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Ivan Turgenev (1818-1883) |
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Novelist, poet, and playwright, known for his detailed descriptions about the everyday live in Russia in the 19th century. Ivan Turgenev portrayed realistically the peasantry and the rising intelligentsia in its attempt to move the country into a new age. Although Turgenev has been overshadowed by his contemporaries Fyodor Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy, he remains one of the major figures of the 19th-century Russian literature. "A nihilist is a man who declines to bow to authority, or to acceept any principle on trust, however sanctified it may be." (from Fathers and Sons by Ivan S. Turgenev, translated from the Russian by C.J. Hogarth, J.M. Dent & Sons, 1929, p. 29) Ivan Turgenev was born in Oryol, in the Ukraine region of Russia, into a wealthy family. His childhood was lonely, but the nature that surrounded the estate gave him much joy. Sergei Nikolaevich,his father, was a cavalry officer. He had some literary contacts, such as Vasilii Andreevich Zhukovsky, a poet, and the historical novelist Mikhail Nikolaevich Zagoskin. Moreover, the Turgenevs had their own orchestra. After retiring he moved with his family to Spasskoe and then to Moscow. He was a cold and stern man, but especially Turgenev was afraid of his strict mother, Varvara Petrona (née Lutovinova), who beat him constantly. While spending time in a dacha outside Moscow, Turgenev fell in love with a young woman. Quite soon it turned out that she had many other suitors, including Turgenev's own father. The incident later inspired the story 'Pervaia liubov' (First Love). Turgenev studied at St. Petersburg (1834-37), where Nikolai Gogol was briefly his professor of history, Berlin Universities (1838-41), and completed his master's exam in St Petersburg. At the age of 19, Turgenev traveled to Germany. He was on a steamer when it caught fire and rumors spread in Russia that he had acted cowardly. A fellow passenger claimed that he had cried: "Save me, I am my mother's only son!" (Turgenev: The Man, His Art and His Age by Avrahm Yarmolinsky, Collier Books, 1961, p. 43) Turgenev himself said that he had rescued four women from the blazing ship. This experience, which followed the author throughout his life, formed later the basis for a ketch entitled 'Un incendie en mer' (A Fire at Sea). In 1841 Turgenev started his career at the Russian civil service. For a short time, he worked for the Ministry of Interior (1843-45). Following the success of two of his story-poems, Turgenev left his post at the ministry, devoted himself to literature, country pursuits, and travel. During his studies in Berlin, Turgenev had became confirmed for the need of Westernization of Russia. Lacking the interest in religious issues like his two great compatriots, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, he represented the social side of reform movement. In a letter he wrote about Tolstoy's '"charlatanism" and even from his death-bed he begged Tolstoy to cast away his prophet's mantle. Dostoevsky, on the other had, caricatured Turgenevin The Possessed as Karmazinov. Turgenev's solution was not revolution, mystical nationalism, or spiritual renewal but in the industriousness of the confident, methodical builders embodied by the engineer Vassily Fedotitch Solomin, a side character in Virgin Soil. The "positive hero" was a new type of personality, who will liberate Russia from her backwardness. In the center of the book, full of discussions about progression, literature, aesthetic life, emancipation, beauty, patriotic principles, etc., is a love story, in which a young woman must choose her of way in life. "You have only to look at Solomin. A head as clear as the day and a body as strong as an ox. Isn't that a wonder in itself? Why, any man with us in Russia who has had any brains, or feelings, or a conscience, has always been a physical wreck. Solomin's heart aches just as ours does; he hates the same things that we hate, but his nerves are of iron and his body is under his full control. He's a splendid man, I tell you! Why, think of it! here is a man with ideals, and no nonsense about him; educated and from the people, simple, yet all there. . . . What more do you want?" (from Virgin Soil, translated by R.S. Townsend, J. M. Dent & Sons, 1955, p. 316 In the 1840s Turgenev wrote poems, criticism, and short stories under
the influence of Nikolai Gogol. With the short-story
cycle A Sportsman's Sketches,
he (1852) made his reputation. Turgenev's way of looking and describing
of the natural world earned him much praise. Vissarion Belinsky wrote
in 1848: "We must not fail to mention Mr. Turgenev's
extraordinary talent for painting pictures of Russian nature. He
loves nature not as a diletantte, but as an artist, and therefore never
attempts to portray it only in its poetic aspects, but takes it just as
it presents itself to him." (Hunting Nature: Ivan Turgenev and the Organic World by Thomas P. Hodge, Cornell University Press, 2020, p. 1) It is said that A Sportsman's Sketches contributed to the
Tsar Alexander II's decision to liberate the serfs. The short pieces were written from the point of view of a
young nobleman, who learns to appreciate the wisdom of the peasants living on his family's estates. However, Turgenev's
opinions brought him a month of detention in St. Petersburg and 18 months of house arrest. Turgenev had a life-long fixation with the opera singer Pauline Garcia Viardot, living near her or at times with her and her husband. At best, she was described as plain; one contemporary, who saw her performing at the Berlin Opera in 1847, said that she was "personally hideous beyond compare." Heinrich Heine wrote that she was ugly, "but with the kind of ugliness which is noble." (Twilight of Love: Travels with Turgenev by Robert Dessaix, Picador, 2004, p. 28) In 1845-46 and 1847-50 Turgenev travelled to France with the Viardots. Pauline, who had a number of romantic attachments outside her marriage, remained Turgenev's great and unfulfilled love. In his youth he had had one or two affairs with servant-girls, and produced an illegitimate daughter, originally named Pelageia but later renamed Paulinette. She was sent to France to be raised with the Viardot children. Pauline retired from the stage at the age of forty-two and settled in Baden-Baden, where he taught singers from all over the world. She also composed a series of operettas to Turgenev's librettos. Mumu (1855) was about the cruelties of a serf society. In the short story a deaf and dumb peasant giant is forced to drown his dog, Mumu, his only source of happiness. John Galsworthy later said: "No more stirring protest against tyrannical cruelty was ever penned in terms of art. Dickens was the least fastidious of writers, Turgenev one of the most fastidious. . . . The whole of his work is saturated in the half-melancholy rapture which Nature stirs in a poetic temperament." (Castles in Spain: And Other Screeds by John Galsworthy, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1927, p. 211) A Sportsman's Sketches was translated without the author's permission into French by Ernest Charrère, who introduced a new character into the tales. Turgenev protested in the Journal de Saint-Pétersbourg. James Meiklejohn's English translation from 1855, entitled Russian Life in the Interior; or, the Experiences of a Sportsman was based on this dubious French version. In 1855 Turgenev met Leo Tolstoy, who had returned to St.
Petersburg from the siege of Sebastopol. Tolstoy had not published his
great works, but Turgenev recognized his literary genius -
"I'm not exaggerating when I say that he'll become a great writer," he
wrote to Tolstoy's sister. (Tolstoy by A. N. Wilson, Penguin Books, 2001, p. 126) In 1857 he traveled with Nikolay Nekrasov
and Tolstoy to Paris, and showed the younger novelist all the sights, but now Tolstoy considered him a bore.
The
relationship between these two great writers remained tense, although
they never broke contacts and has also family ties. Turgenev's mother
had given birth in 1833 to a natural daughter, whose father was rumored
to be Dr. Andrey Bers. He became Tolstoy's father-in-law. When Turgenev
visited Tolstoy at Yasnaya Poloyana, he demonstrated a can-can to the
children. "Turgevev, can-can. Sad," was Tolstoy's reaction. (Ibid., p. 298) Following the thoughts of the influential critic Vissarion Belinsky, Turgenev abandoned Romantic idealism for a more realistic style. Belinsky defended sociological realism in literature; Turgenev portrayed him in Yakov Pasynkov (1855). Between 1853-62 Turgenev wrote some of his finest stories and novellas and the first four of his six novels: Rudin (1856), Dvoryanskoe gnezdo (1859), Nakanune (1860) and Ottsy i deti (1862). In these works central themes were the beauty of early love, failure to reach one's dreams, and frustrated love, which partly reflected the author's lifelong passion for Pauline. Another woman who deeply influenced Turgenev was his mother. She ruled her 5,000 serfs capriciously with a whip. Her strong personality left traces on his work. ". . . Parliamentarism and legal points and the devil only knows what, when all the time it is the bread of subsistence alone that matters, and we are being stifled with gross superstition, and all our commercial enterprises are failing for want of honest directors, and the freedom of which the Government is for ever prating is destined never to become a reality, for the reason that, so long as the Russian peasant is allowed to go and drink himself to death in a dram-shop, he is ready to submit to any sort of despoilment." (from Fathers and Sons, p. 71) Hostile reaction to Fathers and Sons (1862) prompted Turgenev's decision to leave Russia. As a consequence he also lost the majority of his readers. The novel examined the conflict between the older generation, reluctant to accept reforms, and the idealistic youth. In the central character, Bazarov, Turgenev drew a classical portrait of the mid-nineteenth-century nihilist - the word was introduced by the author, who himself was accused of causing civil unrest. Later the temperament of a nihilist found a number of different manifestations: the terrorist, the anarchist, the atheist, the materialist, and the Communist. Fathers and Sons was set during the six-year period of social ferment, from Russia's defeat in the Crimean War to the Emancipation of the Serfs. The central character is the young medical student and nihilist Evgenii Bazarov, who has been described as the "first Bolshevik" in Russian literature. "I agree with no man's opinions," he remarked. "I have some of my own." (Ibid., 94) The figure of Bazarov was conceived in in the Isle of Wright, where Turgenev had spent three weeks in 1860, but the energetic student Belyayev in his play, A Month in the Country, already anticipated the type. Against the radicals of the new generation (the "sons") Turgenev sets the older generation (the "fathers"), who are represented in the novel by the landowner Nikolai Petrovich Kirsanov and his brother Pavel. Bazarov makes a journey to the Kirsanov estate to meet his friend Arkadii, Nikolai's son. Arkadii falls in love with Anna Odintsova, the beautiful landowner, who rejects Bazarov. When Bazarov flirts with the young peasant-girl Fenechka, Nikolai's mistress and the mother of his child, Pavel challenges him to a duel. Pavel is wounded in the leg, Bazarov returns to his home and helps his father who is a doctor. Bazarov dies as a result of his failure to cauterize a cut that he suffers while performing an autopsy on a peasant who had died from typhus. Turgenev lived in Germany and France, and visited Russia regularly, but he also spent some time in England, where he met many prominent figures, including Thomas Carlyle, William Makepeace Thackeray, Thomas Macaulay, Benjamin Disraeli and Florence Nightingale. Fathers and Sons had a great success in London. He settled finally in Paris, where he lived with the Viardots from 1871 until his death. Turgenev was a corresponding member of the Imperial Academy of Sciences. In 1879 he was made Doctor of Civil Law at the Oxford University. Among Turgenev's close friends in France was the writer Gustave Flaubert, with whom he shared similar social and aesthetic ideals. They both rejected extremist right and left and stuck to nonjudgmental if somewhat pessimistic depiction of the world. Struggling with his last, unfinished work, Turgenev wrote to Flaubert (10 July 1978): "I'm still wortking doggedly at my awful nook – at the end of this month, I hope to have finished! . . . On certain days I feel crushed by this burden. It seems to me that I have no more marrow in my bones, and I carry on like an old post horse, worn out but courageous. What a task my good fellow! Provided that it's not pure madness?" (Flaubert & Turgenev: A Friendship in Letters: The Complete Correspondence, edited and translated by Barbara Beaumont, Athlone, 1984, p. 143) Ivan Turgenev died in Bougival, near Paris, on September 3, 1883. He
had suffered from cancer of the spine, and once begged his friend Guy
de Mausassant for a revolver. Pauline was by his side through his agony
and pain. During his last days he was delirious. Before falling back in
coma he said to Pauline: "Come closer... closer. The time has come to
say goodbye... like the Russian czars... Here is the queen of queens.
What good she has done!" (Written Lives by Javier Marías, translated from the the Spanish by Margaret Julia Costa, A New Direction Books, 2006, p. 62) His remains were taken to Russia and buried in
the Volkoff
Cemetery, St. Petersburg. Turgenev's later works include novellas A King Lear of the Steppes (1870) and Spring Torrents, which rank with First Love
(1860) as his finest achievements in the genre. His last published work
was a collection of meditations and anecdotes, entitled Poems in Prose
(1883). The Bibliothèque Russe Tourguéniev, which the author founded in
1875 with German Lopatin, became one of the biggest Russian libraries
in Europe and a meeting place for various revolutionary exile groups.
In 1910, Lenin ordered the transfer of the library and archive of the
Russian Social Democratic Party to the Turgenev Library. After France
was invaded by Nazi Germany, the library was seized by
Alfred Rosenberg's special cultural commandos, the
ERR (Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg), and then, in 1945, by the Red
Army. Many of the books ended up in Moscow, but its "degenerate"
portion was burned in 1955. For further reading: Two Russian Reformers, Ivan Turgenev, Leo Tolstoy by John Arthur Thomas Lloyd (1910); Turgenev, the Man, His Art, and His Age by Avrahm Yarmolinsky (1977); Turgenev: His Life and Times by Leonard Schapiro (1982); The Russian Revolutionary Novel: Turgenev to Pasternak by Richard Freeborn (1985); Ivan Turgenev by A.V. Knowles (1988); Turgenev: A Biography by Henry Troyat (1988); Worlds Within Worlds: The Novels of Ivan Turgenev by Jane T. Costlow (1990); Beyond Realism: Turgenev's Poetics of Secular Salvation by Elizabeth Cheresh Allen (1992); Turgenev and Britain by Waddington, et al. (1995); Turgenev's 'Fathers and Sons' by James Woodward (1996); Turgenev and Pavlovsky: A Friendship and a Correspondence by Patrick Waddington (1997); Ivan Turgenev, edited by Harold Bloon (2003); Written Lives by Javier Marías (2006); Consequences of Consciousness: Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy by Donna Tussing Orwin (2007); Turgenev: Art, Ideology and Legacy, edited by Robert Reid and Joe Andrew (2010); Ivan Turgenev and Joseph Conrad: A Study in Philosophical, Literary and Socio-political Relationships by Brygida Pudełko (2012); Hunting Nature: Ivan Turgenev and the Organic World by Thomas P. Hodge (2020); Ivan Turgenev i evrei by Mark Uralʹskiĭ (2022) - See also: Guy de Maupassant, Isaiah Berlin Selected bibliography:
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