Ivan Turgenev was Russia’s great emancipator. He helped bring freedom to the serfs by an ingeniously devastating method: showing what their lives were like…
…Vavara Petrovna soon had another reason to be angry with her son. During the season of 1843-1844 a French opera company presented The Barber of Seville in Petersburg. The star of the company was a twenty-five year old singer of Spanish and gypsy background, Pauline Viardot. This dark, exotic woman could not, by any stretch of the imagination be called pretty. “Ugly, but of a noble. I might almost say a beautiful type of ugliness,” was how the poet Heinrich Heine described her.
—Here in 1861, all that bloodshed remains many years to the future, and a young Alexander is reordering Russia with the landmark emancipation of the serfs.
Reading the Manifesto, by Boris Kustodiev. —
Big. Change.
But, you didn’t really think the power and property interests that nobles held in their serfs were just going to be thrown over willy-nilly, did you?
Quite the contrary. Emancipated serfs got small plots of land** along with obligations to pay off their lords, restrictions on using lands designated to aristocrats, and new bureaucracies to answer to. In short, this wasn’t exactly the freedom of the open road. —click image for source…
Though Turgenev was tall, more than six feet, and extremely handsome with his dark brown hair and green eyes, Pauline was no easy conquest. She was the toast of the Russian capital that winter, and there was another complication- she was married to Louis Viardot, the director of the company. It all sounds a bit like the vapors of The Blue Angel, but here Turgenov was exceedingly wealthy and determined to have her as a mistress. Their romance lasted for forty years, during which he became first Pauline’s lover and then part of the Viardot family, where his many roles included those of generous patron, father of her son, foster father to her daughter, and, finally, boon companion to Louis Viardot, the wronged husband.
—English: The French mezzo-soprano Pauline Viardot in the title role of Gluck’s Orphée.
Date 1860—WIKI
Pauline’s power over Turgenev was tyrannical with a touch of the sadistic. In the agony of his last illness he was to call Pauline Lady Macbeth, and in one of his brilliant ghost stories, “Clara Milich,” the destructive vampire is described as ” a second Viardot.” Yet he said that he could not have written A Sportsman’s Sketches without her inspiration, and it was to her that he dedicated his book. ( to be continued)…
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