The Torrents of Spring (Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading)

By Ivan Turgenev and Mary Albon

Considered to be Turgenevs greatest love story, The Torrents of Spring is a bittersweet story of young love steered astray by passion. While traveling through Germany, nobleman Dmitri Sanin meets Gemma Roselli, a beautiful Italian girl who works in her familys shop. They fall in love as Sanin saves Gemmas brother life and defends her honor in a duel. Romance turns toward heartbreak, though, when Sanin falls under the spell of an imperious woman.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barnes & Noble
• Release date: Sep 1, 2009
• ISBN: 9781411431218

Ivan Turgenev

Ivan Turgenev was a Russian writer whose work is exemplary of Russian Realism. A student of Hegel, Turgenev’s political views and writing were heavily influenced by the Age of Enlightenment. Among his most recognized works are the classic Fathers and Sons, A Sportsman’s Sketches, and A Month in the Country. Turgenev is today recognized for his artistic purity, which influenced writers such as Henry James and Joseph Conrad. Turgenev died in 1883, and is credited with returning Leo Tolstoy to writing as the result of his death-bed plea.

Book preview

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Introduction

THE TORRENTS OF SPRING

I

II

III

IV

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VII

VIII

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XXX

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XL

XLI

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ENDNOTES

SUGGESTED READING

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Introduction and Suggested Reading Copyright © 2006 by Barnes & Noble Publishing, Inc.

Originally published in 1872

This edition published by Barnes & Noble Publishing, Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

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Cover design by Stacey May

2006 Barnes & Noble Publishing

ISBN-13: 978-0-7607-7909-5 ISBN-10: 0-7607-7909-0

eISBN : 978-1-411-43121-8

Printed and bound in the United States of America

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INTRODUCTION

THE TORRENTS OF SPRING BY IVAN TURGENEV IS A BITTERSWEET story of young love steered astray by passion. While traveling through Germany, Dmitri Sanin, a young Russian nobleman, meets Gemma Roselli, a beautiful Italian girl who works in her family’s shop in Frankfurt. They seem destined for each other: Sanin saves the life of Gemma’s brother, defends her honor in a duel, and inevitably they fall in love. But romance takes a turn toward heartbreak when Sanin falls under the spell of Maria Nikolaevna Polozov, an imperious beauty who pays no heed to consequences in her pursuit of pleasure. Sanin proves to be a weak man who is swept up by carnal desire like a leaf in a rushing stream. This morally complex tale about the destructive power of passion is considered by many to be Turgenev’s greatest love story. In the words of the great French novelist Gustave Flaubert, The Torrents of Spring puts love into your heart: you smile and feel like crying.¹

Ivan Turgenev (1818-1883) ranks with Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky as one of the greatest Russian novelists of the nineteenth century. Although today his lyrical fiction stands in the shadow of the monumental works of his two great contemporaries, Turgenev was a literary innovator and the first Russian author to be widely read and admired in Europe and America. His novels chronicle the Russian intelligentsia during the middle decades of the nineteenth century, capturing with great subtlety the complex tensions that arose between generations and classes in a repressive, feudalistic empire. Turgenev was committed to instilling his fiction with a social message, but his works do not present black-and-white conflicts or characters; instead they illuminate the complexities of human nature. Because of his nuanced approach toward social and political issues, Turgenev was a controversial figure in Russia during his lifetime. His most famous novel, Fathers and Sons (1862), whose central character is a nihilist, alienated Russian readers on both the right and the left, yet was immensely popular; the novel still provokes debate today. His story collection titled A Sportsman’s Sketches (1852), which presents the difficult life of Russia’s serfs with moving dignity, is widely credited with influencing Tsar Alexander II to emancipate the serfs in 1861. But Turgenev was also a subtle prose stylist who advanced the form of the novel itself. By rendering characters through the use of telling details rather than exposition, and by moving away from the omniscient narrator to the narrator as disinterested observer, he shifted the novel to a new stage. Turgenev has been admired and emulated by writers as diverse as Henry James, Willa Cather, Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, and Nadine Gordimer, and his place among the masters of nineteenth-century literature is well deserved.

Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev was born in Orel, a provincial town south of Moscow, in 1818. His father, Sergei Nikolaevich Turgenev, was a lieutenant-colonel decorated for courage in the 1812 Battle of Borodino against Napoleon’s forces. Sergei Nikolaevich was an exceptionally handsome man known for his charm, but his family was poor, so in 1816 at the age of twenty-three he married twenty-nine-year-old Varvara Petrovna Lutovinova, who had recently inherited a large estate, Spasskoe. Although theirs was not a love match and Sergei Nikolaevich was repeatedly unfaithful, the marriage survived until his early death in 1834.

Turgenev spent much of his childhood in the countryside at Spasskoe, where he developed a profound love of nature and observed at first hand the difficult lives of the family’s serfs. He possessed a natural talent for languages, mastering French, German, English, Latin, and Greek as a boy, and picking up Spanish as an adult. He entered Moscow University at fifteen, and completed his studies at St. Petersburg University. In 1838, he headed for Berlin, then the Mecca for young Russian intellectuals, where he spent most of the next few years at the university as well as traveling throughout Germany and Italy. When he eventually returned to Russia, he embarked on a brief career in the Ministry of the Interior, where his work focused on the problems of serfdom, an institution he abhorred. But he was unsuited to the life of a bureaucrat, and in 1845 he resigned to focus on his literary pursuits. He spent most of the rest of his life outside of Russia, but made frequent, extended visits to his homeland. Like all nineteenth-century Russian writers, Turgenev was forced to work within the constraints of official censorship. In April 1852, he was arrested for violating a censor’s edict by publishing a tribute to Nikolai Gogol after the great literary satirist’s death. Although his action might seem a trifling matter, this incident exemplifies the extent to which Russia’s imperial regime perceived writers as a threat. Turgenev was already under suspicion because of his liberal views and his associations with reform-minded Russians at home and abroad, so the Gogol piece proved a useful pretext for his arrest. He was imprisoned for thirty days and then exiled to Spasskoe until November 1853. Ironically, Turgenev published A Sportsman’s Sketches—arguably his most politically influential work—while he was in exile, and the book was an instant success.

In 1845, Turgenev met the great love of his life: Pauline Garcia Viardot, a Spanish opera singer whose voice and charm had captivated audiences all over Europe. She was twenty-two and married to a much older man whom she did not love. Turgenev was instantly smitten, and his love grew deeper and stronger with time; according to his biographer Leonard Schapiro, he loved her quite literally until the last conscious hour of his life, with unquestioning, submissive, undemanding devotion.² Although there is no clear evidence that Turgenev and Pauline Viardot were lovers, a few hints in his letters and his personal writings seem to indicate that the relationship was consummated in 1849-1850. But it soon evolved into a close friendship, and Turgenev appears to have resigned himself to the status of family friend; he lived with or near the Viardots for most of the rest of his life. Turgenev never married, and not having a family of his own seems to have been one of his great regrets. He had one acknowledged daughter, born to a serf on his mother’s estate, and there are unsubstantiated rumors that he fathered at least one of Pauline Viardot’s children. Although Turgenev seems to have considered a spiritual and emotional connection with a woman as more important than sexual union, he regretted being always on the fringe of someone else’s family life. He had a genial personality, but with an undertone of sadness; this melancholy pervades Turgenev’s works, and it is not surprising that one of his major themes is the evanescence of happiness.

Turgenev was acquainted with most of the leading Russian writers and thinkers of his day, both in Russia and abroad, including some of the most revolutionary-minded. He had testy relationships with Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, both of whom seem to have been somewhat contemptuous of Turgenev but also jealous of his success. As exasperated as he often became with both Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, Turgenev admired and championed their work, and helped introduce them to a European audience. His own literary reputation waned somewhat following early successes with A Sportsman’s Sketches and Fathers and Sons. In his later novels, he strove to connect to the younger, more radical generation of Russia’s intelligentsia, but was not entirely successful because his reform-minded liberalism seemed outdated to them. Yet when Turgenev’s body was returned to Russia for burial in St. Petersburg after his death in 1883, the enormous crowds of mourners were a testament to his literary stature. His works have never fallen out of favor with Russian readers, not even during the Soviet era.

Like most of Turgenev’s fiction, The Torrents of Spring (sometimes translated as Spring Torrents) has an autobiographical dimension. The central story was undoubtedly inspired by an incident from his youth; en route home from touring Italy when he was twenty-two, Turgenev had an enchanting encounter with a beautiful girl in Frankfurt (though she was Jewish rather than Italian). The girl implored Turgenev to help her brother, who had fainted; like Sanin, he revived the boy and was charmed by his sister, but he did not stay in Frankfurt long enough for the infatuation to develop into anything serious. It is tempting to conclude that when he was writing The Torrents of Spring Turgenev, then in his early fifties, may have been looking back on his life, reexamining missed opportunities and speculating about what might have been if he had made different choices. Sanin can be viewed as a version of Turgenev, both as the weak-willed young man who becomes enslaved by passion and the jaded older man who believes the best years of his life are behind him (already by his early forties, Turgenev saw himself as an old man drifting toward death). Sanin both is, and is not, Turgenev. He is Turgenev caricatured by Turgenev, perhaps; a kind of paradigm of weakness and fecklessness, perhaps, which Turgenev never was, but which in moods of depression he believed himself to be.³

Turgenev uses one of his favorite devices in The Torrents of Spring; presenting the main story as a recollection of the principal character. As the novella opens, fifty-two-year-old Dmitri Sanin, feeling old and tired of life, tries to distract himself from his gloomy thoughts by rummaging through his desk. He comes across a garnet cross that he recognizes with a mix of regret and delight. The cross takes him back thirty years to the summer of 1840, and then the central story begins. The framing story gives the novella a feeling of inevitability; even as the tale of Sanin’s romance with Gemma unfolds, the reader senses that their love is doomed. And ultimately it is the framing story that turns a bittersweet tale of long-lost love into something more profound. As the eminent critic V. S. Pritchett has noted, "[t]he double view of love we find in the story, of middle age looking back on a folly that turns into betrayal and shame, gives the comedy of Torrents of Spring its moral complexities."⁴

The central story commences as a fast-paced, comic romance. The lovers meet through a serendipitous encounter, obstacles to their love arise and are overcome, and even nature seems to be on their side when a sudden gust of wind presses them together. Sanin is smitten by Gemma’s beauty as well as her innocence and integrity; he also falls in love with her delightful family. She is similarly lovestruck by Sanin, who in her eyes is a hero for resuscitating her brother and defending her honor in a duel with an impudent German officer. But there is also a manic element to the story; like a snowball rolling downhill, it becomes more uncontrollable and ominous as it gathers speed. Dale Peterson has pointed out that Turgenev wrote anti-romances, fables of disenchantment in which experience invariably crushes the protagonist’s conventional conceptualizations of life,⁵ and The Torrents of Spring is no exception. Moreover, "[i]n the Turgenevan novel, unlike the Bildungsroman, character does not develop; it is tested in the crucible of event."⁶ The weak-willed Sanin soon faces a moral challenge, prompted by another chance encounter, that reveals and tests his submissive nature.

After Gemma accepts Sanin’s proposal of marriage, her mother makes plain that she does not want Gemma to move to Russia. Rather than objecting (as a man of stronger will might have done), Sanin offers to sell his estate and invest the proceeds in improving the Rosellis’ shop. Although this mollifies Signora Roselli, Sanin was aware that he was saying something absurd, but he was possessed by an incomprehensible recklessness! It is then that he runs into a former schoolmate, Ippolit Polozov. To Sanin, who believes that the fates are smiling kindly upon him, their meeting is a happy coincidence. Polozov has a rich wife, and he invites Sanin to accompany him to Wiesbaden to meet her. Sanin is hopeful that she will buy his estate.

Maria Nikolaevna Polozov is indeed rich—and intelligent, well educated, and beautiful. (Though as the daughter of a peasant, she can never be considered a gentlewoman.) The Polozovs have an unusual marriage not at all in keeping with the Victorian values of the times: Maria Nikolaevna is clearly in charge; she is an astute businessperson who manages their affairs, whereas Polozov only advises her on matters of taste. By marrying, she has secured the freedom to do as she pleases (her motto is Cela ne tire pas à consequence—It will have no consequence at all), and her husband has gained a life of luxurious indulgence. Although the Polozovs are only in their twenties, they seem much older than Sanin, and far more worldly-wise and cynical—more like partners in crime than husband and wife.

Maria Nikolaevna asks Sanin to stay in Wiesbaden for a few days while she decides whether to buy his estate. Sanin senses she is up to something (This lady was obviously fooling him, and trying in every way to get over him . . . what for? what did she want? Could it be merely the caprice of a spoiled, rich, and most likely unprincipled woman?), but he needs her help to win Gemma’s hand, so he accedes to her wishes. Maria Nikolaevna sees in Sanin both a very handsome fellow and the challenge of seducing an honorable man. Over the course of a few days she bewitches him with her beauty and charm and, perhaps most important for Turgenev, her fierce vitality. The reader knows that it is just a matter of time before Sanin falls into her trap.

Erotic passion plays a critical role in The Torrents of Spring, which is perhaps Turgenev’s most frankly sensual work (though by contemporary standards it is extremely tame). Sanin and Maria Nikolaevna’s wild horseback ride up the mountain is an obvious yet subtly described metaphor for their sexual excitement. The scene is enhanced by Turgenev’s masterly depiction of nature and place; his lyrical language beautifully captures the organic sensuality of the moment. Maria Nikolaevna is a wild, free creature, exuding the vital essence of life; to Sanin, she seemed not an Amazon on a galloping horse, but a young female centaur at full speed, half-beast and half-god, and the sober, well-bred country seemed astounded, as it was trampled underfoot in her wild riot! Aflame with lust, he casts aside his prospects for happiness with Gemma and succumbs to Maria Nikolaevna. In the words of Henry James, "spring-torrents . . . must flow, and ravage their blooming channels."⁷

Sanin willingly enslaves himself to Maria Nikolaevna, but for her, he is merely a new trophy: her lips curled with triumph, while her eyes, wide and clear, almost white, expressed nothing but the ruthless and glutted joy of conquest. The hawk, as it clutches a captured bird, has eyes like that. Sanin knows she will quickly move on in search of new prey, but he cannot help himself. Leonard Schapiro has suggested that Maria Nikolaevna is the true hero of The Torrents of Spring: whereas both Gemma and Sanin are shown as victims of the cosmic will, Maria Nikolaevna is in full control of it; she may almost be said to invoke and exploit it for her own end. She alone of all three characters is free, and she alone has will and strength, the ability to live life to the full and to get what she wants from it. For Turgenev, "the man, or woman, of