 Book Reviews
with Robin Osborne
Twilight of Love
By Robert Dessaix
Picador $40.00
 In an observation that left one speculating about whom the others might be (Carey? Kenneally?) The Sydney Morning Herald said Robert Dessaix is 'one of perhaps three Australian writers whose every appearance in print is a not-to-be-missed event.'
His books tend to be presented as elegantly as the writing they contain, and this homage to the great Russian novelist Turgenev (pronounced 'toor-gye-nyef') is certainly no exception.
When the pre-teenage Dessaix went to a Sydney bookshop in the 1950s he made an unusual choice, although it would enable him to decipher the writing on the glossy Soviet stamps in his collection: he bought a Russian dictionary, a decision he realises changed the course of his life.
He went on to master the language, spend a year at Moscow University at the height of the Cold War, fall in love with Russian literature and return to Moscow in 1970 to spend six days a week reading everything he could about Turgenev: 'I might have done better, I now think, to have read less and lived a little more.'
Perhaps, but then this erudite and delightful book would not have eventuated, which would be a loss to readers as well as the memory of Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev (1818-1883), whose talent and unusual life are presented in a most engaging way.
The younger Dessaix 'never much fancied Turgenev', preferring more dramatic writers like Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, who created 'vast powerful whirlpools you can plunge into', rather than the subtler 'ponds' that flowed from the pen of Turgenev.
Now, 'at the other end of my life', he prefers 'sensibilities of a quite different kind' and in pursuit of the author who so brilliantly created them he embarked on a selective tour of Germany, France and Russia to see the places where Turgenev grew up, wrote, socialised and lived in what appears to have been an a sexual menage a trois with operatic diva Pauline Viardot, with whom he was besotted, and her cosmopolitan husband, Louis.
Part of the mission was to investigate what is still known of the author, especially in his homeland - very little, it seems - and to stand in places, such as the study, where Turgenev had 'written the words I had once threaded into my own soul... So it was a little like coming home.'
This is literary investigation and travelogue of the highest order, in turn profound, funny, sad and astounding.
- Thanks to Book Warehouse, Keen Street, Lismore for supporting this column.
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