The Europeans

7

Culture Without Borders

Living in Paris for personal reasons, he served his country in Europe. We nicknamed him the ambassador of the Russian intelligentsia. There was not a Russian man or woman in any way connected to writing, art or music, on whose behalf Turgenev did not intervene.

Maksim Kovalevsky, ‘Memories of Turgenev’ (1908)

1

The Viardots returned to Paris at the end of October 1871. They were shocked by the damage to the city by the Prussian bombardment and the fighting between Thiers’s troops and the Communards. There had been running battles in the area leading up to Montmartre, where they found the houses pitted by bullet holes and the streets still cluttered by the remains of barricades. Thiers’s mansion in the nearby place Saint-Georges had been torched by the Communards, leaving nothing but a burned-out shell. Their own house in the rue de Douai was unscathed but dilapidated after years of being rented out to a family with many children, who had left during the siege. Returning with the Viardot children from Baden, Turgenev found the house in a chaotic state, as he wrote to Annenkov on 24 November. ‘It is full of labourers decorating, cleaning, scraping, moving furniture – none of it conducive to my work.’¹

The household was gradually restored to the luxury and splendour of ten years before, when the Viardots had last lived there. Pauline’s Cavaillé-Coll organ was brought back from Baden and reinstalled in the Grand Salon, where Louis had his picture gallery. Despite his sale of many paintings to cover the expenses in Baden, he still had important works, including several by Velázquez and Ribera. The ground floor rooms, where they entertained, were richly furnished with oriental carpets, heavy cashmere curtains and hangings, and large vases of flowers. They had an ‘exotic eastern feel’, according to the writer Hjalmar Boyesen. Pauline saw her students in the first-floor drawing room, where she kept her Pleyel grand piano. On the coffee-coloured walls there were portraits of George Sand, Gounod, Saint-Saëns and Turgenev, and a full-length picture of Pauline’s sister, the great singer Malibran.²

To begin with Turgenev had two rooms in the attic. It was the first time he had lived in the same house as the Viardots – the point when his relationship with Pauline and Louis became more or less open. In 1874, when their daughter Claudie married, he was given four small rooms she had vacated on the second floor. Turgenev had a study, a ‘cramped and airless room’ with two little windows and a ceiling far too low for his tall frame; there were a desk covered with his papers, an ottoman, a stool, and paintings covering the walls. Next door, in the library, was a boudoir piano, its lid covered with a thick layer of dust, and, off a narrow corridor, there were a salon and a bedroom, where the jurist Anatoly Koni, who visited Turgenev, noticed through an open door that ‘everything was in disorder’, the bed unmade, a curtain falling from its rail. Turgenev was dressed shabbily at home: his clothes had missing buttons, according to Elena Repchanskaya, one of Pauline’s Russian students, who often called on him. She took it as an indication of his sad existence, without a wife to care for him. Yet, despite this shabbiness, he had ‘impeccable comportment’, recalled Louise, who sensed his presence in the house from the smell of his eau de Cologne.³

Visitors were shocked by the humble quarters of the great writer, who lived like a lodger in his old friends’ house. Russians took offence on his behalf. ‘The apartment resembled a modest set of furnished rooms – the same small passages and corridors, the same doors, stoves and furniture. It was unworthy of a wealthy nobleman,’ thought Petr Boborykin, the Russian journalist and memoirist. ‘Who else, with gout, would climb so many stairs to the upper floors and live there with the sound, from ten o’clock each morning, of loud and piercing roulades and solfeggios sung by Mme Viardot’s pupils in the drawing-room below? I cannot imagine how he worked.’* It seemed tragic to Boborykin that Turgenev lived in ‘bivouacs and temporary quarters’, as if he were a ‘nomad’.⁴

Turgenev only lodged upstairs. Most of the time he spent downstairs, reading, playing chess with Louis, listening to Pauline making music, taking meals with the family, in whose daily life he played a central part. In many ways he acted as a second father to the Viardot children, especially to Claudie and her younger sister, Marianne. Turgenev and the Viardots no longer kept up the appearance of living separately, as they had done in Baden and London. They did nothing to conceal their relationship, which became a source of malicious and misleading public gossip, some of it finding its way to the police, who kept the Viardots under regular surveillance because of their left-wing sympathies and alleged immorality. Turgenev, the authorities believed, had been ‘expelled from Russia’ as a ‘revolutionary’ after the appearance of his ‘nihilist tract’, Fathers and Sons. The agents they assigned to read his mail and follow him around Paris reported to the Prefect of Police that he was ‘considered by the nihilists to be one of their leaders’.⁵ They also followed Louis Viardot, whom they suspected of disseminating socialist ideas at the Sorbonne, where in fact he just went to use the library. The following report on Turgenev and the Viardots was typical of police intelligence:

Madame Viardot lives most of the time alone with Monsieur Tourguéneff in the house at rue de Douai. Monsieur Viardot, who has cold relations with his wife, lives almost permanently with his son at their property in Bougival. He comes to Paris for a few days only during holidays, mainly out of habit rather than to spend the holidays in the circle of his family. Why he allows the presence of Tourguéneff in his house remains unknown: despite the rumours that his wife and Tourguéneff are lovers, Monsieur Viardot remains on the friendliest terms with him: none of their neighbours knows what goes on between them and there is nothing else on which to base conclusions about the character of the relations between these three persons.⁶

Rumours of this sort – and worse – continued to dog the Viardots, especially Louis, who had political ambitions on their return to France.⁷ In October 1874, he stood for election as an independent Radical candidate in municipal elections in the Madeleine district in Paris. His campaign was undermined by malicious gossip – spread sufficiently widely for the inept police to be aware of it – that he was an ‘old pimp (macq) living from the earnings of his wife’, a ‘prostitute and lesbian’, who had sexual relations with her students. Louis lost the election. The next year he was asked to stand for the Sorbonne but declined the nomination, citing his old age as the reason (he was seventy-five), although in truth he was afraid of exposing Pauline and himself to such rumours once again (he went on to stand again for election at the age of eighty-one in 1881, but did not win).⁸

When they returned to Paris, Pauline was aged fifty, Turgenev fifty-three. Neither was too old for a sexual relationship, but one does not seem likely. Turgenev claimed that he was impotent, or so he told his friends over a long and alcoholic dinner at Flaubert’s apartment shortly after his return to Paris. He had said many times in recent years that his relations with Pauline had become easier because their sexual passions had declined. With his white hair and beard Turgenev looked considerably older than his years (when he was out in public with Louis, strangers often thought they were brothers). He suffered terribly from gout and bladder pains (probably the effect of venereal disease contracted many years before). He was not in a condition to be Pauline’s ardent lover. He was her devoted friend, admirer, artistic soulmate, financier, supporter and adviser, errand-runner, helper to her children – in short, her ‘slave’, according to his friends. Among them was Flaubert, who wondered ‘how a man could degrade himself to that extent’.⁹ He called Turgenev a ‘soft pear’ (poire molle) – cruel perhaps in the light of his declared impotence – which became the Russian’s nickname at the Viardots.¹⁰ According to Henry James, a resident in Paris in 1875–6, Turgenev was constantly at Pauline’s bidding, even leaving dinners early to be home by 9.30 p.m. to say goodnight to her before she went to bed.¹¹

James thought Turgenev was a man ‘with something pressing upon him and making him unhappy, more than he knows’. It was an impression some of his friends shared, among them Flaubert, although others, like George Sand, took a slightly different view. Sand had struck up a warm friendship with Turgenev when he came with the Viardots to stay with her – now an old recluse at Nohant – in October 1872. She had not read Turgenev when she met him at Courtavenel during the 1840s, but now she recognized him as a ‘great poet’ and, in the three days that they spent together, came to adore him for his lively conversation and childish love of games.¹² Following a later visit by Turgenev with Flaubert, in April 1873, Sand wrote to the latter, who had complained of not seeing enough of the Russian because Pauline kept him on too tight a rein: ‘No, that giant does not do as he likes, I have noticed that. But he is one of the class that finds its happiness in being ruled, and I can understand it, on the whole. Provided one is in good hands – and he is.’¹³

Turgenev himself would frequently complain of feeling lonely in these years. ‘I have close friends whom I love, people who love me,’ he told a Russian visitor, ‘but not everything that is dear and near to me is as near or dear to them; not everything that interests me is of interest to them; and there are long periods when I feel isolated and alone.’¹⁴ This was the price Turgenev paid for living on the edge of Pauline’s nest. The intensity of his devotion was not shared by her, and so his love for her declined, or rather changed in nature over time, becoming closer to a deep friendship. It was from this loneliness, the desperation of old age, that Turgenev fell in love with a series of much younger women – all Russians – in the 1870s.

The Viardots resumed their custom of hosting a salon. On Thursday evenings they held a musical soirée in the Grand Salon, where the Parisian cultural élite would meet, and on Sunday afternoons a more informal gathering, where there were games, theatricals, charades, comic songs and music-making among family and friends. Saint-Saëns once appeared as a ballerina in a lampoon mime of the diabolic temptations offered to Robert in Robert le diable, the Grand Opera by Meyerbeer. The famous ‘Dance of the Nuns’ was then performed by all the guests dressed in white sheets, beating the rhythm on saucepans while Pauline played the piano arrangement of the score.¹⁵

Writing to his brother, Henry James gave this account of a Thursday musical soirée at Madame Viardot’s, ‘a most fascinating woman’, he remarked, ‘as ugly as eyes in the sides of her head and an interminable upper lip can make her, and yet also very handsome or, at least in the French sense, très belle’.

Her musical parties are rigidly musical and to me, therefore, rigidly boresome, especially as she herself sings very little. I stood the other night on my legs for three hours (from 11 to 2) in a suffocating room, listening to an interminable fiddling, with the only consolation that Gustave Doré, standing beside me, seemed as bored as myself. But when Mme. Viardot does sing, it is superb.¹⁶

Caroline Commanville, Flaubert’s niece, recalls ‘Madame Viardot, wearing a simple but elegant black dress, moving graciously around the room, greeting each group of her guests in turn, leaning in to speak to certain individuals … Standing by a doorway on his own, Turgenev watched her all the time, and when she passed by him, they exchanged smiles.’¹⁷

These Thursday evenings were an important fixture of the Paris music scene. They were attended by the leading French composers of the day, among them Gounod, Saint-Saëns, Fauré, Lalo, Bizet (a neighbour in the rue de Douai), Massenet and Franck (employed as a music teacher to Paul Viardot in the 1870s). Many of their chamber works were first performed at the Viardots’ before an invited audience of influential guests: patrons of the arts, concert managers and impresarios, politicians, writers and their publishers, critics and the owners of their newspapers. Most of these figures reappeared at Saint-Saëns’s Monday musical parties at his mother’s house in the Faubourg Saint Honoré and at Lalo’s parties on Fridays. In this way they began to form a stable network of personal connections that shaped artistic tastes and made things happen in the cultural world of Paris in the 1870s and later.¹⁸

Turgenev and the Viardots were at the heart of this network. They promoted young composers, artists, writers through their connections in the music world, the art establishment, journalism and publishing, in effect performing a role that would become the business of an agent in the modern sense.* As influential figures with an international reach, they also served as intermediaries between different cultures in Europe, introducing Russian music, art and literature to France, Britain, Germany, Spanish art and music to the French, French and German writers to Russia, and so on. Through their international connections they were helping to advance the cultural integration of the Continent.

There were many Russians in Paris. Most were temporary residents, idle noble travellers and tourists; but there were also long-term émigrés, political exiles and revolutionaries, students, writers and artists. In this community Turgenev was a crucial intermediary. ‘We nicknamed him the ambassador of the Russian intelligentsia,’ recalled Maksim Kovalevsky, the sociologist, who was a student at the Collège de France during the mid-1870s. ‘There was not a Russian man or woman in any way connected to writing, art or music, on whose behalf Turgenev did not intervene.’

He took an interest in the Russian students of Mme Viardot, brought Russian musicians to her attention, acted as the Secretary of the Paris club of Russian artists, made arrangements for the exhibition of their works, sent publicity about them to the Paris press, wrote letters of introduction to those who approached him, gave money to those he considered needed it, usually without return, and petitioned on his own or through acquaintances on behalf of [Russian] foreign correspondents, even at the risk of endangering his own relations with the authorities, which could have stopped him from returning to Russia.¹⁹

The club of Russian artists (formally entitled the Society for the Mutual Aid and Patronage of Russian Artists in Paris) was founded by Turgenev and the landscape painter Aleksei Bogoliubov, who settled in Paris because of poor health in 1872. The club met on Tuesday evenings at the mansion of the Russian Jewish banker and philanthropist Baron Günzburg in rue de Tilsitt. Russian artists auctioned their artworks and Turgenev gave readings (a pince-nez balanced on his nose) to attract the expat crowd. Turgenev also played a leading role in the Russian Reading Room, which he established with German Lopatin, the exiled Russian revolutionary, and which held concerts and readings to raise money for political émigrés and students in Paris. Turgenev gave a large part of his library to the Reading Room, and Pauline hosted several private concerts to raise money for it, delighting the Russian audience by singing mainly Russian songs.²⁰ Tsarist secret-police agents kept a watchful eye on these evenings.²¹

Pauline’s singing career was effectively over. The Jena premiere of Brahms’s Alto Rhapsody, in 1870, was her last significant performance in public. She did sing in several private concerts in the 1870s, although her voice retained only traces of its former power and intensity.²² Her central importance in the music world now continued in her role as a teacher and promoter of young musicians and composers in whose talent she believed. On her return to Paris, in 1871, she was appointed Professor of Singing at the Conservatoire, a post she held until 1875, when she resigned in frustration with the rigid pedagogic policies of her colleagues. But her teaching manual, L’École classique du chant (1864), a guide to the bel canto style with annotations on 300 arias and songs, continued to be used by the Conservatoire until the twentieth century.

The Viardot household became an informal headquarters for a group of French composers, all members of the Société Nationale de Musique, founded at the time of the defeat by Prussia in February 1871 to promote the cause of ‘serious’ French music, chamber music in particular, and liberate it from the domination of the German tradition.²³ As the co-founder and president of the society, Saint-Saëns was the intermediary between these composers and Pauline, who was by this time an old and dear friend (he dedicated Samson and Delilah to Pauline, who sang the leading part in a concert performance with the composer at the piano in 1874, although by the time the opera was finally premiered in Weimar, three years later, she was too old to star in it).²⁴

It was Saint-Saëns who first brought Fauré to the Viardots in 1872. The unknown young composer, then aged twenty-seven, had been taught piano by Saint-Saëns at the École Niedermeyer, the austere Paris boarding school for religious music which Fauré had attended from the age of nine, and he was presented to the Viardots as Saint-Saëns’s favourite protégé. Fauré became a frequent visitor at the rue de Douai. Naturally shy, he grew in confidence in the warm family atmosphere and took comfort from the maternal attentions of Pauline, who encouraged Fauré to compose. His songs Op. 4 and Op. 7 are dedicated to Pauline, the songs of Op. 8 and Op. 10 to Marianne and Claudie, and his Violin Sonata (Op. 13) to Paul Viardot – all works dating from this time. Fauré fell in love with Marianne, eight years younger than himself, and the two became engaged.²⁵ But Marianne broke their engagement. She could not be the maternal wife he wanted her to be. Shortly afterwards, she married the composer Victor-Alphonse Duvernoy. Fauré took a long time to recover. It is often said that his Requiem was written in response to this lost love. But musically perhaps the break from Marianne was a blessing in disguise, as Fauré himself later acknowledged: Pauline would have steered him towards opera and choral music (as she did with Duvernoy), whereas Fauré’s strengths were as a composer of piano and chamber works.

Of the young composers encouraged by Pauline, Massenet was the best-known for his opera and choral works. In 1872, he was introduced by Saint-Saëns to Pauline, who invited him to dinner in the rue de Douai and asked to hear some of his music. The unknown composer, then aged thirty, played some extracts from his three-part oratorio Marie-Magdaleine. Pauline was impressed. Based on Renan’s Vie de Jésus, the oratorio was musically modern, eschewing the classical conventions, such as fugues, in favour of an operatic form with oriental colour that captured well the dramatic effect of Renan’s story of Jesus, not as God but as a living human being. Pauline took it on herself to get the work performed, offering herself for the main female part. Marie-Magdaleine was premiered in Paris in April 1873 at one of the ‘national’ concerts organized by the Société. It was an instant sensation, launching Massenet’s career and winning him the highest praise of Gounod, Bizet and Tchaikovsky, who heard it on a trip to Paris that summer. Massenet would later write that he owed his ‘entire career’ to Pauline Viardot.²⁶

For these young French composers, the chance to hear Spanish music was one of the main attractions of the Viardot salon. Pauline had established herself as one of the principal exponents of Spanish song in France, a country where Hispanic music had been little known before she began her career during the 1830s. She had added Spanish songs to her concert repertoire, researched, transcribed and published them, and made them known to composers, Berlioz and Gounod among them, who took a growing interest in the music of ‘exotic Spain’.²⁷ The young French composers of the Société, who regularly heard her sing these songs at her salon, were drawn to Spanish music partly by its popular appeal (in the 1860s the country’s dance and folk music had become established features of opéras comiques, vaudevilles and café-concerts in Paris),²⁸ and partly by their search for an ‘authentic’ folk tradition that had links to southern France and could specifically draw the French away from the influence of the Germans. Ideas of Pan-Latinism were becoming influential in France at this time, partly as a reaction to the rise of Pan-Germanism and Pan-Slavism.²⁹ Saint-Saëns, Bizet, Massenet and Lalo all wrote works with French-styled borrowings from Spanish dances and folk songs.

Inspired by the Spanish music he heard at the Viardots, Saint-Saëns wrote ‘El desdichado’ (1871), a duet dedicated to Marianne and Claudie which was set to a Spanish verse and composed in the form of a Boléro, a dance that became widely known in European capitals around this time. Lalo’s Symphonie espagnole (1875), less a symphony than a violin concerto, was composed for the Spanish violinist and composer Pablo Sarasate, a regular at Pauline’s musical parties, as indeed was Saint-Saëns’s earlier work in a Spanish style for violin and orchestra, Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso (1863).

Bizet too was drawn towards the Spanish music he learned from Pauline, especially the Habanera, the syncopated 2/4 rhythm dance which came to Spain from Cuba in the nineteenth century. The Habanera was made popular by the Basque composer Sebastián Iradier (1809–65), whose ‘La Paloma’ (1860), his version of the dance in a folk style, was performed everywhere in the Hispanic world. Pauline had been adding his songs to her repertoire since the 1850s. She corresponded with Iradier, often asking for his latest scores so that she could introduce them to the concert hall.³⁰ It was through Pauline that Bizet first became acquainted with Iradier. His music library contained many of Iradier’s scores.³¹ Bizet borrowed from his composition ‘El Arreglito’ (1864) for ‘L’amour est un oiseau rebelle’, the famous aria in his opera Carmen (1875), mistakenly assuming that it was an original folk song (warned about his plagiarism, Bizet added an acknowledgement to Iradier to the later versions of his score). The Habanera was not the only contribution by the Viardot circle to Bizet’s opera. It was Turgenev who had directed the opera’s librettists, Ludovic Halévy and Henri Meilhac, to Mérimée’s Carmen (1845) and persuaded them, against their initial reservations, that the novella would make a good story for an opera. Louis Viardot had advised Bizet about Spanish literature, particularly Guillén de Castro’s sixteenth-century play Las mocedades del Cid (based on the medieval legend of ‘El Cid’), which Bizet used for his unfinished opera by that name.* And it was Pauline who acquainted him with her father’s Spanish operas. She had dozens of Garcia’s unpublished scores. One of the songs in his comic opera The Man in Servant’s Disguise (1804), an Andalusian palo, ‘Cuerpo bueno, alma divina’, was the inspiration for the famous entracte to Act IV of Bizet’s opera. A heavily edited version of the song had been published in an album, Échos d’Espagne (1872), which Bizet owned, but Pauline introduced him to the original and helped him to re-create its Spanish character.³²

Bizet’s Carmen was the ultimate expression of the French nineteenth-century cult of exotic Andalusian Spain, a cult that had begun in the 1820s when Louis Viardot had published his first book, Lettres d’un Espagnol. It contained all the stereotypical elements of ‘Spanishness’ – gypsies, smugglers, bullfighters, flamenco dancers, guitarists, castanets – that had since become established as popular components of the dramatic arts in France. There was a vogue for plays with Spanish themes in the boulevard theatres. Spanish dance was regularly featured in French opéras comiques, vaudevilles and café-concerts. Flamenco dancers, singers and guitarists performed in the salons of Paris. The mid-1870s were the highpoint of French cultural interest in Spain (at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1878 the biggest crowds were to be found at the Spanish exhibits). Beyond the exotic stereotypes, there was a growing appetite for realistic views of Spain, as demonstrated by the huge success of Baron Charles Davillier’s account of his travels in L’Espagne (1874), illustrated by Gustave Doré, whom he took, as he explained, so that he ‘could make us acquainted not with the Spain of the opéra comique and keepsakes, but the real Spain’.³³

Bizet’s researches into Spanish culture were in keeping with this new French interest in ‘authentic’ Spain. But the elements of Spanish music, subject, style and colour he put into Carmen were tailored by the Frenchman to fit in with the opéra comique form, in which the old stereotypes of Spain were expected. Only part of Mérimée’s novella went into the libretto, a more compact tragic drama about the downfall of the soldier Don José, who abandons his childhood sweetheart and his military duties for the fiery gypsy Carmen, whose subsequent attraction to the Toreador Escamillo provokes him to murder her.

The first performance took place at the Opéra-Comique on 3 March 1875. The Viardots and Turgenev were in the audience, along with Gounod, Offenbach and Massenet. Initially there was a cold reception for the work. Critics expressed outrage at the ‘immoral’ nature of the characters, at the sordid realism of the opera’s depiction of the lower classes, and (at a time when anti-German feeling was still running high in France) at what was thought to be the ‘Wagnerism’ of the score.³⁴ Ticket sales were poor. Half-empty houses saw the first performances. Bizet was distraught, even suicidal, according to his friend Gounod. Having always struggled to achieve success, he saw this latest setback as a fatal blow to his career. He withdrew to Bougival, became ill from swimming in the cold river, and died from a heart attack, no doubt brought on by the stress of his failed opera, on 3 June. He was aged just thirty-six. Sympathy for the composer brought a change of fortune to his opera. Ticket sales improved. It was brought back in the autumn and had a successful run (among those who saw it then was Tchaikovsky, who declared it to be ‘a masterpiece in every sense of the word’). Not seen again in Paris until 1883, Carmen meanwhile triumphed in Vienna, Brussels, London, Dublin, New York and St Petersburg. It became immensely popular in Germany (Bismarck saw it twenty-seven times).³⁵

In Spain its reception was complex. First performed in a Spanish translation at the Teatro de la Zarzuela in Madrid in 1887, many critics attacked it for pedalling the old Romantic stereotypes – bullfighters, gypsies, smugglers and so on – portraying ‘oriental’ Spain as a primitive and violent society. They felt that modern Spain – which was becoming more connected to the rest of Europe by mass communications and travel – deserved to be better known by foreigners. But others were delighted by what they saw as the opera’s veracity; they praised its music and dances, its realistic staging and costumes as true reflections of ‘authentic’ Spain. Indeed the Habanera from Carmen would be rearranged in many different versions and circulated around the Iberian peninsula as a quintessentially ‘Spanish’ work.³⁶ It was no longer possible, or even meaningful, to distinguish between what was nationally ‘authentic’ and what foreign or international – so much cultural exchange was there across national borders in the modern world.

2

Russian music too found new popularity in Europe. Turgenev and Pauline acted as the go-betweens, connecting people in the European music world with the new generation of composers then emerging in Russia.

Throughout the 1870s, he made short trips to Russia. Improvements in the railways had made this possible. During the previous decade there had been a boom in railway-building in Russia– a development encouraged by the country’s defeat in the Crimean War, which had exposed Russia’s military weakness against the industrial powers, and by the need to improve its transport system for food exports to the West, the main means of raising capital for the country’s industrialization. Turgenev had invested heavily in the newly floated Russian railway shares. He also had a personal vested interest in them. The time it took for him to travel to his estate from Paris was drastically reduced by the opening of a line from Warsaw through Smolensk and Vilnius, completed in 1871. It enabled him to travel to Orel without going via Moscow or St Petersburg. From Paris to his Spasskoe estate – a journey that had taken up to three weeks in the 1850s – now took just five days.³⁷

On his trips to Russia he resumed his acquaintance with Stasov and the ‘Mighty Five’, as well as other Russian composers, such as Dargomyzhsky, championed by the nationalist critic. He had been told by Stasov that the circle often met to perform works in progress among themselves. At first the five were reluctant to let Turgenev join their group. While they recognized his literary genius, they were suspicious of his previous attitude towards their school and his support for their arch-rival Anton Rubinstein. But Stasov persuaded them to change their minds, and on Turgenev’s visit to St Petersburg, in May 1874, they put on a private concert for him at the critic’s house. With four hands at the piano, they performed the final act of Cui’s uncompleted opera Angelo (1876), which Turgenev liked, and Dargomyzhsky’s The Stone Guest (1872), which he did not. On that trip Turgenev got to know Mussorgsky. He met him at a dinner, found him sympathetic (‘his nose is completely red, he is a drunkard, and his manners completely natural’) and heard him ‘sing, or rather groan, several extracts of his opera [Boris Godunov] and another that he is composing now [Khovanshchina], which struck me as characterful and interesting, on my word of honour’, he reported to Pauline. ‘Allons, allons, messieurs les Russes!!’³⁸

Excited by the promise of these Russian composers, Turgenev bought a load of scores and sent them to Pauline, urging her to give them to her musical connections in Paris. The Mighty Five were only just beginning to be known outside Russia, partly through the activities of Liszt, a keen supporter of their music, and partly through their championing by Jules de Brayer, the organist at Chartres Cathedral, who made transcriptions of their works. Twenty-seven of the imported scores went to the Conservatoire – works by Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Cui and Mussorgsky, including Boris Godunov, which had only just received its first performance in St Petersburg in January 1874. It is highly probable that Claude Debussy, a long-time student at the Conservatoire, knew these scores by the time of his graduation, in 1879, when he joined the household of Nadezhda von Meck, the wealthy widow of a Russian railway magnate and patron of Tchaikovsky, as a piano teacher for her eleven children and as her musical companion. Through von Meck, with whom he spent the next year in Russia, Debussy became well acquainted with the music of Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov and Borodin.³⁹

Turgenev was most excited by the young Tchaikovsky, and made a point of seeking out his music during visits to Russia. He was particularly impressed by the Six Romances, Op. 6, which he had heard performed at an all-Tchaikovsky concert in Moscow in 1871. He had the music sent to Pauline in London, who liked them so much, especially the last, ‘None But the Lonely Heart’, that she at once performed them at her musical parties at Devonshire Place.⁴⁰ Later, in Paris, she introduced the Romances to the concert repertoire and made them popular. During the summer of 1874, when he was again in Russia, Turgenev sent Pauline a piano arrangement of Tchaikovsky’s symphonic poem, Romeo and Juliet (1871), which she played at the public piano recitals for which she was mainly known in Paris at that time.

Tchaikovsky was aware of Pauline’s role as a promoter of his work. He was engaged to her former pupil, the Belgian singer Désirée Artôt, before she broke it off in 1869. Tchaikovsky was a frequent visitor to Paris in the 1870s but did not meet Pauline then. At the end of 1876, he began to think of putting on a concert in Paris the following March. He wrote to the Russian composer Sergei Taneyev, who was then staying in Paris: ‘Would it be seen as madness on my part if I were to ask Viardot, through Turgenev, to take part in my concert? After all, she has performed my songs, hasn’t she? If it is a mad idea, then just throw away the enclosed letter. But if you think it is all right, then please go to Turgenev and hand him this letter.’ The concert did not take place because Tchaikovsky was unable to raise the funds. But Taneyev was at a concert at Pauline’s house that spring and accompanied her at the piano while she sang ‘None But the Lonely Heart’, with what one guest that evening described as ‘her characteristic passion, expressiveness, and impeccable diction’. Lopatin, who heard her sing the song at one of her parties, recalled: ‘She was an old woman. But when she sang, “Ia strazhdu” [‘I am suffering’] it made my flesh creep. How much expression she put into it. Her eyes, her pale and hollow cheeks! You should have seen the audience!’⁴¹

The French were receptive to Russian culture in the 1870s. Defeat by Prussia moved France closer to Russia as a diplomatic ally against Germany. It was a rapprochement that continued, on and off, culminating in the Franco-Russian Alliance of 1894. The French invested heavily in the Russian economy, the railways in particular, and as Russia opened to the West, Western interest in it grew. There was a boom of travel-writing about Russia, including the bestselling Voyage en Russie by Gautier. British writers shared the enthusiasm. Lewis Carroll had gone to Moscow and described it as a wonderland (‘you see as in a looking glass distorted pictures of the city’) in his travel diary, which became an inspiration for his Through the Looking Glass (1871). Two extensive travellers in Russia – Donald Mackenzie Wallace and Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu – produced what were arguably the first objective foreign histories of the country in the 1870s, and both sold in large numbers.⁴² In sum, Russia was no longer simply seen as an ‘Asiatic barbarism’ – an oriental ‘other’ to contrast with ‘European Civilization’ – as it had been thirty years before, in the days of the Marquis de Custine. It was coming to be understood as part of Europe itself.

European interest in Russia grew with the international exhibitions of these years – in London (annually between 1871 and 1874), Vienna (1873) and Paris (1878) – where Russian arts and crafts drew some of the largest crowds. At the Paris Exposition in 1878 there was also a well-attended series of Russian music concerts conducted by Nikolai Rubinstein, which featured works by Tchaikovsky, Glinka, Anton Rubinstein and Dargomyzhsky, though not the music of the Mighty Five, which was a source of puzzlement and disappointment to many. The Paris press was united in its critical response: it thought the music interesting but unoriginal, too German or Italian in style. They had expected to hear something more exotically ‘Russian’ in its national character. There had been a similar reponse to Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet, which was hissed at the concerts populaires.⁴³

Expectations of a distinctive national style were central to the growing receptivity of Western audiences to those cultures placed on the ‘periphery’ of the European continent (Russia, Spain, Scandinavia, the Czech lands, Hungary, etc.). They wanted Russian music to sound ‘Russian’, Spanish music ‘Spanish’, Hungarian ‘Hungarian’ (even if it was composed by Brahms) in a way that they did not of, say, German, Italian or even French music (which only needed to sound not German). They wanted music from these countries to seem exotically different, full of folk motifs, with gypsy and bohemian dances. Such expectations encouraged the production of a ‘national style for export’ from these lands. Nationalists, in turn, promoted myths of folk-based authenticity in their arts and music, not just for the purposes of their own nation-building but to assert their country’s distinctiveness among the other nations of Europe. That was the programme of Stasov and his followers. Cui’s book La Musique en Russie (1880) was written to promote awareness of their nationalist music in Europe, where it had a lasting influence on public expectations of what Russian music should sound like.

Turgenev was horrified by the exoticization of Russian culture in the West. He wanted Russian artists to become a part of ‘European Civilization’, and believed that the expression of their national character ought to be subordinate to that – internalized within their art, not worn on their sleeve. That was why he saw great art in Pushkin, Tolstoy and Tchaikovsky: their Russianness did not militate against their Europeanness.

Turgenev’s views were equally opposed to Stasov’s when it came to the promotion of Russian artists in Europe. There were many Russian painters in Paris. The younger ones were mostly from the Academy of Arts with prize scholarships to study in the studios of established artists (e.g. Bonnat, Gérôme or Lefebvre) under the direction of Bogoliubov, the Russian émigré painter appointed to supervise their work. Most of them were influenced by French genre and landscape art, especially the Barbizon painters, although they were also introduced to the broader trends of European painting in Paris: Bogoliubov steered them to the Spanish painter Marià Fortuny as a counterbalance to the French.

Turgenev was impressed by the young painter Alexei Kharlamov, the most Western-oriented of the Russian students in Paris, who painted mainly genre works and portraits. He went overboard in praising him, comparing him to Rembrandt, whose technique Kharlamov had studied at the Hermitage. He commissioned Kharlamov to paint portraits of Pauline, Louis and himself (Plates 20 and 21), which were indeed exceptionally good from a technical standpoint. They were hung together in the picture gallery at the rue de Douai, and Turgenev made a point of inviting friends to inspect the three paintings (even Victor Hugo was asked to come along). The portraits of the Viardots were displayed in excellent positions at the 1875 Salon (Louis was a member of the jury there) and the picture of Turgenev prominently hung at the Salon of the following year, when Zola, in his annual review, singled out Kharlamov for the highest praise, although he thought his study of Turgenev had given to his friend ‘a hard and sad expression’ that was ‘not at all his usual look’.⁴⁴

Through his many connections in Paris, Turgenev launched Kharlamov on the art market. Goupil sold a number of his paintings at his most luxurious gallery, opposite the vast, newly opened Paris Opéra, the Palais Garnier, and sent many to his London branch, where English dealers snapped up Kharlamov’s ‘pretty pictures’, according to an envious friend, the Estonian painter Ernst Liphart, who thought he was corrupted by Turgenev’s definition of success. ‘When a picture dealer comes to your studio and offers you good money for one of your paintings in the conviction that he can immediately resell it with an enormous profit to some collector that he has in mind already, that is the meaning of success,’ Liphart heard Turgenev say. If true, it was a long way from Turgenev’s earlier views; perhaps it was a reflection of his own evolution as a writer in the commercial world of publishing. ‘Poor Kharlamov,’ Liphart wrote, ‘he became the victim of this theory of his protector. The craze for small Italianate paintings which the English dealers encouraged him to churn out killed the Kharlamov promised by his portraits of the Viardots.’⁴⁵

Turgenev promoted other Russian artists in Paris. He wrote articles about them in the press, put them into contact with dealers, and helped them to find buyers for their work. He arranged the sale of four paintings by Arkhip Kuindhzi to Charles Sedelmeyer, the Austrian dealer in Paris. With the help of Louis Viardot, who praised them in the French and Belgian press, he got two sculptures by Marc Antokolsky displayed at the 1878 Exposition Universelle in Paris, where they were awarded a gold medal, earning Antokolsky many foreign commissions.⁴⁶

He was particularly active on behalf of Vasily Vereshchagin, whose large battle paintings and Central Asian landscapes he had first seen on a visit to Moscow in 1876. Two years later he visited the artist’s studio at Maisons Laffitte, near Paris, and was so struck by Vereshchagin’s originality that he thought of writing a biography of him. Turgenev organized a large-scale exhibition of his work, the first one-man show for a Russian artist in Paris, placing adverts in the newspapers, writings articles to promote it, and getting over thirty critics to review the show, all of them extremely favourable, in the French and international press. The exhibition was a huge success, with 50,000 visitors and long queues at the Cercle artistique de la rue Volney to see the outsized canvases, whose impact came from their brilliant light and colour and from their unusual scenes of the Central Asian steppe. Vereshchagin went on to similar successes in Vienna, where an estimated 130,000 people, one sixth of the city’s adult population, visited the show at the Künstlerhaus in just three weeks during the autumn of 1881; in Berlin the following spring, when the exhibition was seen by 134,000 paying visitors (and by many others free); and in Hamburg, Dresden, Budapest and Brussels during 1882.⁴⁷

Turgenev’s relations with the painter Ilia Repin were more problematic, because of the artist’s close connections to Stasov. The nationalist critic had adopted him as the brightest star of the Wanderers (peredvizhniki) – painters who had broken from the Academy of Arts in the early 1860s and, like the Mighty Five in music, set out to create works in a ‘Russian style’. Recognizing Repin’s talent, Turgenev disapproved of the nationalist and politically committed art he was encouraged to develop by Stasov. He criticized his Slavic Composers (1872), commissioned for the concert hall of Moscow’s Slav Bazar Hotel, because he thought it ‘false and artificial’ to represent both dead and living composers together in a single scene. He also took against Repin for writing to Stasov (in a letter published by the critic) that he ‘renounced’ Raphael.⁴⁸ For Turgenev, who worshipped at the altar of European Civilization, this was equivalent to saying that he renounced Christ.

Repin came to Paris as a prize scholar of the Academy in 1873 and remained there for the next three years. Exposed to Western art, he began to break free from the Russian national school and to paint in a manner influenced by the Impressionists, whose first exhibition, in 1874, took place while he was working on A Parisian Café (1875), one of his most impressionistic works. Repin was commissioned by the Moscow textile manufacturer and art patron Pavel Tretiakov to paint Turgenev’s portrait in Paris (Plate 19). It was meant to be displayed in the gallery of famous Russians that Tretiakov was planning to add to his museum of national art. The painting did not go well – the Viardots did not like it – and Repin was forced to make changes, which he thought made the portrait worse. Not convinced by Repin’s talent as a portraitist, Turgenev turned to Kharlamov instead and always made his preference for the latter’s portrait of him clear.⁴⁹

The prominent position given to Kharlamov at the Salon enraged Repin, whose Parisian Café was hung so high that it went completely unnoticed (when, after three weeks, he exercised his right to ask for the picture to be rehung in a lower position, the committee placed it higher still). ‘Here you need protection and connections,’ he wrote to the painter Ivan Kramskoi in Russia. Unlike Kharlamov, Repin found it difficult to sell his paintings in Europe. ‘The Russians don’t buy them, and nor do the French,’ he complained to Stasov. Turgenev was not encouraging. He wrote to Stasov telling him that it would be better for Repin ‘to return under your wing, even better to Moscow. This is where he comes from, his milieu.’ Repin’s failure to break into the Paris art market – the capital of the art world – became a source of bitter disappointment to the painter, who later blamed his failure on Turgenev’s dislike of the Russian nationalist school: ‘we were all idealists with a social tinge and Turgenev, after all, was an aesthete.’⁵⁰ It was a resentful recognition of the writer’s crucial role as an intermediary between Russian artists and the Paris art establishment.

3

Turgenev was a keen art buyer in the 1870s. He was a frequent presence at the Hôtel Drouot, the vast Paris auction house, a bourse of art and bric-à-brac, where his tall and graceful figure, usually seated on the front benches, where he could see the paintings best with his lorgnette, was well known to the auctioneers. He also bought from private galleries, particularly from Durand-Ruel, and sometimes from the artists’ studios themselves. Flaubert was amused by Turgenev’s ‘picture-buying mania’, as he described it to George Sand in May 1874: ‘Our friend now spends all his time in the auction rooms. He is a man of passions: so much the better for him.’⁵¹

Exhibition Room at the Hôtel Drouot. Engraving after Daumier, 1862.

Turgenev was flush with cash at the time of this buying spree. In a letter to Claudie in August 1874, he joked that he had the Midas touch (‘I am overwhelmed by gout and gold’) and drew a cartoon of himself weighed down by bags of money. His books were selling well. He was receiving high advances for the serial rights to his new works. For his novel Virgin Soil he was paid 9,000 roubles (36,000 francs) by The Messenger of Europe, making him the best-paid novelist in Russia. He earned well from his collected works in eight volumes, whose third edition was published in Moscow in 1874–5.⁵²

In his art purchases Turgenev was heavily dependent on the expertise of Louis Viardot. The art market was a risky place. There were many forgeries and mistaken attributions, even in the most reputable galleries. Turgenev got his fingers burned on more than one occasion – as, for example, when he bought a painting passed off as the work of Jules Dupré from the dealer Oudrat, who had sold it on behalf of the banker Alphonse de Rothschild, but would not take it back when the forgery was exposed.⁵³ If Turgenev liked a painting he would ask Louis what he thought of it. Bogoliubov said that he deferred to Louis on all matters about art and had no opinions of his own – an idea repeated by Repin, who described Viardot as a ‘great expert’ on paintings, albeit one ‘exclusively concerned with the virtuosity of the brushwork’, which he would examine in microscopic detail, ‘holding a pince-nez in front of his eyes’. This assessment of Turgenev’s judgement is not entirely fair. Louis’s taste was for the Old Masters, especially the Spanish school, on which he was a great authority, whereas Turgenev had a more eclectic collection, a mix of old and contemporary works, typical of many amateur collections at that time. Émile Bergerat, the essayist, described it as ‘the ideal poet’s collection’, with some good works and some not so good, ‘like all collections put together hastily (a collection of quality is the work of a lifetime) … He collected pictures randomly, without financial motive, solely for the pleasure of having lovely and familiar things around himself.’⁵⁴

The core of his collection was French landscape art, including many by the leading Barbizon painters. He had landscapes by Corot, Rousseau, Millet, Diaz, Dupré, Daubigny, Courbet, Boudin, Chintreuil. Yet perhaps suprisingly he did not have a single work by the Impressionists. It was not unusual for Barbizon collectors to move on to buying the Impressionists, if not sooner then later. The two schools were displayed side by side at Durand-Ruel’s gallery. They were close artistically and similar in their approach to landscape art, a field where Corot, admired by Turgenev in particular, was the closest thing there was to a forerunner of the Impressionists (as late as 1896 the painter Henri Matisse considered Corot to be an Impressionist). Turgenev championed the painter’s duty to capture what he himself called the ‘impressions made by nature’ rather than to copy it with photographic precision. That was what he aimed to do in his own prose descriptions of landscape. He once explained to a Russian friend, the poet Yakov Polonsky, that Corot’s paintings worked as realism if they were viewed, not close up for their literal reproduction of reality, but rather from a distance of a few metres for the sensory ‘impression’ which they re-created of actually being amidst nature through effects of colour, light and shade.⁵⁵ This was what the Impressionists were essentially attempting to achieve.

The absence of their pictures is even more surprising given that, in 1874, Turgenev had bought a house with the Viardots at Bougival, a village on the Seine just outside Paris, where Renoir, Monet, Sisley and Morisot (a friend of the Viardots) were not only residents but painted summer river scenes. Bougival was one of the banlieues, or suburbs, of Paris where the countryside was being taken over by the summer houses of the city’s middle class; it was a haven for artists looking to escape the bustle of Paris; and at weekends it was invaded by day-trippers coming in by train to enjoy the pleasures of the riverbank, with its picnic spots, boats for hire, restaurants and cafés. The Goncourt brothers described walking by the river on a Sunday afternoon in Bougival in June 1862. The grass areas were filled with people, painters, picnickers, couples ‘reading aloud from Le Figaro’, but at last they ‘found a corner where there was no landscape painter sitting at his easel and no slice of melon left behind …’⁵⁶

That whole stretch of the River Seine, from Bougival to Argenteuil, was a magnet for the plein-air painters of Paris. Many of the struggling Impressionists chose to live in these banlieues because the rent was cheaper than in Paris, which they could reach easily by train. In the early 1870s, Monet lived at Argenteuil, Pissarro at Pontoise, Sisley and Renoir in Louveciennes-Voisins near Bougival. The Goncourt brothers called this bit of river ‘the landscape studio of the modern French school’ (Kenneth Clark located ‘the birthplace of Impressionism’ at the riverside café of La Grenouillère near Bougival, where in 1869 both Monet and Renoir painted river scenes (see ill. 24) with bathers, boaters, women promenading in luminous white dresses, the whole scene softened by the warm glow of late-afternoon sunlight and the rippling reflections of the trees and sky in the waters of the Seine).⁵⁷

Turgenev and the Viardots had rented a summer house in Bougival in 1873 and liked it there so much that they decided to buy their own place. The house they chose the following year – a typical example of the neo-classical pavilion (‘pavillon de plaisance’) built in the 1830s – was on a large plot of wooded land that had once been part of the estate of the Empress Josephine but now belonged to a doctor. They bought it for 180,000 francs, two thirds paid by Turgenev, and spent another 15,000 francs on improvements. Pauline did not like the house. She thought it was too ‘bourgeois’ and ‘banal’, the house of a ‘grocer’without any ‘sentiment of art or taste’ – and she said it was too small. But Turgenev liked its rustic feel. He thought about the hunting he could do with Louis, and planned to build a chalet in the woods where he could write. ‘Les Frênes’ (ash trees), as he named the house, was partly Swiss in style but closer in character to a dacha, and everything inside it, from the simple wooden furniture to the stained-glass panels in the doors with scenes of Russian country life (Plate 32), was meant to remind him of his home. This was the place where Turgenev would do all his writing, the place where he felt happiest in his last years. ‘Bougival,’ he wrote, ‘is for me what Mecca is for the Muslims.’⁵⁸

The popularity of the Barbizon painters was reflected in the high prices their works commanded. Durand-Ruel, who owned most of their stocks, knew how to raise their value. ‘The brave Durand knows no obstacles and affirms that your paintings must increase to the prices of Meissonier,’ Sensier wrote to Millet in 1873. Millet’s prices would exceed those of Meissonier. Sums over 20,000 francs were regularly paid for his paintings in the early 1870s (The Shepherd sold for 40,000 francs in 1872), making him one of the most expensive painters of that time, although some of the prices for Rousseau were even higher still (Le Givre (Plate 23) fetched 60,000 francs in 1873).⁵⁹

Meanwhile the Impressionists were struggling to sell their work at all. There were many art collectors, like Turgenev, who shied away from buying them. They were too avant-garde, and not safe investments like the Barbizon painters. The Impressionists were ridiculed at their First Exhibition at Nadar’s photographic studio on the boulevard des Capucines in the spring of 1874. ‘Public opinion against these dangerous innovators was whipped up so intensely [by the press],’ recalled Durand-Ruel, ‘that visitors arrived with the firm intention of laughing and did not even bother to look.’⁶⁰ An auction of their works at the Hôtel Drouot the next year occasioned such riotous commotion, with people shouting insults at the works, that Charles Pillet, the auctioneer, had to call in the police to protect the paintings, most of which were sold for trifling sums, many for less than 100 francs. According to the procès verbal of the sale, seventy-three works came under the hammer, fetching a total of 11,496 francs, an average for each painting of 157 francs, with many bought back by Durand-Ruel at higher prices just to support their stock value. At their Second Exhibition, at Durand-Ruel’s gallery in April 1876, the Impressionists were scorned again. ‘There has just been opened at Mr Durand-Ruel’s an exhibition of what is said to be painting,’ wrote the critic of Le Figaro. ‘Five or six lunatics, of whom one is a woman, have chosen to exhibit their works. There are people who burst into laughter in front of these objects. Personally I am saddened by them. These so-called artists style themselves Intransigents, Impressionists.’ Durand-Ruel was berated by the art establishment for backing them. ‘I was treated as a madman and a person of bad faith,’ he wrote. ‘Little by little the trust I had succeeded in inspiring disappeared and my best clients began to question me. “How can you,” they would say, “after being one of the first to have loved the 1830 school [the Barbizon painters], now praise these pictures in which there is not a shred of quality?”’⁶¹

The Impressionists explained their failure in terms of the public’s inability to recognize their worth. The scandal of their first two exhibitions became part of their mythology of unacknowledged genius (in the twentieth century this idea was central to their brand). As Monet put it to Durand-Ruel in 1881, ‘There are scarcely fifteen amateur collectors in Paris capable of liking a painting without the imprimateur of the Salon. There are 80,000 buyers who won’t buy a thing if it has not been in the Salon.’ The problem faced by the Impressionists was less to do with their landscapes than with their portrayal of human figures which seemed an affront to established concepts of beauty (Courbet had also fallen foul of these artistic conventions). It took time for sensibilities to accept the new aesthetic principles of the Impressionists. Henry James, for example, failed completely to appreciate what the Impressionists were attempting to achieve when he visited their Second Exhibition. He thought they were trying to be realists, that they treated ‘unadorned reality’ in a loose way, and that none of them showed ‘any signs of possessing first-rate talent’. The effect, he said, was ‘to make me think better than ever of all the good old rules which decree that beauty is beauty and ugliness ugliness, and warn us off the sophistications of satiety’. But eight years later, in The Art of Fiction, James began to embrace their aesthetic enterprise, famously declaring that a ‘novel is in its broadest definition a personal impression of life’. And later he would change his mind completely about the Impressionists. In his 1905 essay ‘New England: An Autumn Impression’, he praised the ‘wondrous’ Manet, Degas and Monet for offering the ‘momentary effect of a large slippery sweet inserted, without a warning, between the compressed lips of half-conscious inanition’.⁶²

‘The Impressionist painters can double the effect of their exhibition on the public by having Wagner’s music played at it.’ Cartoon by Cham (Amédée de Noé) in Le Charivari, 1877.

Taste does not develop on its own. It is shaped by intermediaries – by influential patrons, critics, dealers and collectors – who take the lead in buying and promoting works that are new and difficult for the establishment and the general public to accept. Such intermediaries would play the decisive role in changing attitudes to the Impressionists. The first signs of this change were discernible in the critical reaction to their Third Exhibition in 1877, but the real transformation began only in the next decade, when Durand-Ruel found a market for them in America.

The role of the critic was vitally important in this transformation in artistic tastes. One of the earliest to champion the cause of the Impressionists was Théodore Duret, a friend and promoter of Manet from 1865, who started buying Pissarros and Monets in 1873. Duret did not write a great amount about their works until his booklet Les Peintres impressionnistes, in 1878, but he spent a lot of time persuading friends and contacts to buy them, including Étienne Baudry, the writer and dandy, and Charles Ephrussi, the art critic and collector from a family of bankers in Odessa who was one of the models for Proust’s Swann in À la recherche du temps perdu. Duret advised Sisley and Pissarro on what subjects would attract buyers, on how much they could ask for their paintings, and sometimes acted as a sales agent (later he would act as a buyer and adviser to Louisine and Henry Havemeyer, the American sugar baron, whose large collection of Impressionist paintings was bequeathed to the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Louisine’s death in 1929).⁶³

In terms of his influence Zola was the most important critic to champion the Impressionists in the 1870s. It was Zola who would bring Turgenev round to them in the later 1870s, although by then the Russian writer was no longer buying art.⁶⁴ Zola had promoted Manet and his artistic followers as far back as 1863, when Manet’s paintings, including Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, had been rejected by the Salon but famously displayed in the so-called ‘Salon des Refusés’ allowed by Napoleon III. Zola identified with Manet and the other rejected painters (among them Courbet, Pissarro, Cézanne, Whistler and Fantin-Latour) as the pioneers of a truly modern form of art, breaking free from the conventions of ‘boudoir painting’ and the conservative establishment of the Academy. He saw them as allies of his own campaign for a modern literature. His support for Manet, in particular, was vigorous and loud. ‘Manet will be one of the masters of tomorrow,’ he wrote in L’Évènement in May 1866, ‘and if I had a fortune, I would do good business by buying up all his paintings. In fifty years, they will be worth twenty times the price they reach today, while certain paintings valued now at 40,000 francs won’t then fetch even 400.’ The article, republished with a second study of Manet as a pamphlet in 1867, laid the basis for a long friendship, cemented when the two men at last met through the artistic circle at the Café Guerbois, where Zola was brought by Cézanne, his friend since boyhood. Pissarro, Monet, Renoir, Degas, Fantin-Latour and the Belgian Alfred Stevens were regulars at the café, which served as a sort of headquarters where these artists courted journalists.⁶⁵ Manet’s gratitude for Zola’s articles was expressed in his celebrated portrait of the writer at his desk (ill. 25). Pinned on the wall behind him is a print of Manet’s Olympia (1863), and on the desk, clearly visible, is Zola’s pamphlet on Manet.

Zola was consistent in his championing of the Impressionists throughout the 1870s. He defended them as realists in portrait art – where they had been ridiculed – using the same argument Turgenev had advanced for Corot’s landscapes. ‘At twenty steps,’ he wrote in a review of the Third Exhibition of the Impressionists, ‘one cannot make out clearly the nose or the eyes of a person’s face. To replicate a face as one sees it, you do not need to paint the wrinkles on the skin but its living expression.’ Praising all the painters in the exhibition, Zola was especially enthusiastic about Monet and his seven canvases of the Gare Saint-Lazare (Plate 28): ‘You can hear the rumbling of the trains, their smoke billowing under the vast glass interior. Our artists must find the poetry in these stations, as their fathers found it in the forests and rivers.’⁶⁶

The place where Zola met the Impressionists most often was at the salon of his publisher, Georges Charpentier, a keen early patron of the Impressionists. On Friday evenings at the Charpentiers they rubbed shoulders with writers, actors, journalists and politicians, including on occasion Léon Gambetta, Jules Ferry and Jules Grévy, three of the Republic’s most senior political leaders. Charpentier had taken over the family business, famous for its standard pocket library, the Bibliothèque Charpentier, when his father, Gervais, died in 1871, and at once had taken it in a modern direction by signing Zola and Flaubert. He was the publisher Zola had been looking for – one who could pay 500 francs a month to give him the security he needed, as he had put it in 1868, to ‘do something big’ (i.e. write his Rougon-Macquart series of twenty novels, which would begin three years later with La Fortune des Rougons). Such was Zola’s gratitude that some people thought he championed the Impressionists to ingratiate himself with Charpentier.⁶⁷

The publisher had bought his first Impressionist painting at the Hôtel Drouot in 1875, paying 180 francs for Renoir’s Le Pêcheur à la ligne (The Fisherman). Renoir soon became a regular visitor to the Charpentiers’ house in the rue de Grenelle, where he painted the celebrated portrait Madame Georges Charpentier et ses enfants (Plate 27), a picture Proust, who went as a young man to their Friday salon, would invoke as a reminder of ‘the poetry of an elegant home and beautifully dressed women’ in À la recherche.⁶⁸ Through Renoir the Charpentiers began to buy from other Impressionist painters, who often wrote to them for loans against future sales. In 1879, Charpentier established the weekly journal La Vie moderne to promote their ideas and help them along financially by paying them for articles. At the instigation of his wife, whose artistic views were often sought by the Impressionists, he opened a gallery for them in the Passage des Princes, one of the arcades built by Haussmann, near the boulevard des Italiens. At the first exhibition, for Manet, in 1880, a free catalogue was given out to passers-by in the street, but no paintings sold.⁶⁹

Charpentier’s salon was critical in getting other patrons to invest in the Impressionists. Many of their earliest collectors were regulars at his salon (Duret and the opera singer Jean-Baptiste Faure, for instance) or part of the broader Parisian élite that mixed with that crowd. Still, the number of people buying the Impressionists in the 1870s was no more than fifty in Paris. Some were friends of the artists, such as the composer Emmanuel Chabrier, a friend of Manet and Degas, who depicted him, the only member of the audience to be seen, in his painting The Orchestra at the Opéra (1870; Plate 26). Others were artists themselves, notably the Impressionist painter Gustave Caillebotte, who had inherited a private income of 100,000 francs a year from his father’s business in military supplies. He not only bought a lot of the Impressionists’ paintings but lent money to them too. Most of the early buyers, however, were self-made men – manufacturers, financiers, professionals, who identified with modern art (it showed the world in which they lived, right-bank Paris in particular). They had diverse motives for their purchases: to furnish their mansions with paintings which they liked; to buy art for speculative purposes; and to make a statement about their status as major patrons of the arts. Their support contributed to the social construction of a more bourgeois image for the Impressionists.

Among these early Impressionist collectors was Ernest Hoschedé, the owner of a large department store. He was the original buyer of Monet’s Impression, Sunrise, the work that gave its name to the movement, paying what was then a high price for its paintings, 800 francs, in a transaction handled by Durand-Ruel. Henri Rouart, another early buyer, was an engineer and manufacturer of the metal tubes for paint used by the Impressionists. Rouart was an old friend of Degas, who painted him in front of his factory in a portrait dated circa 1875. Rouart was a regular buyer at the Hôtel Drouot sales, beginning with the Barbizon painters but gradually amassing a large collection of Impressionists. Another buyer at the Drouot auctions was Victor Choquet, a civil servant at the Ministry of Finance, where he had an annual salary of 4,000 francs, although he also had an income from his father’s textile factory. Choquet was a friend of Monet, Renoir and Cézanne, whose work he defended with passion (at the Third Exhibition, to which he lent many paintings, he stood in the gallery and ‘accosted those who laughed, making them ashamed of their unkind comments, lashing them with ironic remarks’, according to Georges Rivières, the art critic). A fourth collector, Paul Gachet, was the son of a mill owner, who practised as a doctor in Auvers-sur-Oise, something of an artists’ colony, where he often hosted the Impressionists and sometimes treated them medically (on Pissarro’s recommendation Vincent Van Gogh came to him for medical advice in the last weeks of his life). Gachet purchased many of their paintings (he also had thirty by the Post-Impressionist Cézanne) and frequently appeared in their portraits. A fifth and more unusual collector was Eugène Murer, a pastry cook with a shop in Paris, where he met the Impressionists through Gachet and the painter Armand Guillaumin, a childhood friend. Murer bought a hundred paintings, often taking art in lieu of money owed to him by the Impressionists, and was well known to haggle over prices, never wanting to pay more than 200 francs for any work.⁷⁰

More than anybody else, it was Durand-Ruel who enabled the Impressionists to break into the market. Without him, in all probability, they would not have become widely known and the history of modern art would have been entirely different. In the early 1870s, Durand-Ruel was the only Paris dealer to back the Impressionists. He saw their work as a development of the Barbizon painters, and believed that he could repeat the success he had achieved with them by using the same strategies. The basic idea of his business plan (which would become common practice in the modern dealer system) was to buy a large amount of an artist’s work and raise its value by promoting it. He was the first of a new breed of art dealers who changed public taste by stimulating interest in an unknown brand of art, as opposed to the more established practice of dealing in those works of art which were already known and in demand.

Durand-Ruel bought up works by the Impressionists wholesale, borrowing from bankers, and, if necessary to corner the market, entering into partnership with other dealers, such as Hector Brame, with whom he had acquired a virtual monopoly in the works of Corot and Rousseau after 1865. As a long-term investor in their work, Durand-Ruel was as much a patron as a dealer to the Impressionists. He gave them loans and encouragement when they most needed them. There were times when he came close to bankruptcy because their paintings did not sell. To raise their value on the market Durand-Ruel employed a number of innovative strategies borrowed from investors on the stock exchange. He pushed up the bidding for his own artists to increase their perceived worth (just as Saccard, the speculator in Zola’s novel Money, buys shares in his own bank to raise their value). As he had done with the Barbizon painters, he founded an art review to promote the Impressionists. He specialized in one-man shows, a practice that became more common from the 1880s as other dealers learned from his success, and, instead of hanging paintings in the crowded manner usual at that time, gave each picture lots of space to emphasize its importance. He campaigned hard to get their works into public galleries and museums, recognizing these as ‘our best publicity’. He loaned their works to international exhibitions, and built links with agencies and dealers to develop foreign sales. The art market was internationalized at an ever growing rate from the 1870s, as cheaper photographic reproductions, the telegraph and a faster postal system enabled information about new paintings to cross national frontiers more easily. Durand-Ruel was one of the first dealers to exploit fully these developments with agencies in Europe and America. It was in the United States and Russia that through him the Impressionists would find their biggest markets in the last two decades of the century.⁷¹

Financial problems forced Turgenev to sell his art collection in 1878. His money problems had begun two years earlier. The Balkan Crisis, leading to the outbreak of the Russo-Turkish War in 1877, depressed the value of the rouble, which became harder to exchange for francs. ‘My finances have been paralysed completely,’ Turgenev complained to Flaubert. Meanwhile, his estates were also yielding less. They were even more mismanaged by his steward, Kishinsky, than they had been by his uncle before him – a fact Turgenev took nine years to recognize before eventually sacking him in August 1876, by which point he had been robbed of 130,000 francs, ‘a large part of my fortune’, as he explained to Flaubert. ‘From a man of substantial means (“rich” I never was) I have been turned into a person barely able to make ends meet.’ Louis advised Turgenev to let his brother manage his estates, or to sell them off and live like any bourgeois from the capital: ‘No more stewards, no more farms, no more delays, no worries, and no accounts.’ But Turgenev could not bring himself to let go of his ancestral home, and leased out his lands instead, from which he received a modest annual income of 5,000 roubles (approximately 20,000 francs once the exchange rate improved). This, together with his literary earnings, would have been enough for his own needs, had it not been for the problem of his daughter Paulinette. Her husband had proved to be a disastrous businessman and was losing money heavily at his glass factory. He had already squandered the capital Turgenev had sent with instructions that it should be set aside for his grandchildren, George and Jeanne, as French law allowed him to do. Turgenev tried to borrow money from his brother – Nikolai refused – and then took a loan of 15,000 francs from Baron Günzburg against his Russian railway shares. But even that was not enough to save his daughter from ruin. So, reluctantly, he put his pictures up for sale.⁷²

The auction took place at the Hôtel Drouot on 20 April. Turgenev was stuck in bed with gout, so he asked Antokolsky to go for him and try to push up the bidding. The sale catalogue details forty-six paintings, mostly landscapes by the Barbizon artists with a dozen older Dutch works. It was a bad time for the sale. The recent deaths of several Barbizon painters had flooded the art market with their works, as their studios were cleared, and prices fell accordingly. Hoschedé and Faure had both sold their collections at the Hôtel Drouot earlier in the year, and both had suffered big losses – Faure withdrawing most of them when reserve prices were not reached, while Hoschedé, who had been forced to sell by bankruptcy, sold his collection for a song (117 paintings, including five Manets, nine Pissarros, thirteen Sisleys and sixteen Monets, had gone for just 70,000 francs). Monet’s Impression, Sunrise, went to Georges de Bellio, a Romanian living in Paris, for 210 francs, a quarter the amount Hoschedé had paid for it four years before, while a Sisley landscape, Aqueduct at Marly, was snapped up by the pastry cook Murer for just twenty-one francs.⁷³

Turgenev had an equal disaster. The paintings in the sale had cost him 50,000 francs. They went for only 37,000 francs. Eleven of the paintings were bought by the Paris dealer Jules Féral, most of the rest by dealers from abroad. Turgenev compared his losses to the French defeat at the battle of Sedan.⁷⁴

4

On his return to Paris from London, Turgenev had resumed his friendships with the writers of the Magny circle, Flaubert, Zola, Renan and Goncourt, who no longer met at Magny’s, but at Le Brébant and other restaurants. They were joined by younger writers, Alphonse Daudet and, from 1873, Guy de Maupassant, barely out of college, a protégé of Flaubert, who had known his mother since childhood. George Sand, who came on notable occasions, called them ‘Flaubert’s school’.⁷⁵

Once a month the friends would meet at the Café Riche for what they called the ‘Dinner of the Hissed Authors’ (‘dîner des auteurs sifflés’), or ‘dinner of the five’, places at the table limited to those who had experienced a literary catastrophe: Flaubert, Zola, Goncourt, Turgenev and Daudet. Once a week, on Sunday afternoons, the broader group would meet in the apartment of Flaubert, three small rooms on the top floor of a house on rue Murillo with a superb view over Parc Monceau, and from 1875, when straitened means forced him to move to cheaper accommodation, a set of spartan attic rooms overlooking roofs and chimneys at the unfashionable end of the Faubourg Saint-Honoré. Dressed ‘like a Turk’ in a tunic, red-and-white-striped trousers and calotte, Flaubert would warmly greet each guest, recalls Zola, and take them to his drawing-room, where he smoked constantly from small clay pipes he had made himself and arranged in a rack; ‘when he really liked you, he would even give you one.’ The conversation would last for many hours and range over every subject – sex, love, death, adventures in brothels – returning always to the latest books and general themes of literature; it was often coarse in language, and ‘neither men nor things were spared’.⁷⁶

Henry James, who had come to Paris as a columnist for the New York Tribune, sometimes joined the Flaubert circle, but he thought that none of them was comparable to Turgenev, his idol as a writer and as an embodiment of the European cosmopolitanism with which James identified.* James accused the French writers of being narrow-minded and ignorant of anything that was not French. Turgenev was certainly regarded as the most international of the group. He often introduced his friends to foreign literature, and impressed them with his ad hoc translations of Goethe into French.⁷⁷

Flaubert was at a low ebb. He had frequent bouts of depression in the 1870s. Several of his closest friends had died in recent years, including Louis Bouilhet, his childhood friend, and Gautier. ‘For the last three years,’ he wrote to Turgenev on Gautier’s death in October 1872, ‘all my friends have been dying one after the other, without a break! There’s only one man left in the world now with whom I can talk, and that’s you. So you must look after yourself, so that I shan’t miss you, along with the others.’ Flaubert’s literary stock was in decline. Following the failure of Sentimental Education, he had lost confidence. Always looking for literary perfection, he took five years to finish his next book, The Temptation of St Anthony, an idea he had worked on since the 1840s, whose third and final version was eventually published in 1874. It too received terrible reviews. Flaubert became reclusive, spending whole months at his country house in Croisset with just a servant, Émile, and his greyhound, Julio, for company, coming into Paris only on occasion to see his close circle of literary friends.⁷⁸ He was repulsed by contemporary society, by the modern world of railways and commerce, by the bourgeoisie and its ‘philistine’ values, by the ‘stupidity’ of the public and the ‘Barbarism rising from beneath the ground’ – all things he would rant about. As he wrote to Turgenev: ‘I have always tried to live in an ivory tower; but a sea of shit is beating up against its walls, it’s enough to bring it down.’⁷⁹

From the mid-1870s Flaubert was beset by growing financial problems, as his literary earnings went into decline and he spent what remained of his inheritance to support his beloved niece, Caroline Commanville, his only close surviving relative, whose husband’s saw-mill business had failed. There was a danger they would have to sell the Croisset house, which his mother had bequeathed to Caroline. ‘Poor Flaubert,’ Turgenev wrote to Zola. ‘Fate is abominably brutal to strike at the one man in the world least capable of making a living from his work.’⁸⁰

Flaubert’s friends tried to arrange a sinecure for him at the Bibliothèque Mazarine in the Institut de France, where the librarian was retiring, having fallen ill. Several writers held such positions.* At first Flaubert was too proud to accept help, but Turgenev persuaded him to take the post if he was offered it. Encouraged by Madame Charpentier, who had spoken to Gambetta on the matter and received a vague promise that he ‘wanted to do something’ for Flaubert, Turgenev made a number of attempts to lobby the great republican leader, who, as President of the Chamber of Deputies, had the power to make the appointment.⁸¹ After finding all doors closed, by chance Turgenev came across Gambetta at the house of Juliette Adam, the writer, founding editor of La Nouvelle Revue and hostess of one of the leading republican salons in Paris. ‘I explain the matter to her,’ Turgenev recounted in a letter to Flaubert.

‘But Gambetta is here – he’s having an after-dinner smoke – we shall know all directly.’ She comes back two minutes later: ‘Impossible my dear sir! Gambetta has already got people in mind.’† The dictator arrives with measured step: I’ve never seen trained dogs dance around their master like the ministers and senators etc. surrounding him. He starts to talk to one of them. Mme. Adam takes me by the hand and leads me to him: but the great man declines the honour of making my acquaintance, and repeats – loud enough for me to hear: ‘I don’t want it – it’s been said – it’s impossible.’

‘Come, my good fellow,’ Turgenev consoled Flaubert, ‘we must throw all that overboard – and get back to work, literary work, the only thing worthy of a man such as you.’⁸²

If Turgenev was unable to do much for Flaubert in France, he did a lot to help him become better known abroad. He acted in effect as his international agent, securing publishing contracts, supervising translations, sending his works to literary contacts, and finding friendly critics to write about his publications in Russia, Germany and other countries on the Continent.* When Flaubert finally completed his Temptation of St Anthony, towards the end of 1873, Turgenev campaigned tirelessly to ensure that copies of the proofs were put into the hands of publishers and critics in Vienna, Munich, Berlin, London, Strasbourg and St Petersburg. Translations of it immediately appeared in German in Strasbourg and in Russian in St Petersburg, albeit in the latter with major cuts by the censors, who saw it as an attack on religion (Flaubert complained to Sand that the cuts had cost him 2,000 francs because his contract with The Messenger of Europe had, as normal, stipulated payment according to the number of printed pages). The Russian translation was a ‘terrible fiasco’, Turgenev reported to Pauline on 25 May 1874. ‘The Russian public has not been tempted by his Anthony,’ he added in a letter to Zola, ‘and this fact must be kept from him.’ The German publication, by contrast, was favourably reviewed in several major periodicals, all the reviews by friends of Turgenev, including Julian Schmidt, ‘the Sainte-Beuve of Germany’, as Flaubert informed Charpentier, no doubt repeating what Turgenev had told him. ‘The good Turgenev … has sent from Berlin a favourable article about St Anthony,’ Flaubert wrote to Sand. ‘It is not the article that pleases me, but him. I have seen a lot of him … and like him more and more.’⁸³

Apart from promoting Flaubert’s works abroad, Turgenev translated them. He was a prolific translator, both of French works into Russian and, with the help of Louis Viardot and Mérimée, of Russian into French, although it is hard to say how many works he translated, because only one appeared in his collected works, and because the names of translators seldom appeared on the title page of books. Following the failure of St Anthony in Russia, Turgenev took it on himself to translate Flaubert’s next work into Russian, the Three Tales (1877), made up of the the short stories ‘The Legend of St Julian’, ‘A Simple Heart’ and ‘Herodias’. Turgenev’s idea was to get the stories published in The Messenger of Europe before they came out in France, allowing Flaubert to earn twice as much from them (Stasiulevich, the editor of the Messenger, would only pay for works in translation if they had not yet appeared in their original language, because, once they were in print, other publishers could freely translate and publish them in Russia, where there was no copyright protection of foreign works). Turgenev negotiated a good deal for Flaubert with Stasiulevich, who agreed to pay 750 silver roubles (around 3,000 francs) for the three stories, on the condition that Turgenev promised to give his next novel to the Messenger. Flaubert approved Turgenev’s plan, and in 1876 the Russian spent three days with him at Croisset to discuss the work (twice Flaubert wrote to his niece from Paris ahead of the visit asking her to check the length of the beds because of the Russian’s ‘gigantic size’).⁸⁴

Desperate for money, Flaubert was impatient for the translation to be done quickly. But Turgenev (who gave his payment to Flaubert) proved too slow for his liking. He took great care over the translation, successfully conveying the subtlety of Flaubert’s style in Russian, and counted it as one of his own finest literary achievements (this was the translation he included in the 1880 edition of his collected works). It then transpired that Stasiulevich would not print Turgenev’s translations until after the appearance of his novel Virgin Soil, which began to be serialized in The Messenger of Europe in January 1877. Two of the stories were eventually published in the April and May issues of the Messenger that year. ‘A Simple Heart’ was rejected by Stasiulevich, who found the story of an old servant devoted to her stuffed parrot ‘less successful’ than the other two; like Turgenev, he foresaw problems with the scene where she confuses the parrot with ‘the dove of the holy ghost’. Religious sensibilities were likely to be offended. ‘You can well imagine the cries of the censors!!’ Turgenev agreed.⁸⁵

Zola was another writer promoted by Turgenev in Russia. Many of his books were published in translation in The Messenger of Europe before they appeared in French – this unusual arrangement insulated him from the Paris critics at the time of his writing and made him all the more audacious in his ‘experimental novels’ of the 1870s.⁸⁶ There was much in Zola’s personality that Turgenev did not much care for. He thought he was too self-regarding, too much in a hurry for success; but he recognized his talent none the less, and gladly helped him become famous in Russia at a time when he was only starting out in France.⁸⁷

Aged just twenty-eight when he was introduced to the Flaubert circle in 1868, Zola was not only ambitious but practically shameless in his self-promotion through journalism and publicity. He had started out as an advertising agent for Hachette in 1862, and had mastered the technique of selling books through notices and articles in newspapers and provincial journals, using his contacts in the book-world and the press to launch himself as a writer. When Lacroix bought his first book, Tales for Ninon, in 1864, the publisher made it a condition that Zola handled the publicity; the print-run of 500 copies (not bad for a first-time writer) was as much a vote of confidence in his ability to sell the book through his tried-and-tested methods of publicity as it was in his literary talent. From 1866, when he left Hachette, Zola wrote a books page (mainly gossip) for L’Évènement, the literary supplement to Le Figaro, where his articles on the controversial paintings of Manet brought him notoriety, which he courted to promote himself. When he joined the Magny group, he had just achieved a big success with his darkly brilliant murder thriller Thérèse Raquin (1867). In Charpentier he found the publisher he had been looking for – one who would pay him 30,000 francs for ten novels in five years, 500 francs in monthly payments, in exchange for his copyright, including sales to foreign publishers. The deal was quite good, but not enough to cover Zola’s living costs, so he had to supplement his income by journalism, which meant that he fell behind on delivering two novels every year. His situation worsened after 1872, when one of his articles, a left-wing polemic on the unemployment crisis, led to the suppression of the Parisian daily Le Corsaire, causing all the Paris newspapers to shun Zola. By the time Turgenev rescued him by getting him a contract with Stasiulevich, Zola was so destitute that he was obliged to sell his only mattress in a flea market.⁸⁸

The contract was for Zola to write a monthly ‘Letter from Paris’ for The Messenger of Europe at a rate of fifteen francs per printed page. It would earn him between 400 and 500 francs a month. He could write on any theme he chose, although many of his articles were on topics suggested by Turgenev, who had a ‘good nose’ for which themes would most appeal to a Russian readership. From the first letter, about the election of Alexandre Dumas to the French Academy in April 1875, to the last, on the Paris art scene in 1880, Zola wrote a total of sixty-four letters on a range of topics, from light and humorous sketches of the French clergy and different types of marriage around France to a long and controversial article about George Sand’s romantic idealism, following her death from a painful intestinal blockage in June 1876. Flaubert and Turgenev were shattered by Sand’s death. The latter was in Russia but Flaubert rushed to Nohant for the funeral, a religious service in the village church organized, against Sand’s wishes, by her daughter, Solange Clésinger, and attended by the great and good. The Viardots refused to go, not because they had fallen out with their old friend in any way, but because Louis was an atheist: as a man of strong, unbending convictions, he thought it was hypocritical for her to receive a Christian burial, considering the life that she had lived, and would not have anything to do with it.

Zola’s vivid letters from Paris proved immensely popular in Russia. The democratic intelligentsia recognized in them an echo of their own radical tradition of literary and social criticism going back to Belinsky. Their success attracted the attention of other editors, who tried to recruit Zola. In 1876, on the advice of Turgenev, he rejected an advance from Saltykov-Shchedrin, the editor of Notes from the Fatherland, to write four articles a year for 100 roubles (around 380 francs) per printed page; but he used the generous offer to increase his fee from the Messenger, albeit only to one fifth of the sum he had turned down. Having proved his loyalty, Zola, in return, always asked Stasiulevich to send back the manuscripts of his letters so that he could resell them, and forty-seven of the sixty-four would reappear in French journals.⁸⁹

The popularity of Zola’s letters in turn made his novels commercially attractive to Stasiulevich, who offered him a contract very similar to the one he gave Flaubert, which meant paying for an early copy of the manuscript in instalments so that he could get them translated and serialize them in The Messenger of Europe before they appeared in France. Everything depended on the timely despatch of the instalments, because, if they were delayed and the book was printed first in France, it would be published in a quick (and error-ridden) translation by other Russian periodicals, who legally were not obliged to pay a kopeck for the copyright. It was a risk Stasiulevich was prepared to take, because of Zola’s popularity, and he invested happily. Zola was a bestseller in Russia long before he became one in France. The third novel of the Rougon-Macquart series, Le Ventre de Paris (The Belly of Paris), was published in translation by six different journals in St Petersburg alone, and then appeared in two book editions within months of its French publication in 1873 (before his agreement with Stasiulevich). Its sales were higher in Russian than they were in French in the 1870s. Overall, between 1871 and 1881, the literary journals of St Petersburg published fifty-one separate translations of Zola’s novels, making him the most translated foreign writer in Russia. For the fifth novel in the Rougon-Macquart series, The Sin of Abbé Mouret, Stasiulevich agreed to pay thirty roubles (120 francs) per printed page for advance copies of the three instalments. The novel was 80,000 words, or sixteen printer’s pages (Zola had the skill of a journalist in writing precisely to length), earning the writer 480 roubles, or 1,920 francs. The instalments appeared in the first three issues of The Messenger of Europe in 1875, months before the book appeared in any form in France. The same deal was agreed for the sixth novel, Son Excellence Eugène Rougon (1876), which ran as a serial in the Messenger before its publication in France.⁹⁰

L’Assommoir (1877), the seventh in the Rougon-Macquart series, was turned down by Stasiulevich because the novel had been sold already to the weekly journal Le Bien public* – Zola having been unable to resist an advance payment of 10,000 francs – which meant that it would be published before The Messenger of Europe would have time to translate it. By the time of the novel’s appearance in the Messenger’s pages, other Russian journals would be running it. On Turgenev’s advice, Zola offered extracts of the novel to Stasiulevich, and these were printed in The Messenger of Europe before the book appeared in France. L’Assommoir was such a huge success in France – its sales sent soaring by the scandal it had caused through its depiction of alcoholism, sex and violence among the Parisian working class – that Zola quickly became rich. He no longer needed to write journalism, nor to be published in Russia, where his relations with Stasiulevich were becoming strained by what the latter wrongly saw as the declining quality of Zola’s work. The editor disliked his frequent use of slang and the sexually explicit scenes of Nana (1880), the ninth novel in the Rougon-Macquart series, which made it too much of a risk to publish in Russia, given tsarist censorship, although he published extracts of the runaway bestseller, which in France sold in fifty editions, or 55,000 copies, within a year.⁹¹

By this stage, Turgenev too was falling out of sympathy with Zola’s brand of Naturalism, whose graphic details about working-class conditions bordered on ‘indecency’. ‘I’ve dipped into L’Assommoir,’ the Russian wrote to Flaubert; ‘I am not very taken with it (this strictly between the two of us). There is much talent in it, but it is heavy-going, and there is too much stirring of the chamber pots.’ In a letter to Stasiulevich, Turgenev reported that ‘the words “fuck”, “piss”, “shit” and “buttocks” (foutre, pisser, merde, fesses) have been counted in the novel by someone – they appear 720 times.’⁹²

As for Flaubert, he thought the novel was ‘superb’ in parts and contained many ‘incontestable truths’, but that Zola had gone too far in it to court controversy for self-promotion and publicity – methods alien to Flaubert, who believed in writing as an art rather than a business. He could not stand Zola’s weekly columns in Le Bien public in which he proselytized the ideas of his Naturalist school. As an independent writer, Flaubert had no truck with any movement in the arts, and accused Zola of using his as a form of marketing. One night at Brébant’s, after Flaubert had attacked his journalistic promotion of the Naturalist school, Zola replied, according to Goncourt, with his own attack on Flaubert’s social class:

This evening Flaubert, while paying tribute to his colleague’s genius, attacked the prefaces, the doctrines, the naturalist professions of faith, in a word all the rather flamboyant humbug with which Zola helps along the sales of his books. Zola replied roughly to this effect: ‘You, you had private means which allowed you to remain independent of a good many things. But I had to earn my living with nothing but my pen; I had to go through the mill of journalism and write all sorts of shameful stuff; and it has left me with – how shall I put it? – a certain taste for charlatanism … I consider the word Naturalism as ridiculous as you do, but I shall go on repeating it over and over again, because you have to give things new names for the public to think that they are new … You know, I divide what I write into two parts. On the one hand there are my novels, on which I shall be judged and on which I wish to be judged; and on the other there are my articles for the Bien public, for Russia and Marseilles, which are just so much charlatanism to puff my books.⁹³

Turgenev was responsible for getting other writers published in Russia. He set up Daudet as the Paris correspondent of the Russian daily New Times (Novoe Vremia), from 1878 to 1879. The conservative newspaper published twenty-seven of Daudet’s articles, several of his stories and extracts from his autobiographical novel Le Petit Chose (1868). Turgenev had discovered the story about Daudet’s childhood at a railway bookstore in the Russian provinces shortly after it came out in French (a perfect illustration of the way the railways were internationalizing the book trade) and had been praising it to friends in Russia ever since. It was Turgenev who also established Jules Vallès as the London correspondent for the Russian journal Word (Slovo), from its establishment in 1878, although the name of the exiled Communard could not be printed because it would ‘frighten the censors’, as Turgenev explained to Zola (the populist journal was closed down by the tsarist government in 1881). Otherwise the Russians were delighted by Vallès’s articles, which were ‘hostile to the English, to their arrogance and rudeness’, as the Frenchman described them.⁹⁴ The articles appeared at a time of mutual hostility between Russia and Britain because of the Russo-Turkish War. Turgenev followed the war closely. He was enraged by Britain’s backing of the Turks, despite the Turkish massacre of the Ottoman Bulgarians, and in his satiric poem ‘A Game of Croquet at Windsor’ had blamed Queen Victoria for the bloodshed.

As an agent for The Messenger of Europe, Turgenev also introduced the writings of Maupassant, Goncourt, Taine, Auerbach and Storm to its pages. He negotiated the contracts for each writer and usually oversaw the translation of their work. He acted as a sort of manager for the union of translators in Russia, mostly students on miserable pay, whose work he saw as essential to the ideal of bringing European civilization to the Russians. When no one could be found to translate well enough the works he considered most important (a collection of Heine’s poems, Markovich’s short stories, the poetry of Walt Whitman) he translated them himself.⁹⁵

As the best-known Russian writer in the West, Turgenev also served as an ambassador for his country’s literature. He negotiated book contracts for many Russian writers, not just in France but in Germany and Britain too. Ostrovsky, Goncharov, Aleksei Tolstoy and Saltykov-Shchedrin – all owed their entry into Europe’s literary market to Turgenev’s agency.⁹⁶ The most important service he performed, however, was to bring to the attention of a European readership Tolstoy’s novel War and Peace.

Turgenev had fallen out with Tolstoy in 1861. A clash of personalities was at the heart of it. Ten years older than Tolstoy, Turgenev felt paternal towards him but, because he admired him so much, and perhaps from envy, looked for faults in his writing, which the younger Russian found wounding (he later wrote that he thought Turgenev was ‘laughing’ at his work, which had made him ‘afraid and ashamed’). The two men quarrelled constantly, patched things up, and then broke completely as a consequence of a violent argument about Turgenev’s daughter, Paulinette, in which Tolstoy mocked Turgenev’s patronizing attitude towards his serfs and – despite the fact that he himself had fathered several children with serf girls on his estate – insulted him by drawing attention to her illegitimacy.⁹⁷

For the next seventeen years they did not talk to each other. But Turgenev recognized the magnitude of Tolstoy’s achievement in War and Peace, which he read for the first time in 1868, a year after it came out (he read the book six times in the next ten years). He wrote about the masterpiece to all his European friends, declaring it to be the greatest novel of the nineteenth century, and urging them to get it published in their own countries. Because of its immense length, Turgenev first arranged the translation of a much shorter work, The Two Hussars, and got it published in Le Temps in 1875 with an introduction by himself to inspire interest in War and Peace. The novella created little interest among the French, and no requests to translate War and Peace were forthcoming, neither into French nor into any other language (British readers had been equally unimpressed by a translation of Childhood and Youth, prompting Turgenev to complain that they were unable to appreciate such fine psychological writing and merely thought of Tolstoy as ‘an imitation of Dickens’). Turgenev wanted to translate War and Peace himself, cutting all the philosophical digressions which he thought would alienate a European readership, but since his relations with Tolstoy were so frosty he gave up on the idea.⁹⁸

All that changed in April 1878 when Turgenev, in Paris, received a letter from Tolstoy. Remembering their old friendship, Tolstoy no longer felt any hostility, and hoped Turgenev felt the same. He recalled all the good in him, claimed that he owed his ‘literary celebrity’ to him, and proposed, ‘if you could pardon me’, to ‘offer all the friendship I can give’. Turgenev replied expressing his delight that the ‘misunderstandings between us are a thing of the past’, and declaring his goodwill towards Tolstoy, ‘both as a person to whom I was sincerely devoted, and as a writer whose first steps I welcomed earlier than others, and in whose new works I have always taken the liveliest interest’.⁹⁹ Two months later, on his return to Russia, he went at once to see Tolstoy.

The next year a French translation of War and Peace was printed in St Petersburg. Bearing the editorial brand of Hachette in Paris, the title page did not give the name of the translator, Princess Irène Paskévitch, but stated only ‘Traduit par une russe’. Turgenev asked Annenkov to send him ten copies – more requests would soon follow and 500 copies would eventually be sent – which he gave to his most influential literary friends, publishers and critics in Paris, advising them that the translation did not do justice to the original, from which there were many cuts. He was uncertain if it would appeal to French readers. ‘The import of it all is a long way from what the French like and look for in books,’ he wrote to Tolstoy, ‘but truth, in the end, is its own master. I am counting, if not on a brilliant triumph, then on a solid, if gradual, victory.’¹⁰⁰

Turgenev’s influence gave the book a vital push on the way to that victory. At every opportunity he spoke about the book to people he encountered at soirées, at dinners, in salons, and many heard of it for the first time through him. ‘None of us had known of Tolstoy until then,’ recalled the journalist V. P. Semenov, ‘but Turgenev talked of nothing else.’ Renan, Taine, Anatole France were all turned into Tolstoy fans by Turgenev’s urging that they read his masterpiece. It was Flaubert’s opinion that mattered most to Turgenev. ‘Thank you for making me read Tolstoy’s novel,’ Flaubert wrote at last in January 1880.

It’s first rate. What a painter and what a psychologist! The first two [volumes] are sublime; but the third goes terribly to pieces. He repeats himself and he philosophises! In fact the man, the author, the Russian are visible, whereas up until then one had only seen Nature and Humanity. It seems to me that in places he has some elements of Shakespeare. I uttered cries of admiration during my reading of it … and it’s long! Tell me about the author. Is it his first book?

Turgenev replied at once:

My good old fellow,

You cannot imagine the pleasure your letter gave me and what you say about Tolstoy’s novel. Your approval confirms my own ideas about him. Yes, he is a man of great talent, and yet you put your finger on the weak spot: he also has built himself a philosophical system, which is at one and the same time mystical, childish and presumptuous, and which has spoilt his third volume dreadfully … I don’t know what the critics will say. (I have sent ‘War and Peace’ to Daudet and Zola as well.) But for me the matter is settled: Flaubertus dixit. The rest is of no significance.¹⁰¹

5

Turgenev’s own works were translated into other European languages with increasing frequency in the 1870s. During the previous decade he was already widely read in Germany, partly because he lived there and was seen by the reading public as an important writer in their midst. A German edition of his collected works appeared in twelve volumes between 1869 and 1883. In France and Britain, where only a handful of his books had previously been translated, there was a boom in Turgenev translations. In Britain, by the end of the century, his works would appear in over sixty translations in book form or in journals, in addition to a fifteen-volume edition of his novels translated by Constance Garnett, and in France his rise was similar.¹⁰²

Publishers were quicker to translate his books, usually within a year, and his shorter works would appear in translation within weeks of their being published in Russia. His story ‘The End of Chertopkhanov’, first published in the November 1872 issue of The Messenger of Europe, appeared in a French translation (as ‘Le Gentilhomme de la steppe’) in the Revue des deux mondes on 1 December. Because of the limited protection against pirate translations, Turgenev felt it was important to get an early copy of the manuscript to those foreign publishers he trusted so that he could oversee the translation to ensure its quality. By publishing an ‘authorized’ translation first, the market for unauthorized translations would be drastically reduced, for even pirate publishers would be more inclined to steal the former than pay a new translator. This was the strategy Turgenev adopted with his novel Virgin Soil (1877), which went with his own corrections into German, French, English, Italian, even Swedish, directly from his manuscript; they appeared in these translations almost at the same time as the novel’s publication in Russia. Within the year, it had been translated into nine foreign languages, including Polish, Czech, Serbian and Hungarian, with additional translations in Croatian, Romanian and Danish on the way.¹⁰³

What Turgenev saw in the growth of foreign sales was part of a general expansion in the European market for translations from the 1870s. The main factor driving this was a steep rise in the number of new readers, as the system of compulsory education was extended by most European states (in Britain the Education Act was passed in 1870, in Germany the key laws were introduced after the foundation of the Empire in 1871, and in France the ‘Ferry Laws’ were enacted in 1881–2). Demand for books outstripped supply in most European languages, especially in small but highly literate countries such as Holland and Scandinavia, which depended heavily on translating foreign works, though even dominant literary cultures, such as Britain, France and Germany, were opening their markets to more imports from abroad.

Nation-building was another force behind this growing traffic in translations. In Russia, for example, where more foreign works were published in translation than in any other European country, the dissemination of Western literature was viewed as a means of overcoming Russia’s cultural backwardness and implanting democratic values in its society by all those who looked to Europe as a source of progress and enlightenment – the Westernizing intelligentsia and liberal nobility. Elsewhere the opening of literary markets helped new nations to liberate themselves from the cultural domination of imperial rulers. In the Habsburg Empire the nascent literary cultures of the Czechs, Croatians, Hungarians and Serbs were extremely receptive to works translated from French, English or Russian as a means of breaking free from the domination of the German language and its literature. Statistics show that in the final decades of the century the empire’s Slavs were far more active than its Germans in translating foreign literatures. They were also increasingly translating from each other’s literatures – the Czechs from the Hungarians and Poles, Hungarians from the Czechs, Croatians from the Serbs, and so on – all as an alternative to reading German literature.¹⁰⁴

The market for translations took off in a wide variety of literary forms. Translations were a lucrative addition to the ‘standard’ and ‘railway’ libraries, the pocket mass editions established by Routledge, Hachette, Charpentier and other publishers in the middle decades of the century. They were also attractive to newly founded publishers without a backlist of domestic authors, nor the capital to invest in copyrights. A large share of the market in translations was for popular fiction, detective and crime stories, children’s literature and science fiction, especially the voyages extraordinaires of Jules Verne, the most translated author of the nineteenth century and the first genuinely ‘international bestseller’. Around the World in Eighty Days (1873) really did go round the world – in fifty-seven different languages by the end of the century.

Literary periodicals were increasingly important as a medium for translations. The 1870s witnessed the beginning of a steep rise in the number of journals across Europe, as new publishing technologies, mechanization and the railway network reduced printing and distribution costs. Established journals like the Revue des deux mondes, a major outlet for translations, increased sales substantially; imitations of the grande revue were found in other countries (e.g. the Deutsche Rundschau in Berlin and España moderna in Madrid). There was a proliferation of smaller cultural reviews, the petites revues, which as startup businesses depended heavily on translations as a cheap alternative to paying for original writing, although many of these journals were committed to a cosmopolitan agenda in which translations played a vital part. Belgium was a case in point. The number of new literary journals published there rose from under twenty every year in the 1850s to as many as sixty every year during the 1890s. Many of these new journals carried translations between Flemish, French and German, the country’s three main languages, with the aim of promoting what was termed the ‘Belgian spirit’, defined by the journal L’Art moderne as a cultural space for the cross-fertilization of Latin and Germanic sensibilities.¹⁰⁵

These reviews became a focus for literary and artistic groups, which linked them to journals with a similar philosophy on the European scene. In this way they came to provide an important network for the development of international cultural movements, such as Naturalism, Symbolism, Impressionism, and so on. The Revue des deux mondes, for example, had a commitment to socially progressive literature which it shared with España moderna and The Messenger of Europe, both modelled on the grande revue, which naturally increased the traffic of translations between them. España moderna regularly published works by Zola and Daudet in translation, not least because its founder, the financier and art patron José Lázaro Galdiano, was guided by his mentor, the novelist Emilia Pardo Bazán, a pioneer of Zola’s Naturalist movement in Spain. It was through Zola that she had discovered Russian literature, first Turgenev, later Dostoevsky and Chekhov, whose works often appeared in translation in España moderna.¹⁰⁶

Periodicals were important as a platform for critics to promote the cause of writers from abroad. Turgenev owed a great deal of his success in the West to the support of influential critics. In Germany he was heavily promoted by the writer Julian Schmidt, who in 1870, in one of the earliest biographical portraits of Turgenev published outside Russia, portrayed him as the equal of Dickens and Schiller.¹⁰⁷ His other great promoter in the German-speaking lands was Friedrich Bodenstedt, whom he had first met in Baden in 1863. Bodenstedt not only served as Turgenev’s translator but acted as his agent, or intermediary, by selecting works for translation most likely to appeal to a German readership. Bodenstedt’s own reputation as a writer and Professor of Slavic Languages at Munich University guaranted the widest review coverage for Turgenev in the German press.¹⁰⁸

In France this role was played by Mérimée, Turgenev’s main translator in the 1860s, and by Lamartine, the poet and statesman, whose entry on Turgenev in his multi-volume Cours familier de littérature, written at the end of the 1860s, was in effect the first biography of the Russian writer to appear in France. In the English-speaking world Turgenev owed his fame to the tireless efforts of William Ralston, his translator, who used his wide connections in London’s literary circles to get his works reviewed in leading journals like The British Quarterly Review, The Athenaeum and The Contemporary Review. It was also thanks to Ralston that Turgenev was awarded an Honorary Degree by Oxford University in 1879.¹⁰⁹

Meanwhile, in America, Turgenev was promoted by the critics William Dean Howells (editor of The Atlantic Monthly), Thomas Sergeant Perry (the foreign books reviewer for The Atlantic Monthly and The Nation) and Henry James (who wrote about the European literary scene in The North American Review, The Atlantic Monthly and The Nation). Turgenev was already known in the United States. His Sketches from a Hunter’s Album, with its subtle condemnation of serfdom, had an obvious significance for a country in which slavery was still such a contentious issue. James had been reading Turgenev since his teenage years, when his family had travelled in Europe, and his novels became an important part of his cosmopolitan education. But it was at Harvard, where James met Howells and Perry, that he came to see in Turgenev’s writing a new literary philosophy. The three men took a lively interest in continental European literature. They read the Revue des deux mondes, whose literary aesthetic they absorbed. Perry, in particular, was influenced by the essays of Julian Schmidt, co-editor of the Vienna journal Grenzboten. Through Schmidt they discovered the German village writers such as Auerbach and the Norwegian tales of Bjørnson, which they embraced as a more realist alternative to the English melodramas of Dickens and Trollope. They also found in Schmidt an argument for holding up Turgenev as ‘the greatest living novelist’ – a claim Perry made on the basis of an article by the German critic favourably comparing the Sketches to Uncle’s Tom’s Cabin by pointing out the superior affective impact of Turgenev’s dispassionate rendering of selected details to Beecher Stowe’s ‘authorial rhapsodizing and sentimentality’. In Turgenev they had found their model for a new type of poetic realism which they promoted in America.¹¹⁰

Through such international networks literary periodicals played a vital role in the cultural integration of Europe, bringing writers from the Continent’s periphery closer to its major capitals, and provincial writers closer to the metropolitan centres. They also were important in getting writers from the other Francophone countries (Belgium and Switzerland) and German-speaking cultures outside Germany (Austria, Bohemia and the Baltic lands) better known in the main literary markets for those languages.

The boom in Russian novels in French translation took off in this way during the 1880s. Zola and Turgenev had prepared the ground, but the sudden spurt of French interest in Russian literature was mainly due to the influence of Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé’s bestselling book, Le Roman russe (1886), which had appeared as a series of essays about Russian writers in the Revue des deux mondes and the Revue bleu around 1883. As the French ambassador to Russia from 1875 to 1882, de Vogüé had travelled widely in the country, and became absorbed in its culture. He wrote on Russia in the Revue des deux mondes over a period of many years, and was personally acquainted with Turgenev, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, whose characters he vividly portrayed. The main impact of Le Roman russe came from its idea that the Russians could revive the realist tradition, which, de Vogüé argued, had lost its way in France: Russian novels had a spiritual aspect lacking in the materialist realism of Zola or Flaubert. The message struck a chord with a public that had begun to grow tired of naturalism and wanted something new and different, and the effect was immediate. The French translation of War and Peace, which had sold fewer than a thousand copies since its publication six years earlier, became a bestseller, with 20,000 copies sold between 1886 and 1889. Over the same period there was a steep rise in the number of translations of other Russian novels into French.¹¹¹

Networks of supporters in the European journals were equally important in the breakthrough of the three great Scandinavian playwrights, Ibsen, Bjørnson and Strindberg. Their most important promoter was a Russian diplomat in Sweden, Count Maurice Prozor, a writer and translator from Russian and Norwegian into French. He was so impressed by the European premiere of Ibsen’s Ghosts at the Helsingborg State Theatre in southern Sweden, in 1882, that he translated it himself and got extracts of it published in La Revue indépendante, a newly established Paris journal (not to be confused with the long-defunct periodical of the same name founded by George Sand and Louis Viardot) which became a tribune of the Naturalists and Symbolists. That publication put him into contact with another diplomat, Edouard Rod, the French ambassador in Switzerland and an Ibsen fan, who had written articles about the Norwegian playwright in Le Temps. With Rod’s help Prozor got the play produced in Paris, in 1890, in a production based on his complete translation in La Revue indépendante the previous year. Ghosts was soon produced in all the major theatres of the Continent. It was translated from Prozor’s French into many languages. Ibsen had been launched on an international scale. In the future all his plays would be published in translation simultaneously with their appearance in Danish, allowing them to receive their first performance simultaneously in the European capitals. Literature had become internationalized.¹¹²

The acceleration of translations did not lead to more diversity of national cultures, as one might expect, but to quite the opposite: a growing uniformity or standardization of literary forms, with ‘all of Europe reading the same books’.¹¹³

Commentators had long seen this happening. Writing in the Revue des deux mondes in 1846, the French critic Saint-René Taillandier had lamented the disappearance of diversity in the national literary cultures of Europe. ‘One could almost say that foreign literatures do not exist any more,’ he wrote, ‘as if the world was enveloped by a sad uniformity.’ Jean-Jacques Ampère, the French philologist, writing in the Revue in 1853, diagnosed the causes of this uniformity in a typically French manner. It had begun, he argued, as the ‘servile copying’ of France by the other nations of Europe. ‘To start with, the literatures of Europe’s nations were entirely different, but through imitation they became similar, and today, without imitation, they are all alike.’¹¹⁴

Ampère overlooked the British novel, which had its imitators in Denmark and Holland, even Germany and France. But the French model became dominant in southern and central Europe, from Spain and Italy to Hungary and Bohemia, where the book market was flooded with translations from the French. Native writers imitated successful imports.¹¹⁵ National cultures in these countries thus developed, not by their own home-grown means, as nationalist myths would have it, but through the borrowing of foreign means. The ‘Spanish’ novel was not Spanish, the ‘Italian’ not Italian, the ‘Hungarian’ not Hungarian: they were all imitations of the French.

No French writer was more imitated than Zola. He had a truly global literary reach. The influence of Zola differed in each country, according to social conditions, but everywhere his novels were perceived as an agency of progress and modernity. In Italy, where ‘Zolaismo’ was embraced by liberal progressives as an ally in their cause against the Church’s influence, there were ‘thousands of greenhorn Zolaists [zolistes de lendemain]’, as Felice Cameroni, one of the critics who had been promoting him, wrote to Zola with some exaggeration in 1879. Giovanni Verga and Luigi Capuana, both Sicilians, were conscious imitators of Zola, seeing in his documentary style a modern way to write about the real lives of the poor. In Spain the impact of Zola was almost equal to a cultural revolution, as radical intellectuals embraced his movement as a way to overturn the conservatism of Catholic society. One group founded a journal, Germinal, named after Zola’s masterpiece about a miners’ strike. His style of social realism was adopted by many of the country’s leading writers, including Benito Pérez Galdós and Bazán.¹¹⁶

Zola’s writings had a radical impact on the small and provincial literary cultures of Sweden, Norway and Denmark. Championed by the critic Georg Brandes, whose lectures at Copenhagen University began the ‘modern breakthrough’ in Scandinavian literature, Zola’s works were widely talked about during the 1880s. Young writers, in the words of Strindberg, who counted himself one of them, ‘adored Zola’ and all tried to write like him.¹¹⁷

In the Netherlands the upcoming writers of that time, Frans Netscher and Lodewijk van Deyssel (the pseudonym of Karel Thijm), were inspired by Zola’s frank approach to sexuality – a far cry from the oppressive Calvinism of Dutch society – and by his attempts to apply science to his writing. They saw his scientific approach as the key to a modern literature in the service of society and progress. In Germany, where Zola’s novels were the most widely read of any foreign writer in the 1880s, they appealed to a public looking for a new type of realist literature. They were widely read by the German working class, who saw in them a truthful reflection of their own lives.¹¹⁸ It was a type of social novel they would soon find in their own German emulators of the Zola style. Among them was Gerhart Hauptmann, whose first work, Bahnwärter Thiel (1888), the story of a railway signalman who kills his wife, could not have been more Zolaesque.

Britain was the only European country where Zola had almost no following, with just George Moore, the ‘Irish Zola’, acknowledging his influence. The reasons are not hard to find. Britain had in Thomas Hardy its own version of Zola, and in Dickens and Eliot a well-established realist tradition that made it independent of influences from the Continent.

6

Paris played host to the world again with the opening of the Exposition Universelle, the largest exhibition of its kind so far, on 1 May 1878. Thirteen million people paid to enter it, around half a million from abroad (Flaubert complained that the city’s prostitutes would be worn out). There were two enormous sites, the main building, in the Champ de Mars, and, connected to it by the Pont d’Iéna on the other bank of the Seine, the Trocadéro Palace, specially constructed in a half-Byzantine and half-Moorish style for the great event.¹¹⁹ Among the new inventions on display, visitors could see an aluminium flying machine by Félix du Temple, a telephone by Alexander Graham Bell, and a phonograph by Thomas Edison, the first mechanism capable of recording and reproducing sound.

The exhibition was a symbol of France’s resurrection after the defeat of 1871. In contrast to the previous Exposition, in 1867, which had brought prestige to the French Empire, this one was perceived as a celebration of the French people and republican values – a victory symbolized by France’s gift to the United States of the Statue of Liberty, whose completed head was unveiled in the gardens of the Trocadéro Palace on 30 June.

The frieze above the main entrance showed France summoning the nations of the world. The Avenue of Nations in the Champ de Mars was lined by buildings representing typical examples of the architectural style of nearly every country in Europe, and quite a few from Asia, America and Africa. The public, noted Zola, ‘mostly came in search of amusement’: they wanted ‘curiosities, tropical bazaars and cafés, restaurants where they could try extraodinary drinks and listen to strange music’. Large crowds were drawn to the Chinese, Japanese and Persian exhibits, and there was a lot of interest in the log huts made by Russian peasants without a single nail. Zola himself was so smitten by the Norwegian Pavilion that he bought it, had it dismantled at the Exposition’s end, and rebuilt it in the garden of his mansion at Médan, newly purchased with the fortune he had made from L’Assommoir.¹²⁰

Six weeks after the opening of the Exposition, an International Writers’ Congress met in Paris to discuss proposals for an international treaty to protect literary copyright. Attended by 200 writers from countries all around the world, the congress elected Victor Hugo as its chairman for the ceremonial sessions and Turgenev for the working ones. The idea of the congress went back to the Brussels conference of 1858, the first attempt to draw up international laws of copyright. After Brussels there had been a second congress in Antwerp, in 1861, and then one in Manchester, in 1866, but a conference planned in Paris to coincide with the 1867 exhibition did not materialize, so the organizing council of the Société des Gens de Lettres called another one to take place at the time of the next world fair, thinking it would bring a lot of writers to Paris. Turgenev helped to draw up the lists of invited writers from abroad. But the foreign delegations were not large, and for every foreigner there were two French delegates. Most of the latter were jobbing writers for the feuilletons, the workers of an industry in popular fiction to help sell newspapers, according to the leader of the Russian delegation, Petr Boborykin. One of them had no idea who Flaubert was. Goncourt, Zola, Maupassant and Flaubert were all absent from the conference.¹²¹

The congress began with a public session in the Théâtre du Châtelet on 11 June. After the opening formalities, Hugo gave a long and lofty speech in praise of literature as the legislator of civilization and setting up the congress as its international parliament. Declaiming in a strong impassioned voice with long pauses for effect, he reminded Boborykin of an old actor. The delegates, seated in the stalls, listened with religious awe. The cult of Victor Hugo was at its height in France. The writer – who had returned from exile only on the fall of Napoleon III – was hailed as the moral conscience of the Republic. With his white hair and beard he assumed the role of national sage. He would hold court at his salon in rue de Clichy, where admirers would come to hear his views, which he gave on anything and everything, and his words of wisdom would later appear in the press.¹²²

Turgenev did not care much for Hugo – he thought Les Misérables was ‘false from start to end’ – and was irritated by this universal reverence for him. Among friends, like Flaubert and Zola, who shared to some extent his annoyance with this cult, he poked fun at Hugo’s pomposity (he invented a special word for it, ‘hyperbombifocasse’ – ‘hyperbombification’).¹²³ He liked to tell the story of a visit to his salon, probably in 1875:

Once, when I was at his home, we were chatting about German poetry. Victor Hugo, who does not like people talking in his presence, cut me short and began to give a portrait of Goethe.

‘His best work,’ he said in an Olympian tone, ‘is Wallenstein.’

‘Forgive me, dear master [Turgenev interjected]. ‘Wallenstein is not by Goethe. It is by Schiller.’

‘It matters not. I have read neither Goethe nor Schiller, but I know them better than those who have learnt their works by heart.’

He also liked to tell how once at Hugo’s house a group of young French writers were talking of the possibility of a local street being named after Hugo. They all agreed that the street was too small to do him honour and began to compete by listing bigger streets. Finally, one of them suggested that the whole of Paris should be renamed Hugo. Hugo paused in thought and then said to the young man, ‘Ça viendra, mon cher, ça viendra! [‘That will come, my dear fellow, that will come!’]’¹²⁴

Turgenev’s own speech was modest. In five minutes he outlined to the congress how the great French writers of the past 200 years had helped Russian literature to emerge on the European scene, naming Pushkin, Lermontov and Gogol as no longer disciples of the French but as their colleagues (whereupon there were cries of ‘Turgenev! Add Turgenev!’).¹²⁵

Turgenev was a poor public speaker. His voice was too high-pitched and weak to command a hall. As the chairman of the working sessions, which took place in the Masonic Lodge of the Grand Orient of France, he struggled to maintain control of the delegates, and often had to be helped out by Edmond About, the French novelist, who was the real organizing force of the congress.

The French stood firmly by the position they had long held: that authors’ rights were a form of natural property, unrestricted by national boundaries. The purpose of the congress, as About defined it, was ‘to draw up an international law by which the foreign writer shall enjoy in every country the same advantages as that nation’s own writers – that without his consent he may neither be reprinted, nor translated, nor performed on the stage’.¹²⁶ Most of the foreign delegations agreed with the French, but some of the smaller countries, which depended heavily on imported literature, wanted greater freedom for translations; so it was resolved to divide the delegations into national groups, which would advance their proposals to the congress for a vote (where the French would win as they had the majority of delegates). The Slav group (Russians, Poles and Czechs) met at the Viardot house in the rue de Douai.

Turgenev was in a difficult position. The Russian delegation was flatly opposed to the French proposal: they wanted to protect the livelihood of Russian translators, and since fewer Russian writers were translated into foreign languages than foreign writers into Russian, they could not see a benefit to Russia in accepting the protections suggested by the French. A similar position was adopted by the other Slavs. Turgenev’s own views, however, were on the French side. He had long complained of ‘thieving publishers’ and their pirated translations of his work abroad. It was not just that they deprived him of the foreign royalties which he would have earned with international protection, but that these unauthorized translations were so poor that they might damage his literary reputation where they appeared. Many times he wrote to foreign periodicals to complain and warn their readers about them. He was most outraged by those that falsely claimed to be translated with his authority. One pirate publisher in Germany brought out a translation of his novel On the Eve with a fabricated preface ‘From the Author’. Even more infuriating was an incident in 1877, when a French translation of ‘A Strange Story’, originally published in The Messenger of Europe, was retranslated into Russian and published as an ‘original Turgenev story’ with a different title (‘A Priest’s Son’) in New Times. There were numerous mistakes in the new version and the whole tone of the story had been lost. Turgenev complained to Stasiulevich, asking him to join him in a letter of complaint to Aleksei Suvorin, the editor of Novoe Vremia, although in the absence of any Russian laws of international copyright he recognized that there was nothing more that they could do: ‘The law is on the side of such gentlemen, but decent people would not take advantage of such laws.’¹²⁷

Turgenev was a firm believer in the need for international laws: honourable behaviour was not enough to protect authors’ rights when printed texts crossed national frontiers. In May 1878, the Swedish-Finnish architect and writer Jac Ahrenberg, a delegate at the writers’ congress, visited Turgenev at Bougival, where he recorded his frank views on copyright:

Turgenev said that he had been exploited in a shameful way by Swedish publishers. Without consulting him, they had translated his works, mostly from the German and French editions. A few days ago, he himself had seen in Mr Nilsson’s window a copy of his Spring Torrents with no indication of the translator’s name and without any Swedish publisher having even asked him about the matter. Well, one publisher had asked, and asked in such a way that Turgenev had not even replied to the letter. The letter supposedly began with ‘although he, the publisher, had a legal right in the case of translations to do as he wanted … he nevertheless offered the author’ – what Turgenev called ‘un pourboire’ [a tip], presumably a few hundred crowns. Nilsson was sorry for his grievance, said that the Swedish editions were small, that it was not worth while to publish a book, if the author had to be paid a fee, that the Russians had the same right vis à vis the Swedish writers, though Sweden, regrettably, did not have and never had had Turgenev’s like; that he, Nilsson, had no part in this bellum omnium inter omnes [war of all against all], he was but a commission agent and sold what others sent him. The conversation lasted a long time, and in the end the causa mali was brought forward, a letter from Turgenev’s Russian publisher, which claimed (surely erroneously) that Turgenev’s works were printed, sold and read in Sweden more than even any Swedish writer’s, and ended with the petition that Turgenev, with the support of his great reputation, should take measures to curb this mischief and obtain, at least for himself, compensation for his work. The whole thing gave me the impression that, as surely as the old man was right in his claims for compensation, he just as much needed his money.

Turgenev spoke heatedly and with justified indignation about these translations into foreign languages. His sharp criticisms of this ‘new Varangian trading and plundering’ were, however, humorous rather than satirical or ironic. He made one remark, among others, that struck me: ‘If this right to translate without compensation is not revoked, small nations shall be stifled in competition on the literary market. It will always be better business for a publisher to choose a masterpiece for nothing (I’m not talking about my own works now) than to pick from among the few domestic original works that might be good enough. But foreign masterpieces are less necessary for a nation’s spiritual life than domestic works of lower rank. The consequence is that publishers get fatter while authors die out, and so the nation’s literature suffers a heavy blow. Small nations are, more than others, forced to protect themselves against foreign influences. Better to have a few poor publishers and a small but viable literature. Look at Italy and Spain! Their literatures are dead. Why? Well, before the last edition of a French novel has left the printing presses, it has been exploited by a publisher in these countries.’¹²⁸

Turgenev had hoped that the Russian delegation would ‘silently approve the French proposals’, as he had written to Stasiulevich. The danger that he had seen for small nations could equally apply to Russia, where he feared that young writers might find it hard to publish because of the influx of foreign translations. He had also been concerned that ‘the Russians should not give the French cause to accuse us of illiberal views in not wanting equal rights [between nations] – an accusation fully justified.’ At their meeting in the rue de Douai he managed to persuade the Slav group that, since the French would reject out of hand any proposal for freedom of translations, they should propose a compromise of copyright protection for a limited period (between two and five years depending on the category of work).¹²⁹

This was the proposal he advanced on their behalf at the congress. Turgenev underlined that for young literary nations such as Russia, especially in those where there was censorship, it was important to maintain freedom of access to foreign literary and scientific works: this was the surest guarantee for the spread of European civilization to these less fortunate societies. He also argued for permissiveness on grounds of equity: ‘We Russians cannot yet afford to pay authors money for translations from the French. You, the French, do not translate us, and practically ignore us, but we translate all your latest works. And who are our translators? Poor students, for whom this work is their only means of livelihood.’ One of the French delegates shouted at this point: ‘Let them pay me just two sous! The important thing is the recognition of my rights!’ – a sentiment applauded by the French majority. Turgenev was supported by several of the smaller delegations – the Romanians, the Dutch and the Portuguese – who claimed that in their countries it was impossible to earn a living from writing, there were no native writers, and that those from the richer nations should look on the translation of their works as an advertisement in these markets. Turgenev made a final plea: ‘These translators are not brigands. They are to some extent the pioneers of civilization in our country. You may say that what they introduce they take from you. That is true, but there are precedents. If Peter the Great had not been an illustrious brigand, I would not be talking to you here today.’ There was laughter and applause. But in the vote his proposal was rejected by all but twenty of the delegates.¹³⁰

The congress passed a series of proposals advanced by the French for copyright protection of authors’ rights, including translations and adaptations, in all countries equally. It then closed with a banquet and more speeches calling on national governments to draw up the necessary international laws. Turgenev did not go to the banquet but went instead to the Folies Bergère with the Viardots. He was tired and fed up with the congress, a ‘comedy’ he called it, which had produced ‘some general phrases’ but no results of any real significance (‘patati et patata’). ‘I’ve had enough of it,’ he wrote to Flaubert, ‘and I’m leaving for Karlsbad.’¹³¹

Turgenev allowed his name to be included on the honorary committee of the International Literary and Arts Association (ALAI), which organized a series of conferences in London (in 1879), Lisbon (1880) and Vienna (1881) to draft proposals for international laws of copyright. But he attended none of these. He thought his role in London would be ‘miserable’, and even in Vienna, where he was declared an Honorary President, he saw no purpose in his being there: the Russians were showing every sign of backing out of any agreements on international copyright.¹³²

Turgenev had been wrong when he had told Flaubert that the congress ‘won’t and can’t produce any result’. The resolutions it had passed were enshrined in a draft convention of international copyright at the ALAI Conference in Berne in 1883, discussed by governments at diplomatic conferences in the same city in 1884 and 1885, and formally adopted by ten states (France, Belgium, Britain, Germany, Haiti, Italy, Liberia, Spain, Switzerland and Tunis) as the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works (the founding document of a copyright union which today incorporates 172 countries) on 9 September 1886. Most of Europe’s smaller states, those predominantly book-importing, remained outside the convention, although many joined it later on: Norway (in 1896), Denmark (1903), Sweden (1904), Portugal (1911) and the Netherlands (in 1912). The Austro-Hungarian Empire was kept out by its non-German parts, the main importers of foreign translations, which held the majority in the Reichsrat. The Russians too refused to join the convention. But there was an irony. They had based their opposition to the French proposals on the reasoning that they translated more works from the other European languages than the other way around, but their decision not to join the convention went a long way to reverse this imbalance. After 1886, there was a steep and sustained rise in the number of translations of Russian books in Europe. It was partly the result of increased Western interest in Russian literature, but mainly because Russian books were unprotected by the convention and thus cheaper to translate and publish than works under international copyright.

The Berne Convention was one of the towering achievements of international law in the nineteenth century. It came at a highpoint of internationalism – a time when the International Red Cross was established in all the major countries of Europe, when Socialists were organized through the Second International, and the women’s international movement took substantial form. The force of international law was increasing, and European states were signing up to international norms and conventions: an International Telegraphic Union (1865); a Union for the Metric System (1875); a Universal Postal Union (1875); an International Meridian Conference to establish standard time (1884); and an Agreement on Goods Transport by Rail (1890), which coordinated the timetables and technical requirements for the railway companies of nine continental European states.¹³³

The Berne Convention was not yet sufficient to eradicate the problem of international piracy. States outside the convention – notably the USA and Russia – continued to provide a legal loophole for pirate publishers.* The wording of the convention was ambiguous in certain areas – performance rights, for example – which gave rise to legal fights between the creators of music or dramatic works and concert or theatre managers. But overall the treaty was a crucial piece of legislation, whose guiding principles remain in force today. It encouraged publishers of music, literature and art to expand their business internationally, and enabled artists to collect an income from their work around the world.

* Turgenev had an acoustic tube installed so that he could hear the singing lessons while he wrote.

* Agents had existed in an informal sense, as middlemen, since at least the early nineteenth century, but the modern professional agent began to appear in the 1870s, at first mainly in the English-speaking world. The Glaswegian A. P. Watt was probably the first, his agency dating from the later 1870s, when he set up in London, advertised himself as a literary agent, and charged a 10 per cent commission on the income earned for his clients.

* Massenet would reuse parts of the libretto for his ‘Spanish’ opera Le Cid (1885). See Hugh Macdonald’s ‘Bizet Catalogue’ (http://digital.wustl.edu/bizet/works/Don_Rodrigue.html).

* Something close to his outlook was expressed in the scene from The Europeans (1878), his most Turgenevian novel, in which Gertrude interrogates her distant cousin Felix on meeting him for the first time after his arrival in Boston from Europe:

‘You are a foreigner of some sort,’ said Gertrude.

‘Of some sort – yes; I suppose so. But who can say of what sort? I don’t think we have ever had the occasion to settle the question. You know there are people like that. About their country, their religion, their profession, they can’t tell.’

* Jules Troubat was the librarian at Compiègne Palace, Louis Ulbach at the Arsenal, while Leconte de Lisle and Anatole France were employed at the Senate Library.

† Flaubert’s old friend Frédéric Baudry, the deputy director of the Mazarine and a distinguished scholar with political connections, had been nominated for the job, which he had been coveting for twenty years. Flaubert felt humiliated by the incident, whose outcome was reported in Le Figaro. According to Maupassant, who visited Baudry to find out what had happened for Flaubert, Turgenev was to blame for lobbying Gambetta before trying to find out what the situation was (Kerandoux (ed.), Gustave Flaubert, Guy de Maupassant, p. 167). Flaubert later accepted a supernumerary post at the Mazarine created for him by Baudry. He did not go there once.

* The British took longer to appreciate Flaubert. The first translation of Madame Bovary, by Eleanor Marx-Aveling, the daughter of Karl Marx, appeared only in 1887, thirty years after its original publication in France. The novel was too scandalous for the prudish Victorians. A tame adaption of it, The Doctor’s Wife by Mary Braddon, was published in 1864.

* Le Bien public later dropped the serial following complaints from its subscribers, who took offence at Zola’s shocking portrait of the working class.

* The USA joined a less protective Universal Copyright Convention in Geneva in 1952. It did not accede to the Berne Convention until 1988. The Soviet Union signed the Berne Convention in 1975, Russia reaffirming its adherence in 1995.