Penguins on Parade: A Month in the Country!

Some Penguin Classics come perfectly recommended. Oh, they all come recommended – that’s what their Introductions are for, after all (although there’ve been one or two instances over the decades when the writer of the Introduction clearly disliked the translator of the work – or, even more titillatingly, clearly disliked the work itself; it can happen – I guarantee you, if Penguin ever commissions me to write a Classic introduction, it’ll be for goddam Ibsen)(or perhaps … can the evil day be far off? … Alice Munro). But sometimes the text finds the perfect ambassador, as happened in the 1983 Penguin Classic of Turgenev’s brilliant play whose title here is rendered “A Month in the Country.” The edition is translated and introduced by the great Isaiah Berlin as a special commission he undertook for the National Theatre. His version of the play was first published by the Hogarth Press in 1981 but was quickly recognized as a gem worthy of wider dissemination – hence this slim, handy Penguin Classic.

Berlin’s Introduction here is a marvel of erudite compression. He assumes that his readers will already be familiar with the basic plot of the play, in which a languid family and its various hangers-on, bored at a peaceful country estate, have their complacency upturned by the arrival of a passionate young tutor, with whom two of the ladies of the house promptly fall in love. And that assumption is his edition’s only weak spot, since it held water in the 1950s but certainly no longer does in the early 21st century, when the general reader will only be familiar with Turgenev if he was on “Dancing with the Stars” and the general college student will only be familiar with the name ‘Turgenev’ if it’s a brand of cigarette. Needless to say, those general readers have never heard of Berlin himself – but they’re in good hands nonetheless.

He takes them through the text’s surprisingly ad hoc history and Turgenev’s typically negligent, indifferent treatment of his own work (Berlin calls him “perhaps the least vain of major authors,” and that’s putting it mildly), and he revisits the fabled story of famous Russian actress Maria Gavrilovna, who took up the role of Vera, the slightly appalling teenage ward of Natalya Petrovna, the lady of the aforementioned country house. Gavrilovna transformed the role of Vera – or rather, as the hapless author later half-heartedly averred, discovered dimensions buried deep in the character – and made an enormous hit out of the play while simultaneously, perhaps inadvertently, stressing its mutability.

The notoriously humorless Berlin is gently baffled at the play’s classification as a comedy – he sees it as tragicomic at best, which would almost tempt me to think he’d never seen a good performance of it even though I know he must have. It’s faintly possible to see that ‘tragi’ part if you’ve only ever read the play, but Turgenev had very little doubt that he was writing about a group of people who were fundamentally absurd. Such is his flawless ear for dialogue that those people sound three-dimensional, but that just makes the comedy a bit more sharply relentless. Turgenev himself was utterly foolish when it the grip of headlong infatuation, and he captures that foolishness wonderfully from the first moments of the play to the end.

To my mind, he does it best in the form of the lady of the house, Natalya Petrovna, married to a good but clueless man nearly a decade her senior, constantly attended by Mikhailo Aleksandrovich Rakitin, a frustrated former suitor whom she expertly keeps at arm’s length. Vera might be an intuitive weathervane, but it’s Natalya Petrovna’s constant wry observations that give the whole play its heartbeat:

You know, Ratikin, I noticed this a long time ago … You are wonderfully sensitive to the so-called beauties of nature, and talk about them exquisitely … very intelligently … so exquisitely, so intelligently, that I feel sure nature should be indescribably grateful to you for your beautifully chosen, happy phrases about her; you court nature, like a perfumed marquis on his little red-heeled shoes, pursuing a pretty peasant girl … the only trouble is, I sometimes think that nature will never be able to understand or appreciate your subtle language – just as the peasant girl wouldn’t understand the courtly compliments of the marquis; nature is simpler, yes, cruder than you suppose – because, thank God, she is healthy … Birches don’t melt, they don’t have fainting fits like ladies with weak nerves.

Berlin keeps his notes to a minimum, and the play itself is over far, far too soon; this is a Penguin Classic that has to work hard to break 100 pages. But my, the sheer amount of insight into the human heart contained in those 100 pages! It’s as piercing as anything of comparable length in Tolstoy (our other main candidate for ‘T’) – and funny besides.