Word: pritchett
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...GENTLE BARBARIAN by V.S. PRITCHETT 243 pages. Random House...
...Tolstoy, befriended Zola, intrigued Carlyle, enchanted Henry James. He was at once a hunter of game and celebrity, a well-traveled man of letters, and a provincial Russian. Ivan Turgenev's life is several lives, and by now several biographies should have recounted them. Yet, as Critic V.S. Pritchett notes, there has not been a definitive biography of Turgenev in any language...
Until now. This brisk, critical Life operates under a great handicap: Pritchett does not read Russian; literary and biographical sources come almost entirely from translations. But the author has the compensating virtues of insight and wit. Turgenev's oeuvre has long been accessible to an English-speaking audience; The Gentle Barbarian at last makes the neglected author as approachable as his work...
Unpredictable Virago. Ivan's father, an impoverished dandy, died in 1834 when the boy was 16-possibly to get away from his wife. Turgenev's mother was a wealthy, unpredictable virago who alternately punished and indulged her serfs and sons. "Children brought up under a tyranny," observes Pritchett, "spoiled one moment and beaten the next are likely to be evasive and to lead a double life." Ivan, Mama's favorite, always existed on two planes: the imaginative and the real. On the first he succeeded; on the second he foundered for six decades...
...youth. The Sportsman's Sketches provides a landscape with figures-peasants and hunters who wander in a remote and somehow doomed pastorale. The book was to become a profound influence on Hemingway, and Poet Randall Jarrell called its evocations of the countryside "the best of all possible worlds." Pritchett agrees. "There are two masters of seeing in Russian literature," he observes. "Tolstoy sees exactly as if he were an animal or a bird: and what he sees is still and settled for good. He has the pride of the eye. Turgenev is also exact but without that decisive pride...