Ivan Turgenev

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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
Genres Realist
Notable work(s) Fathers and Sons
Influences
Influenced

Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev (Russian: Ива́н Серге́евич Турге́нев IPA: [ɪˈvan sʲɪrˈgʲeɪvʲɪtɕ turˈgʲenʲɪf]) (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

[edit] Life

Turgenev was born into a landed and wealthy family in Oryol, Russia, on October 28, 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 an unhappy childhood and suffered in her marriage. Ivan's father died when Ivan was sixteen, leaving Turgenev and his brother Nicholas to be brought up by their abusive mother. After the standard schooling for a child of a gentleman's family, 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 central-European 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.

A family serf read to him verses from the Rossiad of Kheraskov, a celebrated poet of the 18th century. Turgenev's early attempts in literature, poems, and sketches had indications of genius and were favorably spoken of by 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 Garcia-Viardot, with whom he had a lifelong affair.

Turgenev never married, although he had a daughter with one of his family's serfs. Tall and broad, Turgenev's personality was timid, restrained and soft-spoken. His closest literary friend was Gustave Flaubert. His relations with Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky 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. Dostoevsky would parody Turgenev in his 1872 novel The Devils, through the character of the vain novelist Karmazinov who is anxious to ingratiate himself with the radical youth. Dostoevsky's famous 1880 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 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. He died at Bougival, near Paris, on 4 September 1883. On his deathbed he pleaded with Tolstoy: "My friend, return to literature!" After this, Tolstoy would write such works as The Death of Ivan Ilych and The Kreutzer Sonata.

Shortly after his death, Turgenev's brain was weighed at 2,021 grams, a world record for largest human brain size.

[edit] 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. Based on the author's own 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 and are credited with having influenced public opinion in favour of the abolition of serfdom in 1861. Turgenev himself considered the Sportman's Sketches to be his most important contribution to Russian literature,[1] and Tolstoy, amongst others, agreed wholeheartedly, saying that his evocations of nature in these stories were unsurpassed.[2]

In the 1840s and early 50s 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, the notorious oppression, and the persecution and arrests of artists, scientists, and writers, including Dostoevsky. 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 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 his (now notorious) obituary to his idol Nikolai Gogol 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 idolatry and banned its publication, but Turgenev managed to fool the Moscow censor into printing it. These underhand tactics landed the young writer in prison for a month, and he was forced into exile to his estate for nearly two years.

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

Whilst still in Russia, in the early 1850s, Turgenev wrote several short novels (povesti in Russian): The Diary of a Superfluous Man (Дневник лишнего человека), Faust (Фауст), The Lull (Затишье). In them Turgenev expressed the anxieties and hopes of Russians of his generation. In 1854 he moved to Western Europe and during the next year produced his first post-Russian important work: the novel Rudin (Рудин), the story of a man in his thirties, 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 he 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 Dostoevsky paid tribute to in his Pushkin speech of 1880, alongside Tatiana and Tolstoy's Natasha Rostova. A story from A Sportsman's Sketches, known as Bezhin Lea or Byezhin Prairie, was later to become a literary reference in the controversial 1937 movie Bezhin Meadow, directed by Sergei Eisenstein.

In 1855 Alexander II had ascended the Russian throne, and the political climate in Russia became more relaxed. Inspired by the positive social changes, in 1859 Turgenev wrote the novel On the Eve (Накануне), in which he portrayed the Bulgarian revolutionary Insarov. The following year saw the publication of one of his finest short stories, First Love (Первая любовь), which was based on bitter-sweet childhood memories. 1860 was also the year in which Turgenev delivered his famous 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 pervades Turgenev's own works. It is worth noting that Dostoevsky, 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.

In 1862 Fathers and Sons (Отцы и дети), Turgenev's most famous and enduring novel, appeared. 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 political or 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. His next novel, Smoke (Дым), was published in 1867 and was again received less than enthusiastically in his native country, as well as triggering a famous quarrel with Dostoevsky 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.

Some literary historians have compared Turgenev to Victorian novelists such as Thackeray, Hawthorne, and Henry James, but his style and concerns were in fact very different from these American and British writers. More frequent and fruitful are contrasts between Turgenev and his two great Russian contemporaries, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, who wrote on similar themes, but often from a religious or moral perspective which Turgenev did not approve of in artistic creation. It is also possible to draw parallels between Turgenev and his friend, the North German poet and master of the novella form, Theodor Storm, for both writers often dwelt on memories of the past and evoked the beauty of nature.[4]

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

[edit] List of works

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[edit] Novels

  • 1857 - Rudin (Рудин); English translation: Rudin (1894)
  • 1859 - Dvoryanskoye Gnezdo (Дворянское гнездо); English translations: Home of the Gentry, A Nest of Gentlefolk, A Nest of Nobles
  • 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

[edit] Selected short stories

  • 1850 - Dnevnik Lishnego Cheloveka (Дневник лишнего человека); English translation: The Diary of a Superfluous Man
  • 1851 - Provintsialka (Провинциалка); English translation: The Provincial Lady
  • 1852 - Zapiski Okhotnika (Записки охотника); English translations: A Sportsman's Sketches, The Hunter's Sketches
  • 1855 - Yakov Pasynkov (Яков Пасынков)
  • 1855 - Faust (Фауст)
  • 1858 - Asya (Aся); English translation: Asya
  • 1860 - Pervaia Liubov (Первая любовь); English translation: First Love
  • 1870 - Stepnoy Korol' Lir (Степной король Лир); English translation: King Lear of the Steppes
  • 1872 - Veshnie Vody (Вешние воды); English translation: Torrents of Spring
  • 1881 - Pesn' Torzhestvuyushey Lyubvi (Песнь торжествующей любви); English translation: The Song of Triumphant Love
  • 1883 - Klara Milich (Клара Милич); English translation: The Mysterious Tales

[edit] 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)
  • 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

[edit] References

  1. ^ As he said in Paris, in the 1870s: "All that I would wish for my gravestone is a brief inscription saying that my book (the Sportman's Sketches) served the cause of the liberation of our peasants" - memoirs of Captain Faurie, in V. G. Fridliand (ed.), I. S. Turgenev v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov (Moscow: 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 Dostoevsky for a reference to a study dealing with precisely this issue.
  4. ^ See Karl Ernst Laage, Theodor Storm. Biographie (Heide: Boyens, 1999).

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

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