Russian plays – A Month in the Country by Turgenev

A Month in the Country is a play about feelings. Feelings that no-one wants to talk or be honest about, feelings that you can get tangled up in and feelings that become real once they have been spoken out loud.

Turgenev wrote A Month in the Country between 1848 and 1850 in the Viardots’ country house Courtavenel. Courtavenel, some 50 kilometres from Paris, was one of his favourite places. Turgenev lived in Paris because the love of his life, the famous singer Pauline Viardot, lived there. Interestingly he was also close friends with her husband Louis.

Towards the end of the 1840’s the relationship between Turgenev and Pauline was rather strained. Pauline was touring a lot, she was having an affair with another man, the composer Charles Gounod, and she rarely replied to the daily letters that Turgenev sent her. Although the Viardots themselves were mostly gone, Turgenev liked being at Courtavenel anyway, and he wrote some of his best works there.

Turgenev has often used his complicated relationship with Pauline as a source of inspiration for his work. The relations in A Month in the Country between Natalya, her husband Islayev, her admirer Rakitin and the innocent student Belyayev were no doubt inspired by the relations between Pauline, Louis, Gounod and himself. 

Natalya is a typical Turgenev woman: smart, attractive, capricious and passionate. The relationship with her husband, who really adores her, does not make her happy. To alleviate the boredom she flirts with Rakitin, a friend of the family. Rakitin is Turgenev himself, as he describes it in one of his letters: the unsuccessful lover. This situation changes with the arrival of a young student, hired as a tutor, to the family’s country estate; Natalya really falls in love with this fresh and pure young man.

The first one to notice this is Rakitin. Natalya only realises how serious her feelings are when she detects feelings of jealousy towards her 17 year-old ward Vera. Belyayev appears to be a bit scared of Natalya, but he seems entirely comfortable with Vera. A little too comfortable for Natalya’s liking. In an attempt to discourage Vera from befriending Belyayev any further, she confronts her. She manages to get Vera to confess that she is in love with Belyayev, and precisely by doing so, Vera’s feelings become real and grown up: what would most likely have blown over as soon as the summer was over and Belyayev was gone again, had now been turned into an entirely inappropriate relationship between a poor ward and student. Natalya even stoops so low as to try to marry her ‘rival’ off to an older bachelor neighbour.  

In a further attempt to manipulate the situation she confronts Belyayev. Belyayev is dumbfounded. He had no idea about Vera’s feelings and he does not feel the same way about her. Vera, in turn, has understood after her conversation with Natalya that Natalya is in love with Belyayev herself, and she tells Belyayev so. He can’t believe it, until he hears it from Natalya herself. Completely confused about what he has apparently caused, he thinks that he has feelings for Natalya too. He wants to leave as soon as possible before things really get out of control. Rakitin has just enough pride left to leave as well and Vera marries the neighbour so that she doesn’t have to live with Natalya anymore.

Natalya’s feelings scare her when she realises what they make her do. Rakitin’s feelings are bitter. Love of every kind, he sighs, happy as much as unhappy, is a real calamity if you give yourself up to it completely. The innocent Belyayev feels as if he has brought some contagious disease to the house and Vera feels no longer welcome. Of course, by marrying the neighbour, she will end up being unhappy just like Natalya.

And Turgenev himself? His feelings were so strong that never left his beloved, except for a few times when he had to go back to Russia. He swallowed his pride and contented himself with being a friend of the family.  

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Photos from Wikipedia, collage and text © Elisabeth van der Meer 2019 

• A Month in the Country, Turgenev 
•  Toergenjev’s Liefde, Daphne Schmelzer

Gogol’s Plays

Russian Literature is well known for its lifelike characters who usually go through some ordeal and achieve personal growth through that. The base of many a novel, but Russian literature particularly excels in it. The reader is swept along and en passant gains some experience himself. Who has read War and Peace knows that whatever happens, normal life will always take its course again, and happiness will return. Not with Gogol. In his work the end situation is the same as the beginning, the characters are not particularly sympathetic and no-one has learned anything. Yet he is considered one of the founders of the great 19th century Russian literature, together with Pushkin.

Details

Gogol had a particular talent for characterising his protagonists, big and small. We all know the people who walk around in Gogol’s fictional world: frauds, vain creatures, people with big plans that never materialise, scroungers and misers. Surely somewhere a miserable civil servant is dreaming of having a bigger car than his boss. But however recognisable they may be, that are the product of Gogol’s rich fantasy. He took a character trait and built a character around it.

Gogol wrote three plays, all three are still being performed: The Government Inspector, The Gamblers and Marriage.

The Government Inspector

The Government Inspector (1836) is the best known of the three. In a small provincial town a high ranking inspector is expected. The officials in the town are terrified that their deplorable state of affairs will be discovered and they mistake a young man staying in the local inn for the inspector. As soon as he realises that he can profit from the situation, the young man plays along, not hindered by any lack of fantasy, accepting bribes from everyone. After he disappears it soon becomes clear that he was not the real inspector, and everyone tries to shift the blame for the mistaken identity to each other.

The Gamblers

In The Gamblers (1840) a card sharp becomes the victim of a cunning scam himself. He has just won a lot of money and arrives in a new town hoping to make some more. Unfortunately he meets a couple of clever conmen and he loses all his money even quicker than he had made it.

Marriage

In Marriage (1832) the protagonist is planning to get married. He has hired a matchmaker to help him find a suitable bride. She finds him several candidates, but Podkolyosin is terribly indecisive. In order to speed things up his friend forces him to to visit the latest candidate with him. There they find several suitors, but the friend manages to close the deal. They are supposed to get married that same evening, the friend will arrange everything. While the bride gets dressed, Podkolyosin climbs out of the window and goes home as fast as he can.

Moral intentions

Gogol had intended to not just entertain the audience with his plays, he also wanted to confront them with what was wrong in society. The audience, however, saw only the satire and humor of the plays and even the tsar himself had a good laugh when he saw The Government Inspector. Gogol was disillusioned. But the society that he depicted was the product of his imagination. He had never visited a Russian provincial town, he wasn’t a civil servant. Hardly a reliable witness exposing all kinds of wrongs.

Memorabilty

If we forget about Gogol’s moral intentions, we are left with highly enjoyable pieces of literature. Gogol has a unique sense of humor and his characters are as alive today as when he created them many years ago. He has shown his descendants the importance of details when it comes to characterisation. It’s the details that make the character universal, alive, and memorable. A young man passing through a provincial town is unremarkable, but a young man who has squandered away all his money and is sitting in his room in the inn with an empty stomach and an obstinate servant promises entertainment.

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Text and photo © Elisabeth van der Meer, 2019