Flaubert & Turgenev; a friendship in letters.

A PAIR OF MOLES

BOTH FLAUBERT and Turgenev--similar in age, profession, and stature--thought writing was a solitary and lonely art, and felt an intense need to communicate with a kindred spirit. From 1863--when they met and were instantly attracted to one another at one of the famous literary dinners at Magny's restaurant--until Flaubert's death, in 1880, they exchanged about 230 letters and moved from flattery of friendship.

The letters are competently translated, introduced, and edited by Barbara Beaumont, though she does not annotate all the obscure references. The more emotionally dependent Flaubert is both bitter and effusive. Turgenev good-humored and folksy, but the style of their letters--in English translation--is not sufficiently distinct. Since many of the rather disappointing letters contain trivial details and requisite formalities, and tend to skirt serious literary and political issues, they are not nearly as interesting as the Freud-Jung or Thomas Mann-Erich Kahler correspondence. They do not have the intuitive sympathy, vital energy, intellectual audacity, or imaginative intensity of the greatest letter writers: Byron, Keats, Lawrence.

Flaubert, who had exalted literary standards, begins by praising the works of the "amiable barbarian" whom he found so charming and cheerful: "I have considered you a master for a long time. But the more I study you, the more your skill leaves me gaping. . . . Your Scenes from Russian Life make me want to be shaken alone in a telega [cart] through snow-covered fields, to the sound of wolves howling." And Turgenev, who later described the all-enveloping boredom in Russia and his solitary confinement in a czarist cell, genially replied: "There are few men, particularly Frenchmen, with whom I feel so relaxed and at ease and yet at the same time so stimulated. . . . We are a pair of moles burrowing away in the same direction."

Turgenev translated Flaubert's Three Tales into Russian and listened to Flaubert read his works when they met. Flaubert believed that Turgenev was "the only man in existence really devoted to literature," and poured out a lava of anger in letters to his sympathetic friend. Flaubert insists that Theophile Gautier "died poisoned bythe filth of modern life." He is "overwhelmed by public Stupidity," feels "a wave of relentless Barbarism rising up from below the ground," and hopes "to be dead before all [he values] is swept away." Yet he wants to live long enough, at least, to empty "a few more buckets of sh-- on the heads of my fellow men." A slight ray of hope appears when a distinguished French nobleman is arrested for sodomy, and "judges' robes hang over the latrines"--"Such stories cheer one up and help to make life bearable." Turgenev agrees that France is "an engine that's heading full steam into an abyss, while the driver quietly scratches his backside."

Flaubert's literary response to public stupidity was the self-defeating Bouvard and Pecuchet, which he worked on during the last decade of his life. Turgenev shrewdly predicted the book would be monotonous and boring, but Flaubert defended his gigantic conception: "I don't share your opinion as to how the subject should be dealt with. If it's done briefly, with a concise, light touch, it will be a more or less witty fantasy, but will lack impact and verisimilitude, whereas if it's detailed and developed, it can become a serious and even frightening thing." Several years later he acknowledged: "It's the very conception of the book that worries me. . . . B. & P. are wearing me out. Frankly, I can't take any more."

When the decay of their bodies matched the disintegration of the world, both writers expressed profound pessimism about fate, suffering, and death. Turgenev--impotent, old, gouty, and crippled--lamented that "Illness, slow disgust, painful stirrings of useless memories are all that await us once we're past the age of fifty." The genius of George Sand, he said, was reduced by death to a "horrible relentless hole in the ground, silent and stupid, that doesn't even know what it's devouring."

Flaubert's "fanatical devotee," Guy de Maupassant, whose still unrecognized syphilis was secretly eating away at his hair and stomach, provided the best summary of the passionate intellectual friendship of Turgenev and Flaubert: "These two men love each other through their sympathy of genius, universal knowledge, and shared habits of thought. A convergence of literary tendencies, exalted ideals, admiration, and erudition, established between them many points of perpetual contact."