TITLE: Twilight of Love: Travels with Turgenev
AUTHOR: Robert Dessaix
PUBLISHER: Picador (Sept. 2004)
ISBN: 0 330 36499 5 PRICE: A$40.00 (hardback) 275 pages
Reviewed by Ann Skea (ann@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
)
"One Saturday morning when I was about eleven or twelve years old, at
about the
time the first sputnik began criss-crossing the sky, I went into a
bookshop in
a suburb of Sydney and bought myself a Russian dictionary".
So, Robert Dessaix's obsession with all things Russian was born and "in
the
blink of an eye...the whole course of [his] life changed". Dessaix studied
in
Russia, reads and speaks Russian fluently, and knows Russian literature
well
but, until now, he has found writing about Russia "extraordinarily
difficult".
It is surprising then, that in Twilight of Love he chose to write about a
Russian author whose work he confesses to never having totally enjoyed,
even
though he know it thoroughly.
Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev, the man, however, has somehow become someone
Dessaix
feels a kin****p with. And following his footsteps around Europe, visiting
towns
he lived in and houses he knew well, Dessaix feels empathy and "a
glimmer of
fellow feeling" for him. Turgenev, it seems to Dessaix, shared his own
feeling
of dislocation and strangeness in the place in which he was born, and had
a
similarly strained relation****p with the usual conventions of his society.
Both, Dessaix suggests, experienced situations which taught them to "know
what
wormwood tastes like".
Yet wormwood has little to do with the flavour of this book, which is
anecdotal, humorous, intelligent, literate and entertaining. Twilight of
Love
is a travelogue which reveals as much of Dessaix's own character as that
of
Turgenev. Dessaix's various travelling companions and friends, superfluous
as
they sometime seem to Dessaix's main journey, do reflect different aspects
of
Dessaix's own life and offer a sort of modern parallel to Turgenev's life
and
times.
Dessaix begins his journey in Baden-Baden, where he teams up with an old
friend (a sophisticated, married German woman) to visit various Turgenev
'sites'. In France, with its more relaxed ***ual ambience, Dessaix meets a
young Frenchman, Daniel, with whom he once had an affair and who is now in
his
"Buddhist phase". With this new companion and his very different
perspective,
he tracks Turgenev to Rozay-en-Brie and to Courtavenel, the vanished
castle of
which was the place where Turgenev felt most at home. And in Moscow, it is
Irina he meets again - a Russian woman with whom he has been friends since
their studies at Moscow University in the mid-sixties. Irina is anxious
that
Dessaix approves of the recent dramatic changes in Russia, and his
reminiscences of earlier times are as interesting as his visits to St.
Petersburg and Oryol, and to Spasskoye, to which Turgenev had eventually
come
home and where some of his best-know novels were written.
As well as writing about Turgenev's life and of his friend****ps with other
well-known Russians, Dessaix focuses his travels particularly on places
associated with Turgenev's lifelong love of the opera diva, Pauline
Verdot.
Theirs was a three-cornered relation****p in which Pauline's scholarly
husband,
Louis, was the third party. This unusual and long-lasting arrangement
seemed to
suit all three, but whether Turgenev and Pauline ever became lovers has
long
been the subject of debate. Dessaix speculates, but comes to no
conclusions.
Love is love, and it is expressed in many forms - and whilst this book is
a
travelogue of sorts, and a literary biography of sorts, it has more the
product
of Dessaix's own love of life and literature than of anything else.
Sometimes, like life, Twilight of Love is patchy, and sometimes Dessaix's
reflections on his own past seemed to me to be random and irrelevant .
Mostly,
however, this book is an interesting, informed and easily read meander
through
some of Turgenev's writing, through Russian history, and through the vast
range
of ideas which attract Dessaix's active curiosity. By the end of it you
may,
like Dessaix himself, find yourself "warming to the idea of re-reading
Turgenev": or, even, of reading Turgenev for the first time with Twilight
of
Love beside you as a sort of rough guide to some of Turgenev's
eccentricities.
tribulations and loves.
*******************************************************************************
**
Copyright © Ann Skea 2004
http://ann.skea.com
Ted Hughes' Pages http://ann.skea.com/THHome
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