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Ivan Turgenev

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Ivan Turgenev, photo by Félix Nadar (1820-1910)

Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev (Russian: Ива́н Серге́евич Турге́нев, November 9, 1818, Orel, Russia - September 3, 1883, Bougival, near Paris, France ) was a major Russian novelist and playwright. Although his reputation has suffered some setbacks during the last century, the novel Fathers and Sons should still be regarded as one of the defining works of the 19th-century fiction.

Life

Turgenev was born into an old and wealthy family at Orel, Russia, in the province of the same name, on October 28, 1818. His father Sergei Nikolaevich Turgenev, the colonel of a cavalry regiment, died when he was sixteen, leaving Turgenev and his brother Nicholas to be brought up under the care of their abusive mother, Varvara Petrovna Lutovinova, who owned large estates and many serfs. After the normal schooling for a child of a gentleman's family, Turgenev studied for a year at the University of Moscow, then the University of St Petersburg focusing on the classics, Russian literature and philology. He was finally sent in 1838 to the University of Berlin to study philosophy (mostly Hegel) and history. Turgenev was impressed with the more modern society he witnessed in Western Europe, and went back home a "Westernizer", as opposed to a "Slavophile", who believed that Russia could improve itself by imitating the West and abolishing outdated institutions such as serfdom.

A family serf read to him verses from the Rossiad of Kheraskov, a celebrated poet of the eighteenth 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 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, for whom the author harboured a life-long but futile admiration. 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. Turgenev occasionally visited England, and in 1879 the degree of D.C.L. was conferred upon him by the University of Oxford. He died at Bougival, near Paris, on the 4th of September 1883.

Career

Turgenev 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 while sport hunting birds and hares in his mother's estate of Spasskoye, the work appeared in a collected form in 1852. In 1852, between Turgenev's Sketches and his first important novels, he wrote his now notorious obtiuary to his idol Gogol in the St. 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 St. Petersburg did not approve of this idolotry and banned its publication, but Turgenev managed to fool the Moscow censor into printing it. These underhanded tactics landed the young writer in prison for a month, and he was forced into exile at his estate for nearly two years.

His next work was A Nest of Nobles (Дворянское гнездо)in 1859, and was followed the next year by On the Eve (Накануне), a tale which contains one of his most beautiful female characters, Helen. 'On the Eve'(of reform), with Turgenev's portrayal of Bulgarian Revolutionary Dmitri, would have been very exciting politically to many contemporaneous readers. In 1862 Fathers and Sons (Отцы и дети)was published, an admirably-structured novel in which the author famously described the revolutionary doctrines then beginning to spread in Russia. His lead character Basarov is heralded by many as one of the finest characters of the 19th Century novel. 19th Century Russian critics did not take to "Fathers and Sons." The stinging criticism, especially from younger radicals,disappointed Turgenev and he wrote very little in the years following Fathers and Sons.

Turgenev's later novels, with their antiquated language and stilted situations, are considered inferior to his earlier efforts. Smoke (Дым) was published in 1867 and his last work of any length, Virgin Soil (Новь), was published in 1877. Aside from his longer stories, many shorter ones were produced, some of great beauty and full of subtle psychological analysis, such as Torrents of Spring (Вешние воды), First Love, Asya and others. These were later collected into three volumes. His last works were Poetry in Prose and Clara Milich, which appeared in the European Messenger. Turgenev is considered one of the great Victorian novelists, ranked with Thackeray, Hawthorne, and Henry James. A melancholy tone pervades his writings, a morbid self-analysis.

Public Domain This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. {{cite encyclopedia}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)

Bibliography

Novels

Short Stories

Plays

See Also

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