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Viardots’ apartment in Petersburg.
    Pauline herself was captivated by the mixture of Oriental barbarity and polish in Court Society in Petersburg where everyone spoke French. She was persuaded to sing some Spanish gypsy songs to Russian gypsies: both parties were convinced that Russia and Spain had far more in common than they had with Western Europeans and in this their instinct was right. It is an irony that Turgenev, the Westerner who believed the future of Russia lay in learning from Europe, should have been brought to his one great and lasting passion by what looks like an atavism: her Spanishness had its Islamic roots; his own, remote though they might be, had something of this too. The Andalusian wit and feeling that underlay her French upbringing responded to his lazy, open Russianness. There was more than the buried image of his mother in Pauline, more than the attraction of a common love of music and the belief in the supremacy of art, more even than the conventional attractions of a handsome man for a plain woman, or of a young Quixote for a young woman who was set on the practical matters of her career.
    The Viardots left Russia. The following year they came back to Petersburg and then went on to Moscow, where Turgenev took his mother to hear Pauline sing. His mother had heard the gossip about his absurd behaviour. She was annoyed. She did not mind him goingto bed with serf girls or having an older mistress of his own class—he had been having an affair with a miller’s wife when he was out shooting near Petersburg just before meeting Pauline—but to dangle so seriously after a foreign actress killed any chance of the marriage his mother had hoped he would make. After hearing the singer she sulked, but came away saying “It must be admitted the damn gypsy sings well.”
    The embittered, ill and ageing sovereign of Spasskoye was at this period of her life, showing her own ever-increasing powers as an actress. She had, as we know, broken with her son Nikolai because of his disgraceful marriage; cutting Ivan’s allowance to next to nothing had not prevented him from stooping to literature and accepting an invitation from the Viardots to visit them in France. (He went, on the pretext that he had to see a doctor about his eyes.) She could not stand the company of her brother-in-law who had come to live in the house and got rid of him. Worse: the old gentleman had married and very happily. In spite of everything, she longed for the sons who would not obey her and she put on fantastic and malevolent scenes. One year she announced that there would be no Easter Festival—an appalling sacrilege in the eyes of her peasants and her neighbours. She ordered the priest to stop the ringing of the church bells and though the servants laid the great table in the hall with the Sèvres porcelain and had set out the bright red eggs, the lamb made of butter and the Easter cake, she made them clear it all away untouched.
    In another scene she sent for the priest to hear her confession, but when he got there she called for her house serfs to be assembled and told the priest she wanted to be confessed publicly. The priest protested that this was against the laws of the church but she shouted and threatened till the terrified man gave in.
    The most powerful scene occurred on the date of Ivan’s birthday, a sacred day for her. She ordered him to come home. Budding orange trees were placed in tubs on the verandahs, the cherry trees were brought out of the forcing sheds. A great feast with the foods Ivan loved was laid out on the tables in the stone gallery, the flags of the Lutovinovs and Turgenevs were hoisted over the house and she had a signpost erected on the road on which the words
Ils
reviendront
were painted. Neither son came, and retiring to her room she announced that she was dying. She called for Ivan’s portrait and called out,
“Adieu,
Jean.
Adieu,
Nikolai.
Adieu, mes en-fants.
”