love them. Natalya and Vera love Belyaev. He probably doesn\u2019t love either of them. Bolshintsov loves Vera. She does not love him. Even the servants are caught up in this, Shakespeare-style: the German tutor has an eye for Katya, the maid, who is really not that into him.<\/p>\n

Reading this play helped me enormously, as I could see the comedy of my own situation. It\u2019s horrible when you love someone madly and they just think you\u2019re vaguely tolerable. And yet, somewhere deep inside me, I did realize that the situation was funny on some level. It was hard to know which one of us was more ridiculous. Was it me, loving someone who clearly thought very little of me, or him, wasting his time with an English girlfriend he didn\u2019t like that much and who frequently wore an oversize Aran sweater knit by her Northern Irish grandmother because she thought it made her look like Debbie Harry? (In fact, it made me look like a bag lady. You can see now why the passion of God\u2019s Gift, Son of God\u2019s Gift, was not ignited.)<\/p>\n

Turgenev combines the horror and the comedy of this situation like no one else. There is little in the play to indicate Rakitin\u2019s physical state, but you can imagine him making big saucer eyes at Natalya, looking at her like a puppy and generally behaving like a lovesick teenager. (Put him in an oversize Aran sweater and he could be me.) Most of his scenes\u00a0are with Natalya, so we get to see him almost exclusively in this state, as if he\u2019s incapable of existing in any other way. Being the victim of unrequited love defines his identity. In the scenes where Natalya isn\u2019t present, Rakitin behaves and speaks much more like a normal, rational person. This is Turgenev\u2019s idea of self-parody: he knows that love, especially unrequited love, makes fools of us all. And he knows what it\u2019s like to be one of those fools.<\/p>\n

Reading the play, I realized that Rakitin\u2019s unrequited love is so extreme that it represents the best-ever argument for not bothering with this miserable one-sided state. \u201cYou wait!\u201d Rakitin says in a rant to his rival Belyaev in the final act of the play. \u201cYou will know what it means to be tied to a petticoat, to be enslaved and poisoned\u2014and how shameful and agonizing that slavery is! \u2026 You will learn at last how little you get for all your sufferings \u2026\u2009\u201d We have to remember, of course, that this is a comedy. And it\u2019s possible to get a laugh out of Rakitin\u2019s condition. But there\u2019s also something poignant here. Is this Turgenev talking? Is this how he felt all his life, up against Viardot? If he was writing this character to parody himself or to convince himself to change, he didn\u2019t succeed. He wrote this play only several years into his acquaintance with Viardot. He had another three decades of it to go.<\/p>\n

The reader knows the truth, though, whether about Turgenev or Rakitin. A mysterious force has not tied them to the petticoat. No. They have tied themselves there. And they rather like it. Realizing this made me blush. I also liked loving someone who did not love me that much. It was safe. I knew where I stood. There would be no unpleasant surprises. It was one of those moments where you feel a writer has seen straight into your soul.<\/p>\n

Much later on in life, I learned that I needn\u2019t have identified with Turgenev so readily. There\u2019s no point in feeling sorry for him. Although he was madly in love with the on-off mistress who would never give up her other life for him, this didn\u2019t stop him from having plenty of other ladies on the go. Not a bit of it. As Avrahm Yarmolinsky writes in his biography, Turgenev thought he was a better writer \u201cwhen the page was warmed by the glow of a casual affair.\u201d Maybe this is where I went wrong. I could have loved God\u2019s Gift, Son of God\u2019s Gift, and felt tortured and unloved but still had loads of other boyfriends. It didn\u2019t occur to me for a second that variety might have solved my problem. I would have assumed it would make it worse. That\u2019s possibly why I\u2019m not a Russian playwright.<\/p>\n

The more I learned about Turgenev, though, the more I understood that I very much liked him as a person. As well as Pauline Viardot never loving him as much as he wanted, he didn\u2019t really get that much love back for his work either. A Month in the Country <\/em>had a reception that can best be described as lukewarm. The great director Konstantin Stanislavsky called the play \u201cboring and unstageable\u201d even after he had cast himself in it as Rakitin. How insulting is that? You\u2019re in a play you\u2019ve chosen to stage, and you\u2019re playing the lead, but you still think the play is awful. This was to be Turgenev\u2019s lot in life: never quite appreciated for the talent he had.<\/p>\n

However, there was a moment of sublime recognition, and it came during his lifetime. As the biographer and translator Rosamund Bartlett has pointed out, there was a time when Turgenev was known as the one and only great Russian writer. In the 1880s, Turgenev was more popular in translation and more famous a name than Tolstoy. Bartlett quotes from the British literary periodical the Saturday Review <\/em>in 1905: \u201cWe remember mentioning his [Tolstoy\u2019s] existence to an American novelist of first rank, a great admirer of Turgenev, who did not seem inclined to believe that people would soon come to realize the greater power of Tolstoy.\u201d The novelist cited was almost certainly Henry James. To underline what\u2019s being said here: Turgenev is more worth reading than Tolstoy. That\u2019s a pretty good recommendation. Soon, though, both Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky overtook Turgenev\u2019s reputation both at home and abroad.<\/p>\n

Nowadays, he\u2019s not entirely reviled. He\u2019s well known as a dramatist: his plays are popular onstage and adapted for the screen. But he\u2019s not what you would call \u201cup there\u201d for everyone. The seeds for this fate were sown in the latter part of his career, when Turgenev, the writer first known abroad as the one and only voice of Russia, suddenly became seen as \u201ctoo Western.\u201d This was code for being too caught up with the aesthetics of the novel and not enough with the moral and spiritual principles of the characters. Virginia Woolf writes that he was appreciated \u201cmore for his formal artistry than for his political or social commentary.\u201d \u201cFormal artistry\u201d is code for writing about human nature and the natural world and love and flowers, instead of writing about God and why the serfs should be emancipated. (This is slightly unfair, as Turgenev did believe the serfs should be emancipated and wrote about it, too.) Basically, Turgenev became more closely associated with the style of Henry James, Hemingway, and Flaubert. He was supposedly not enough like Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky to be properly Russian. This was\u2014and is\u2014both his charm and his downfall.<\/p>\n

He was extremely entertaining and eccentric. He once said that the actress Sarah Bernhardt reminded him of a toad. He threw an inkwell at Pauline Viardot one time when she annoyed him. When he was suffering acutely from an undiagnosed, severe physical condition, only months away from death, immobile and miserable, he described himself as a \u201chuman oyster.\u201d At the same time, he cheerfully undertook a \u201cmilk cure,\u201d which, predictably enough, consisted of drinking nine or ten glasses of milk a day and not much else. He reported that it made him feel much better. He sat in bed and dictated his last short story, entitled, appropriately enough, \u201cThe End.\u201d Later, it turned out that he had cancer of the spinal cord. No amount of milk is going to cure that.<\/p>\n

I like to think of Turgenev as being charming and a bit bonkers. Virginia Woolf reviewed a biography of him under the title \u201cA Giant with Very Small Thumbs.\u201d This was not an unreasonable description. Woolf saw him as a literary giant. And he did have very small thumbs\u2014by his own account, at least. In one account of Turgenev\u2019s time in England, Anne Thackeray (eldest daughter of the\u00a0Vanity Fair <\/em>author William Makepeace Thackeray and stepaunt of Virginia Woolf) tells of the time she invited the Russian author to tea and he didn\u2019t turn up. \u201cI am so sorry I could not come,\u201d he said later. \u201cSo very sorry. I was prevented. Look at my thumbs! \u2026 Yes, my thumbs! See how small they are. People with such little thumbs can never do what they intend to do, they always let themselves be prevented.\u201d<\/p>\n

Tolstoy was always wary of stating too much appreciation for Turgenev, although they had a cautious friendship for most of their lives, with occasional upsets. The two once had a huge falling-out when they disagreed over whether it was a good thing for Turgenev\u2019s daughter to take in \u201cthe poor clothing of the paupers\u201d for mending. Turgenev considered this a generous act of charity. Tolstoy thought it was pretentious and hypocritical. Turgenev uttered an unrecorded swear word. There\u2019s also a suggestion that Tolstoy disapproved of the illegitimacy of Turgenev\u2019s daughter, who was the child of a serf. (Which is silly in itself, as Tolstoy had also fathered a child by a serf, telling his wife about it just before they got married, which upset her immensely.) They later exchanged letters, variously demanding and requesting apologies, which culminated in Tolstoy challenging Turgenev to a duel. They both managed to wriggle out of this by sending more letters, and Tolstoy, during one of his religious phases, eventually apologized. Tolstoy writes that Turgenev \u201clives in luxury and idleness\u201d but that he was \u201cthe most likable of pagans.\u201d<\/p>\n

Tolstoy and Turgenev did have some good times together, though, with Turgenev visiting Tolstoy at his estate at Yasnaya Polyana. He was well known among Tolstoy\u2019s children for impersonating a chicken while eating soup. When Turgenev visited friends, he would make a great show of checking the two watches he carried at all times, one in the pocket of his (usually dark green velvet) jacket, one in the pocket of his waistcoat. He would get them both out and make certain they showed the same time. There\u2019s a sense that he sometimes got a bit carried away with his own japes. He told Tolstoy\u2019s children stories about Jules Verne, referring to him as \u201ca stay-at-home and a frightful bore.\u201d He was also happy to dance for them, just to amuse them, and to amuse himself. That night, in his diary, an unimpressed Tolstoy writes, \u201cTurgenev\u2019s can-can. Sad.\u201d<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not sure I was directly influenced by A Month in the Country <\/em>to take the course of action I took that summer in Odessa. But it must have played some part. There are several scenes of confrontation in the play where the person who is tragically in love decides to challenge the object of their affections directly. It is the moment of the greatest folly and the purest bravery. It is the moment of ultimate knowledge: love me or reject me. It was a moment I decided would happen on a beach in Odessa.<\/p>\n

I was coming to the end of my time in Ukraine (where I was on holiday, at the end of my university year abroad in Russia) and would soon be facing my return to England. I needed to know whether God\u2019s Gift, Son of God\u2019s Gift, wanted to be with me or not. I wanted a commitment or, at the very least, an indication. Most Saturday nights, we would hang out on the beach with a group of people drawn from the band and its many hangers-on. The alcohol would run out at around ten P.M.,<\/small> and the party would move on to someone\u2019s house. That night, I made sure it ran out more quickly than usual, by drinking as much of it as possible myself and discreetly pouring away plastic cupfuls of portvein <\/em>(port wine\u2014actually more like cough syrup) into the sand. Soon, the cry went up for beer, and most of the party headed up the sand dunes to the alcohol kiosk.<\/p>\n

\u201cOstanem\u2019sya<\/em>. Razdenem\u2019sya<\/em>,\u201d I said, in the direction of God\u2019s Gift, Son of God\u2019s Gift\u2014\u201cLet us remain here and undress ourselves.\u201d As soon as the last straggler had disappeared out of sight over the sand dunes, I began to take my clothes off. I had decided. On this night, I would not be English or Russian or anything. I would be myself. And I would do something reckless, just because I felt like doing it. (And also because I was really quite drunk.) I left my clothes in a neat pile on a slope above the waves and ran screaming into the foam\u2014just as I remembered that I never went swimming in Odessa because the water was too polluted. When the water got up to my belly button, I started as something floated past me. It was an ice-cream wrapper printed with the word Eskimo<\/em>. My reading speed in Cyrillic is equal to my reading speed in English now, I thought to myself, pleased.<\/p>\n

Before my shoulders were under, I turned back\u2014God\u2019s Gift, Son of God\u2019s Gift, was long gone, miles away up the beach. Unrequited love is painful and humiliating. Avoid it at all costs if you possibly can, while acknowledging that it\u2019s almost impossible to avoid. Sometimes we have to do stupid things because we are inherently foolish. If Tolstoy had been around to write in his diary that day, he would have put: \u201cViv\u2019s skinny-dip. Sad.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Viv Groskop is a journalist, comedian, and author of <\/em>The Anna Karenina Fix<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

This essay is an adapted excerpt from <\/em>The Anna Karenina Fix, by Viv Groskop, published October 23 by Abrams Press.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

No one writes better about the painful humiliation of loving someone far, far more than they love 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