Slavs & Slaves

THE TURGENEV FAMILY (179 pp.)--V. Zhitova--Roy ($2.75).

TURGENEV: A LIFE (328 pp.)--David Magarshack--Grove ($6).

"[In Russia], the habits of slavery are too deeply implanted." says a Russian in Ivan Turgenev's novel Smoke. "We must have a master in everything . . . This master is mostly a living person, but sometimes a so-called movement gets the upper hand . . . Why and on the strength of what reasons we [Russians] become slaves is a mystery, but such, it seems, is our nature."

Such, too, was the nature of Novelist Turgenev (Fathers and Sons, On the Eve, Rudin), with the vital difference that he spent a lifetime analyzing and fighting it. Too gentle to be as dogmatic as the proud Tolstoy, too rebellious to accept the resignation of Dostoevsky, Turgenev made his place in literature as a genius who dwelt in a house divided against itself, half slave and half free.

Two new books will be invaluable keys both to Turgenev and to the "mystery" of Russian slavishness. The Turgenev Family, an eyewitness report written in 1884 by Varvara Zhitova, adopted daughter of Turgenev's mother, is like the beginning of a psychiatrist's case history: it deals with the patient's heredity and early environment. Turgenev: A Life, by David Magarshack. a competent. Russian-born biographer (Chekhov: A Life), is more a full-dress analysis of his great artistic achievement and personal unhappiness.

Mother Dictator. Turgenev was the slave of a mother who had herself suffered all the ignominies of enslavement. As a young girl, she was abused with "drunken violence" by her stepfather until she was 16 years old. She ran away and took refuge in the house of a "severe and miserly" uncle, who, says Biographer Magarshack, threatened not only to throw her out of his house but also to disinherit her. But when he died, she inherited his vast estates, married Turgenev's father--and set out to get her own back for the miseries she had suffered.

Father Turgenev was a landowner who spent his life chasing women; he kept out of the home and let his wife "do anything she liked." What she liked, according to Magarshack, was to make her household resemble the Czarist government as closely as possible. She gave her serfs court titles: "Maid of Honor," "Court Chamberlain." When her family physician came to treat her little adopted daughter, he was told: "Remember! If you don't cure her . . . Siberia!" Mother Turgenev discouraged marriage among her serfs because she liked their undivided attention for herself, so her women bore illegitimate children instead and either drowned them at birth in the estate lake or brought them up secretly for years in locked rooms. "A maid who did not offer her a cup of tea in the proper way was sent off to some remote village and perhaps separated from her family forever; gardeners who failed to prevent the plucking of a tulip [were] flogged . . ."

Perhaps the most terrible admission in Author Zhitova's book is that mother Turgenev's victims were devoted to her. In return for their absolute obedience, she organized their lives down to the last detail and relieved them of all personal responsibility. One day when she nearly fainted (with sadistic excitement) while flogging her eldest son, Nicholas, he forgot his pain instantly and screamed piteously: "Water! Water for mummy!"

The Leaning Tower. Son Ivan reacted differently. He adored his mother, but he never gave an inch in his detestation of her "insensate lust for power.'' He grew up incapable of ever wielding power, good or bad. Invited once to dinner, he arrived late because "his valet and coachman stopped the carriage to have a game of cards, [and he] was too weak to tell them to drive on."

"He had a frame which would have made it perfectly lawful, and even becoming, for him to be brutal," wrote the young Henry James, one of his most ardent disciples, "[but his] air of neglected strength [was such] that one almost doubted whether he were a man of genius after all."

Turgenev was no sooner free of his mother's domination than he found a despotic mistress to take her place. Pauline Viardot was an opera singer; in her callousness (Turgenev admitted) she was "worse than Lady Macbeth." My "soul rushed madly to her feet," confessed Turgenev--and Pauline made sure it stayed there until the day he died. European audiences, unused to the strange habits of the submissive Slav "soul." scratched their heads perplexedly when Turgenev introduced them to it in his plays, such as. A Month in the Country.

Rakitin. Why do you go on hurting me?

Natalya. Well, who else is one to hurt if not one's friends? . . .

Rakitin. You play with me like a cat with a mouse . . . But the mouse doesn't mind.

Natalya. Oh, you poor little mouse!

And yet, the "mouse" managed to make himself an execrated writer in Russia.

Turgenev was hated by the reactionaries for his persistent attacks on serfdom, hated by the radicals for refusing to replace a "master" of the Right with a "master" of the Left. His passion for European civilization (which caused him to spend much of his life in France and Germany) was felt as a bitter insult by Russians. Tolstoy took Turgenev's behavior for granted --until he stumbled one day on the elderly master, his "thumbs stuck into his waistcoat," lustily dancing the cancan with a pretty girl. "Turgenev--the cancan! It is sad," wrote Tolstoy in his diary.

To his admirers, Ivan Turgenev is the greatest of all the Russian writers, not merely because he was the greatest exponent of the Russian soul but because, in art as in life, he refused to twist the truth or enforce his will on human creatures.

Where other great novelists marshaled facts to support their theories, Turgenev was content to observe, note and "lean against the facts provided for me by life." Always pitched aslant, midway between earthly submission and airy aspirations, Ivan Turgenev remains literature's tallest, finest leaning tower.

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