Ivan Turgenev

(click to enlarge)
Ivan Turgenev. (credit: From the collection of David Magarshack)

(born Nov. 9, 1818, Oryol, Russia — died Sept. 3, 1883, Bougival, near Paris, France) Russian novelist, poet, and playwright. His years at the University of Berlin convinced him of the West's superiority and the need for Russia to Westernize. He lived in Europe after c. 1862. He is known for realistic, affectionate portrayals of the Russian peasantry and for penetrating studies of the Russian intelligentsia who were attempting to move the country into a new age. His most famous early work is "The Diary of a Superfluous Man" (1850), which supplied the epithet "superfluous man" for the weak-willed intellectual protagonist common in 19th-century Russian literature. He gained fame with the short-story cycle A Sportman's Sketches (1852), which criticizes serfdom. His dramatic masterpiece, A Month in the Country (1855), and the novel Rudin (1856) followed. His interest in change and intergenerational differences is reflected in the controversial Fathers and Sons (1862), his greatest novel. Turgenev's work is distinguished from that of his contemporaries by its sophisticated lack of hyperbole, its balance, and its concern for artistic values. His greatest work was always topical, committed literature, having universal appeal in the elegance of the love story and the psychological acuity of the portraiture.

For more information on Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev, visit Britannica.com.

The Russian novelist, dramatist, and short-story writer Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev (1818-1883) was a founder of the Russian realistic novel. He ranks as one of the greatest stylists in the Russian language.

The life of Ivan Turgenev is woven like a bright thread throughout Russian history of the 19th century, during the time the nation's artistic and intellectual life experienced a golden age. He knew, was related to, or fought with almost every figure of any consequence in his homeland. He was also the first Russian author to establish a European reputation, and during his long years abroad he was friends with Gustave Flaubert, Henry James, Émile Zola, Guy de Maupassant, and many other writers. Turgenev's generous enthusiasm for the work of other men made him a perfect mediator between East and West.

Parentage and Early Life

Turgenev's biography is as much the story of his encounters with strong-willed women as it is of his meetings with famous men. The first of these women was his mother, Varvara Petrovna. She was a Lutovin, an obscure family that had recently achieved enormous wealth. She was her uncle's only heir, and she ruled with an iron hand over her vast estates and 5, 000 serfs. Three years after coming into her inheritance she married Sergey Nikolayevich Turgenev, a retired colonel of cuirassiers. The Turgenevs were old stock, dating back to a Tatar prince of the 15th century. Turgenev's father, however, was forced to marry Varvara Petrovna in order to shore up his family's sagging fortunes. It was an unhappy marriage, the handsome father constantly embroiled with mistresses, and the mother running her family as despotically as she did her estates.

Turgenev was born, the second of three sons, at the family seat of Spasskoye in Orel Province on Nov. 9, 1818. He first visited Europe when he was 4 years old, when the whole family made the grand tour. His father narrowly saved Turgenev's life in Bern, where Turgenev almost fell into the bear pit. He was educated by private tutors at Spasskoye until he was 9 years old. Only French was spoken at home, so he learned Russian mainly from family servants. In 1827 he attended various preparatory schools in Moscow, entering the university there in 1833. Already he was rebelling against his aristocratic background: about the only thing known of this period is that his fellow students, struck by his democratic leanings, called him "the American."

In 1834 Turgenev transferred to the University of St. Petersburg when the family moved to the capital. The father died the same autumn. At this time Turgenev was planning to become a university professor, but he was writing poetry in his spare time. His first work, a Gothic melodrama in verse, was severely criticized by his favorite professor, P. A. Pletnyov. However, in 1838 Pletnyov published Turgenev's first poetry in Contemporary.

His Youth

Meanwhile, having finished his courses at St. Petersburg, Turgenev resolved upon further study at the University of Berlin. On the boat journey in the spring of 1837, his steamer caught fire off Travemünde. Accounts of this incident vary, but all agree that Turgenev behaved badly. Some versions say he screamed in French, "Save me, I am my widowed mother's only son!" The event rankled in his mind until his death.

In Berlin, Turgenev studied Latin, Greek, and philosophy, immersing himself in the works of G. W. F. Hegel. In July 1840 Turgenev met Mikhail Bakunin, and for a whole year they lived together, arguing philosophy day and night. In 1841 Turgenev returned to Russia. The following year was an important one. While carrying on a high-flown platonic romance with one of Bakunin's sisters, Tatyana, Turgenev entered into an earthier alliance with Avdotya Ivanov, one of his mother's seamstresses which resulted in the birth of a daughter, known in later life as Paulinette. Turgenev also did all the work for his master of arts degree except the dissertation. For various reasons he abandoned his plans for an academic career and entered the Ministry of Interior Affairs. He left the civil service - to the mutual satisfaction of both parties - after 18 months. His mother was infuriated and cut off his funds, thus forcing him to lead a rather precarious existence, complicated by the fact that everyone thought he was rich.

Turgenev met the critic Vissarion Belinsky, with whom he remained very close until the latter's death. Belinsky was instrumental in turning the young man away from vaporous poetry to a greater realism and a more natural tone. Parasha (1843) showed Turgenev to be an imitative poet in these early years (especially of Aleksandr Pushkin and Mikhail Lermontov), and Turgenev later dismissed his verse as having been written before he found his true vocation.

In 1843 Turgenev met the woman with whom he struggled for the rest of his life. Pauline Viardot-Garcia belonged to a talented Spanish family of gypsies. When Turgenev first saw her, she was well on her way to becoming the reigning mezzo-soprano in European opera. She was considered by many unattractive, but her voice was remarkable, and she was a great actress. Turgenev saw her during a tour in St. Petersburg and fell immediately in love. A curious relationship began that ended only with Turgenev's death in her arms. She was married to Louis Viardot, a man 20 years her senior, a director of the Italian Opera in Paris, but her marriage was no complication because her husband was extremely permissive. The problem lay in Pauline herself, who, unlike many other women, was not especially attracted to Turgenev. She had many affairs with other men, never entering into an exclusive alliance with Turgenev, even though he devoted much of his life and fortune to her, and even though she, as well as her husband and children, lived with Turgenev for years.

From 1845 to 1847 Turgenev spent most of his time in Russia, plunging now into his nation's literary life, coming into contact with all its leading literary figures. In 1847 he went abroad, resolved to fight serfdom with his pen. That year he wrote the first of his Hunter's Sketches, "Khor and Kalinich." He also visited Salzbrunn to comfort the dying Belinsky, but he spent most of his time at Courtavenel, the Viardot summer home where he did most of his work at this time.

In 1850 Turgenev returned to Russia, where his mother lay dying. Her death made him master of 11 estates, including Spasskoye, some 30, 000 acres, with thousands of serfs. He did his best to lighten the load of these peasants, and he freed the household workers among them. In that year he wrote A Month in the Country, of all his stage pieces the one that has remained in the repertoire. A Provincial Lady was written in 1851. While Turgenev always claimed he had no dramatic talent (and he stopped writing plays in 1852), the lyrical tone of his plays has a close affinity to that of Chekhov's masterpieces, and his dramas are just as difficult to classify.

First Years of Fame

More of the Hunter's Sketches appeared at frequent intervals during these years. In many of them the serfs seemed nobler than their masters, and both master and serf seemed stunted by the institution of serfdom. The sketches angered the government. The stage for some action against Turgenev was set. In November 1852 he wrote a laudatory article on the recently dead author Nikolai Gogol. This article was not passed by the St. Petersburg censors; Turgenev then took it to Moscow, where it was published. Its publication was regarded as a "treasonable act"; he was arrested, and after a month in prison, he was put under house arrest at Spasskoye for almost 2 years. The greatest irony was that after his arrest the collected Hunter's Sketches were published in book form. The volume created a revulsion against serfdom much greater than the separate sketches had. During his month in prison Turgenev wrote "Mumu, " a piece called by Thomas Carlyle "the most pathetic story in the world."

In 1854 Turgenev was back in St. Petersburg. He had long felt the need to experiment with a longer form and after several false starts wrote his first novel, Rudin, in 7 months in 1855 (published 1856). It was a portrait of the talky, idealistic generation of the 1840s, and many readers felt its hero was modeled on Bakunin. Turgenev met Nikolai Chernyshevsky and Leo Tolstoy that same year; he was destined to quarrel with both. In 1856, on one of his frequent trips abroad, Turgenev met Harriet Beecher Stowe, the American novelist; the effect of Hunter's Sketches on the abolition of serfdom in Russia had often been compared to the effect of her Uncle Tom's Cabin on the abolition of slavery in the United States.

In 1857 Turgenev wrote "Assya, " and he also began work on A Nest of Gentlefolk. The following year on a trip to England, he met Benjamin Disraeli, William Makepeace Thackeray, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Carlyle, and other authors. In 1859 Turgenev returned to Russia, where his A Nest of Gentlefolk had brought him great acclaim. In the spring of that year he dusted off a manuscript given him earlier by a young soldier, Vassily Karatayev, who had felt he would not survive the Crimean War (he had died soon afterward of typhus). The manuscript was an autobiographical tale, and it served as the core for Turgenev's next major work, On the Eve. When this novel was published in 1860, it created a stir: the old and rich attacked it, and the young and radical defended it. A two-edged review of this novel by N. A. Dobrolyubov in Nikolai Nekrasov's journal, Contemporary, caused Turgenev to break with that review and its increasingly radical orientation. The unhappiness this rupture with his old friend Nekrasov brought was compounded by a violent break with Tolstoy, who went as far as to threaten Turgenev with a duel. Turgenev declined, but the two were never truly close again.

In 1860 Turgenev also endured further unhappiness caused by a literary friend. Ivan Goncharov, who had been working on his novel The Precipice (1869) for many years, often discussing it with Turgenev, accused him of stealing ideas from it for On the Eve. An informal court was set up, with three authors acting as judges. They cleared Turgenev, but he was infuriated and was never again close to Goncharov (whose paranoia later became clinical).

Part of Turgenev's pain was eased by hard work on his new novel, which, when it appeared as Fathers and Sons (1862), marked a watershed in the literary, intellectual, and political life of Russia. This novel ranks as his masterpiece. Everyone was forced to take sides on the issue of Bazarov, the book's hero, and his nihilist philosophy. Bazarov became the archetype for the generation of the 1860s; he was a socialist in politics and a scientific materialist in philosophy. Conservatives accused Turgenev of prostrating himself before the younger generation, while radicals charged him with a cruel satire of their ideals. Some felt that Bazarov was a parody of the radical critic Dobrolyubov, who had died tragically young.

In 1863 Turgenev bought a villa in Baden-Baden, Germany, where he lived on a grand scale with the ever present Viardots. In 1866 Turgenev published Smoke, a novel that offended all Slavophiles and all conservative religious opinion in Russia. Many accused him of selling out to the West, of having lost contact with his homeland. The following year he was visited by Fyodor Dostoevsky, who attacked him as a slanderer of the motherland.

Last Phase

At the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, the Viardots fled to England, where Turgenev followed. A few months later he settled in France, first in Paris and then at his summer home on the Seine at Bougival near Paris. In these years he regularly attended dinners with Zola, Alphonse Daudet, and Maupassant. Flaubert was a particular favorite of Turgenev's. During these years Turgenev wrote several of his best-known short stories: "First Love" (1870), "A Lear of the Steppe" (1870), and "The Torrents of Spring" (1871).

In 1877 Turgenev published the novel on which he had labored for the past 6 years: Virgin Soil. It is his longest work and another of his generational studies. The story this time is of the young people of the 1870s. Fed up with the talk and empty idealism of their fathers, these young people have decided on action. The book was a best seller in Europe, but it was condemned by all factions in Russia. Turgenev was greatly disillusioned by the failure of this novel in Russia, and some of the pessimism thus generated crept into the short pieces he wrote in 1878 called Senilia (later entitled Poems in Prose).

A new misfortune occurred the winter of the following year. Turgenev had to go to Russia, after his wealthy older brother's death, to fight for a fair share of the inheritance. But this unpleasantness soon became a blessing. Turgenev's return to his native land, where he thought he was in disgrace and discredited, turned into a triumphal procession. He made up his old literary feuds, and he was even reconciled with his uncle, Nikolai, who, as his estate manager, had almost ruined him. Turgenev was feted day and night.

While Turgenev's life had always, since 1843, been bound up with Pauline Viardot-Garcia, their relationship was not a simple one in which he gave only unalloyed worship to the diva. The two had many fights but always reconciled, even long after Pauline had lost her voice and was more or less dependent upon Turgenev. He had other mistresses and even contemplated marriage with other women. He was a man of large and impressive physique - he was known in France as "that Russian giant" - and had a handsome face and great charm. During the tumult of his acclaim in 1879 he found time to pay court to an actress, the young and beautiful Maria Savina. In June, Turgenev received an honorary doctorate from Oxford University.

In 1880 Turgenev returned to Russia for the unveiling of the Pushkin Memorial in Moscow. In the same year he wrote one of his most beautiful stories, "The Song of Triumphant Love." The following year he published most of the Poems in Prose and wrote the ghostly love story "Clara Milich." The prose poems that he felt to be too intimate were not published by his wish until 1930.

All his life Turgenev had been a hypochondriac; in 1882 real symptoms appeared. He was afflicted with cancer of the spine and died on Sept. 3, 1883. A huge ceremony was held at the Gare du Nord in Paris when his body was shipped back to Russia, and his interment in St. Petersburg was an occasion for national mourning.

Further Reading

David Magarshack, Turgenev: A Life (1954), is more compact than Avrahm Yarmolinsky, Turgenev: The Man, His Art and His Age (1926; rev. ed. 1959), which is overwritten and contains much that is sheer speculation. The memoirs of a woman raised by Turgenev's mother, full of racy anecdotes, were translated into English: Varvara Zhitova, The Turgenev Family (1947). An excellent study of Turgenev's literary development is Richard Freeborn, Turgenev: The Novelist's Novelist (1960). For background see Charles Moser's excellent scholarly study Antinihilism in the Russian Novel of the 1860s (1964); its chronological scope extends beyond its title.

Additional Sources

Pritchett, V. S. (Victor Sawdon), The gentle barbarian: the life and work of Turgenev, New York: Ecco Press, 1986, 1977.

Schapiro, Leonard Bertram, Turgenev, his life and times, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982, 1978.

Troyat, Henri, Turgenev, New York: Dutton, 1988.

Waddington, Patrick, Turgenev and England, New York: New York University Press, 1981.

Yarmolinsky, Avrahm, Turgenev, the man, his art, and his age, New York: Octagon Books, 1977, 1959.

(1818 - 1883), Russian novelist, playwright, and poet.

Turgenev was born into an extremely wealthy family on an estate with 500 serfs near Oryol, in the Mtsensky uezd, in central European Russia. His mother, a tyrannical shrew, savagely beat her serfs and her sons and despised all things Russian. The family spoke only French in the home. His father was an attractive and dissipated rake. Turgenev's childhood nurtured in him an animosity toward the institution of serfdom and a profound understanding of the culture of rural, aristocratic culture of pre-Reform Russia - the very cultural wellspring from which so many of the characters in his novels were to emerge.

Turgenev is nearly universally mentioned, along with Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Leo Tolstoy, as one of the great masters of the psychological novel, although Turgenev himself disparaged more than once the emphasis on psychological analysis that marks the works of the other two members of that triumvirate. Turgenev further distinguished himself from Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky by beginning his career as a poet: his first major work was the long poem Parasha, published in 1843 - a year before Dostoyevsky's entrée into literature and nearly a decade before Tolstoy's. Parasha was followed by a handful of other significant verse works, though Turgenev later wrote that he felt a nearly physical antipathy toward his verse works.

Although his poetry was enthusiastically received by Vissarion Belinsky, the leading literary critic of the time, Turgenev's first work of lasting influence was a series of sketches of what Turgenev knew first-hand from his childhood: the manorial, rural, and peasant milieus. The brief, episodic descriptions were initially published separately, beginning in 1847, and then as a single work, A Huntsman's Sketches, in 1852. The work exercised a profound influence on the public that is often likened to that of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, published the same year. Turgenev's work is one of the highest artistic quality - exquisite, tightly crafted descriptions of the physical world combined with engaging and complex portraits of peasants (generally positively portrayed) and gentry (generally negatively portrayed).

Beginning soon after the death of Nicholas I in 1855, Turgenev, always sensitive to the winds of change, wrote his four most significant novels: Rudin (1856), Home of the Gentry (sometimes translated, more literally, as Nest of Gentlefolk) (1859), On the Eve (1860) and Fathers and Sons (more precisely Fathers and Children) (1862). All are penetrating chronicles of the quickly shifting alliances, mores, and institutions that marked the initiatory period of the Great Reforms, with all its optimism and surety of a brighter future. The greatest of these, Fathers and Sons, depicts the intergenerational conflict between the liberal men of the 1840s, with their refined, European (more specifically, Gallic) sensibilities and an inclination toward incrementalism in social and political change; and the new people of the younger generation, nihilists (a word Turgenev brought into coinage), men of science who embraced German-inflected positivism, disparaged aesthetics per se, and believed in the creative potential of destruction. The older generation found Turgenev's portrait of their brethren dismissive and patronizing, and the younger generation found their reflection insulting and patronizing. Turgenev, criticized from nearly every political angle, responded by quitting Russia for Western Europe. From his refuge in Baden-Baden, Turgenev wrote Smoke (1867), a venomous satire that attacked, inter alia, the radicalized intelligentsia in exile, the Europeanized Russian aristocracy, and the conservative Slavophiles.

Poems in Prose, Turgenev's final work, sealed his reputation as the first Russian stylist. The final poem famously praises the Russian language as great, powerful, truthful, and free, a tribute perhaps nowhere truer than when the Russian words flowed from Turgenev's own pen. He died near Paris in 1882, and, according to his wishes, his body was transported back to St. Petersburg where it was interred in perhaps the largest public funeral in Russian history.

Bibliography

Allen, Elizabeth Cheresh. (1992). Beyond Realism: Turgenev's Poetics of Secular Salvation. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Costlow, Jane T. (1990). Worlds within Worlds: The Novels of Ivan Turgenev. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Magarshack, David. (1954). Turgenev: A Life. New York: Grove Press.

Schapiro, Leonard Bertram. (1978). Turgenev, His Life and Times. New York: Random House.

Seeley, Frank Friedeberg. (1991). Turgenev: A Reading of His Fiction. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.

—MICHAEL A. DENNER

Quotes:

"However much you knock at nature's door, she will never answer you in comprehensible words."

"I agree with no one's opinion. I have some of my own."

"... if we wait for the moment when everything, absolutely everything is ready, we shall never begin."

"Most people can't understand how others can blow their noses differently than they do."

Ivan Turgenev
Ivan Turgenev, 1872 portrait by Vasily Perov
Born	October 28, 1818(1818-10-28) Oryol, Russian Empire
Died	September 3, 1883 (aged 64) Bougival, Paris
Occupation	Novelist and Playwright
Genres	Realism
Notable work(s)	Fathers and Sons • A Month in the Country
Influences Shakespeare, Goethe, Pushkin, Belinsky, Lermontov, Byron, Schiller, Hegel, Schlegel, Schopenhauer, Bakunin
Influenced Theodor Storm, Gustave Flaubert, Herman Bang, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Anton Chekhov, Irène Némirovsky, Ernest Hemingway, Truman Capote

Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev (Russian: Иван Сергеевич Тургенев IPA: [ɪˈvan sʲɪrˈɡʲeɪvʲɪtɕ turˈɡʲenʲɪf]) (November 9 [O.S. October 28] 1818 – September 3 [O.S. August 22] 1883) was a Russian novelist and playwright. His novel Fathers and Sons is regarded as one of the major works of 19th-century fiction.

Contents 1 Life 2 Career 2.1 Selected novels 2.2 Selected shorter fiction 2.3 Selected plays 3 References 4 See also 5 External links

Life

Turgenev was born into a wealthy landed family in Oryol, Russia, on 28 October 1818. His father, Sergei Nikolaevich Turgenev, a colonel in the Imperial Russian cavalry, was a chronic philanderer. Ivan's mother, Varvara Petrovna Lutovinova, was a wealthy heiress, who had had an unhappy childhood and suffered in her marriage. Ivan's father died when Ivan was sixteen, leaving him and his brother Nicholas to be brought up by their abusive mother. After the standard schooling for a son of a gentleman, Turgenev studied for one year at the University of Moscow and then moved to the University of Saint Petersburg, focusing on Classics, Russian literature, and philology. He was sent in 1838 to the University of Berlin to study philosophy, particularly Hegel, and history. Turgenev was impressed with German society and returned home believing that Russia could best improve itself by incorporating ideas from the Age of Enlightenment. Like many of his educated contemporaries, he was particularly opposed to serfdom.

When Turgenev was a child, a family serf had read to him verses from the Rossiad of Mikhail Kheraskov, a celebrated poet of the 18th century. Turgenev's early attempts in literature, poems, and sketches gave indications of genius and were favorably spoken of by Vissarion Belinsky, then the leading Russian literary critic. During the latter part of his life, Turgenev did not reside much in Russia: he lived either at Baden-Baden or Paris, often in proximity to the family of the celebrated singer Pauline Viardot, with whom he had a lifelong affair.

Turgenev never married, although he had a daughter with one of his family's serfs. He was tall and broad-shouldered, but was timid, restrained, and soft-spoken. His closest literary friend was Gustave Flaubert. His relations with Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky were often strained, as the two were, for various reasons, dismayed by Turgenev's seeming preference for Western Europe. His rocky friendship with Tolstoy in 1861 wrought such animosity that Tolstoy challenged Turgenev to a duel, afterwards apologizing. The two did not speak for 17 years. Dostoyevsky parodies Turgenev in his novel The Devils (1872) through the character of the vain novelist Karmazinov, who is anxious to ingratiate himself with the radical youth. However, in 1880, Dostoyevsky's speech at the unveiling of the Pushkin monument brought about a reconciliation of sorts with Turgenev, who, like many in the audience, was moved to tears by his rival's eloquent tribute to the Russian spirit.

Turgenev upon receiving his Honorary Doctorate at Oxford in 1879

Turgenev occasionally visited England, and in 1879 the honorary degree of Doctor of Civil Law was conferred upon him by the University of Oxford.

Turgenev died at Bougival, near Paris, on 4 September 1883. On his death bed he pleaded with Tolstoy: "My friend, return to literature!" After this Tolstoy wrote such works as The Death of Ivan Ilyich and The Kreutzer Sonata.

Career

Turgenev first made his name with A Sportsman's Sketches (Записки охотника), also known as Sketches from a Hunter's Album or Notes of a Hunter, a collection of short stories, based on his observations of peasant life and nature, while hunting in the forests around his mother's estate of Spasskoye. Most of the stories were published in a single volume in 1852, with others being added in later editions. The book is credited with having influenced public opinion in favour of the abolition of serfdom in 1861. Turgenev himself considered the book to be his most important contribution to Russian literature; It is reported that Pravda, ^[1] and Tolstoy, among others, agreed wholeheartedly, adding that Turgenev's evocations of nature in these stories were unsurpassed.^[2] One of the stories in A Sportsman's Sketches, known as "Bezhin Lea" or "Byezhin Prairie", was later to become the basis for the controversial film Bezhin Meadow (1937) - directed by Sergei Eisenstein.

In the 1840s and early 1850s, during the rule of Tsar Nicholas I, the political climate in Russia was stifling for many writers. This is evident in the despair and subsequent death of Gogol, and the oppression, persecution, and arrests of artists, scientists, and writers, including Fyodor Dostoyevsky. During this time, thousands of Russian intellectuals, members of the intelligentsia, emigrated to Europe. Among them were Alexander Herzen and Turgenev himself, although the latter's decision to settle abroad probably had more to do with his fateful love for Pauline Viardot than anything else.

In 1852, when his first major novels of Russian society were still to come, Turgenev wrote an obituary for Nikolai Gogol, intended for publication in the Saint Petersburg Gazette. The key passage reads: "Gogol is dead!... What Russian heart is not shaken by those three words?... He is gone, that man whom we now have the right (the bitter right, given to us by death) to call great." The censor of Saint Petersburg did not approve of this and banned publication, but the Moscow censor allowed it to be published in a newspaper in that city. The censor was dismissed; but Turgenev was held responsible for the incident, imprisoned for a month, and then exiled to his country estate for nearly two years.

Pauline Viardot in the 1840s. Drawing by P.F. Sokolov

While he was still in Russia in the early 1850s, Turgenev wrote several novellas (povesti in Russian): "The Diary of a Superfluous Man ("Дневник лишнего человека"), Faust ("Фауст"), The Lull ("Затишье"), expressing the anxieties and hopes of Russians of his generation.

In 1854 he moved to Western Europe, and during the following year produced the novel Rudin ("Рудин"), the story of a man in his thirties, who is unable to put his talents and idealism to any use in the Russia of Nicholas I. Rudin is also full of nostalgia for the idealistic student circles of the 1840s.

In 1858 Turgenev wrote the novel A Nest of the Gentry ("Дворянское гнездо", published 1859) also full of nostalgia for the irretrievable past and of love for the Russian countryside. It contains one of his most memorable female characters, Liza, whom Dostoyevsky paid tribute to in his Pushkin speech of 1880, alongside Tatiana and Tolstoy's Natasha Rostova.

Alexander II ascended the Russian throne in 1855, and the political climate became more relaxed. In 1859, inspired by reports of positive social changes, Turgenev wrote the novel On the Eve ("Накануне"), portraying the Bulgarian revolutionary Insarov.

The following year saw the publication of one of his finest novellas, First Love ("Первая любовь"), which was based on bitter-sweet childhood memories, and the delivery of his speech ("Hamlet and Don Quixote", at a public reading in Saint Petersburg) in aid of writers and scholars suffering hardship. The vision presented therein of man torn between the self-centred scepticism of Hamlet and the idealistic generosity of Don Quixote is one that can be said to pervade Turgenev's own works. It is worth noting that Dostoyevsky, who had just returned from exile in Siberia, was present at this speech, for eight years later he was to write The Idiot, a novel whose tragic hero, Prince Myshkin, resembles Don Quixote in many respects.^[3] Turgenev, whose knowledge of Spanish, thanks to his contact with Pauline Viardot and her family, was good enough for him to have considered translating Cervantes's novel into Russian, played an important role in introducing this immortal figure of world literature into the Russian context.

Fathers and Sons ("Отцы и дети"), Turgenev's most famous and enduring novel, appeared in 1862. Its leading character, Bazarov, was in turns heralded and reviled as either a glorification or a parody of the 'new men' of the 1860s. However, the issues treated in the novel transcend the merely contemporary. Many radical critics at the time (with the notable exception of Dimitri Pisarev) did not take Fathers and Sons seriously; and, after the relative critical failure of his masterpiece, Turgenev was disillusioned and started to write less.

Turgenev's next novel, Smoke ("Дым"), was published in 1867 and was again received less than enthusiastically in his native country, as well as triggering a quarrel with Dostoyevsky in Baden-Baden.

His last substantial work attempting to do justice to the problems of contemporary Russian society, Virgin Soil ("Новь"), was published in 1877.

Stories of a more personal nature, such as Torrents of Spring ("Вешние воды"), King Lear of the Steppes ("Степной король Лир"), and The Song of Triumphant Love ("Песнь торжествующей любви"), were also written in these autumnal years of his life. Other last works included the Poems in Prose and "Clara Milich" ("After Death"), which appeared in the journal European Messenger.

Turgenev wrote on themes similar to those found in the works of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, but he did not approve of the religious and moral preoccupations that his two great contemporaries brought to their artistic creation. Turgenev was closer in temperament to his friends Gustave Flaubert and Theodor Storm, the North German poet and master of the novella form, who also often dwelt on memories of the past and evoked the beauty of nature.^[4] Turgenev's artistic purity made him a favorite of like-minded novelists of the next generation, such as Henry James and Joseph Conrad, both of whom greatly preferred Turgenev to Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. James, who wrote no fewer than five critical essays on Turgenev's work, claimed that "his merit of form is of the first order" (1873) and praised his "exquisite delicacy", which "makes too many of his rivals appear to hold us, in comparison, by violent means, and introduce us, in comparison, to vulgar things" (1896).^[5] The notoriously critical Vladimir Nabokov praised Turgenev's "plastic musical flowing prose", but criticized his "labored epilogues" and "banal handling of plots". Nabokov stated that Turgenev "is not a great writer, though a pleasant one", and ranked him fourth among nineteenth-century Russian prose writers, behind Tolstoy, Gogol, and Anton Chekhov, but ahead of Dostoyevsky.^[6]

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This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica, Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.

Selected novels

• 1857 - Rudin (Рудин), English translation: Rudin
• 1859 - Dvoryanskoye Gnezdo (Дворянское гнездо), English translation: A Nest of Gentlefolk
• 1860 - Nakanune (Накануне), English translation: On the Eve
• 1862 - Otzy i Deti (Отцы и дети); English translation: Fathers and Sons
• 1867 - Dym (Дым); English translation: Smoke
• 1877 - Nov (Новь); English translation: Virgin Soil

Selected shorter fiction

• 1850 - Dnevnik Lishnego Cheloveka (Дневник лишнего человека); novella, English translation: The Diary of a Superfluous Man
• 1852 - Zapiski Okhotnika (Записки охотника); collection of stories, English translations: A Sportsman's Sketches, The Hunter's Sketches
• 1855 - Yakov Pasynkov (Яков Пасынков); novella
• 1855 - Faust (Фауст); novella
• 1858 - Asya (Aся); novella, English translation: Asya
• 1860 - Pervaia Liubov (Первая любовь); novella, English translation: First Love
• 1870 - Stepnoy Korol' Lir (Степной король Лир); novella, English translation: King Lear of the Steppes
• 1872 - Veshnie Vody (Вешние воды); English translation: Torrents of Spring
• 1881 - Pesn' Torzhestvuyushey Lyubvi (Песнь торжествующей любви); novella, English translation: The Song of Triumphant Love
• 1883 - Klara Milich (Клара Милич); novella, English translation: The Mysterious Tales

Selected plays

• 1843 - Neostorozhnost (Неосторожность); A Rash Thing to Do
• 1847 - Gde Tonko Tam i Rvetsya (Где тонко, там и рвется)
• 1849/1856 - Zavtrak u Predvoditelia (Завтрак у предводителя)
• 1850/1851 - Razgovor na Bol'shoi Doroge (Разговор на большой дороге); A Conversation on the Highway
• 1846/1852 - Bezdenezh'e (Безденежье)
• 1851 - Provintsialka (Провинциалка); English translation: A Provincial Lady
• 1857/1862 - Nakhlebnik (Нахлебник); English translation: The Hanger-On; Fortune's Fool; The Family Charge
• 1855/1872 - Mesiats v Derevne (Месяц в деревне); English translation: A Month in the Country
• 1882 - Vecher v Sorrento (Вечер в Сорренто); An Evening in Sorrento

References

1. ^ Pravda 1988: 308
2. ^ Tolstoy said after Turgenev's death: "His stories of peasant life will forever remain a valuable contribution to Russian literature. I have always valued them highly. And in this respect none of us can stand comparison with him. Take, for example, Living Relic (Живые мощи), Loner (Бирюк), and so on. All these are unique stories. And as for his nature descriptions, these are true pearls, beyond the reach of any other writer!" Quoted by K. N. Lomunov, "Turgenev i Lev Tolstoi: Tvorcheskie vzaimootnosheniia", in S. E. Shatalov (ed.), I. S. Turgenev v sovremennom mire (Moscow: Nauka, 1987).
3. ^ See the "Influences" section in the Infobox of the article on Dostoyevsky for a reference to a study dealing with precisely this issue.
4. ^ See Karl Ernst Laage, Theodor Storm. Biographie (Heide: Boyens, 1999).
5. ^ See Henry James, European Writers & The Prefaces (The Library of America: New York, 1984).
6. ^ See Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Russian Literature (HBJ, San Diego: 1981).

See also

• Sir Frederick Ashton who created a ballet based on A Month in the Country in 1976
• Asteroid 3323 Turgenev, named after the writer
• Lee Hoiby an American composer and his opera based on A Month in the Country
• Vladimir Rebikov, who composed an opera based on Home of the Gentry in 1916
• Galina Ulanova, who advised her pupils to read such stories of Turgenev's as Asya or Torrents of Spring when preparing to dance Giselle

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Ivan Turgenev

• Works by & about Ivan Turgenev at Internet Archive (scanned books original editions color illustrated)
• Works by Ivan Turgenev at Project Gutenberg Gutenberg.org (plain text and HTML)
• (Russian) Turgenev's works
• Turgenev Society (mainly in Russian)
• (French) Turgenev Museum in Bougival
• Ivan Turgenev Chronicle by Erik Lindgren
• Short biography
• Turgenev Bibliography 1983- by Nicholas Žekulin
• The Novels of Ivan Turgenev: Symbols and Emblems by Richard Peace
• Turgenev and Russian Music (with music samples)
• Text of A Sportsman's Sketches, in English as translated from the Russian
• Turgenev works (HTML/PDF), media & interactive timeline

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