Ivan Turgenev

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Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev () (November 9, 1818 – September 3, 1883) was a Russian novelist and playwright. His novel Fathers and Sons is regarded as one of the major works of 19th-century fiction.

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 St 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 a Westernizer, as opposed to a Slavophile, 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 Slavophiles, opposing Turgenev in this respect. 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 Demons, through the character of the novelist, Karamazinov. Dostoevsky's famous 1880 speech at the unveiling of the Pushkin monument brought about his reconciliation with Turgenev. Turgenev occasionally visited England, and in 1879 the 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.

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 while 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) 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 St. Petersburg did not approve of this idolatry 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 to his estate for nearly two years.

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 (Russian intelligents) emigrated to Europe. Among them were Alexander Herzen and Turgenev himself. In the early 1850s Turgenev wrote several short novels (povesti in Russian): The Diary of a Superfluous Man (dramatized as The Journey of the Fifth Horse), Faust, The Lull. In them Turgenev expressed the anxieties and hopes of Russians of his generation. In 1854 he settled in Europe and during the next year produced his first post-Russian important work: the novel Rudin, the story of a man in his late twenties, torn between his much loved but barbaric homeland and a comfortable but unsatisfactory life in Europe. "Rudin" is also a story of nostalgia for the 1840s. In 1858 he wrote the novel A Nest of Nobles (Дворянское гнездо, published 1859), also a story of the nostalgia for the beauty of the lost, which contains one of his most memorable female characters, Elena.

In 1855 Alexander II became the Russian tsar, 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 Dmitri. In 1862 Fathers and Sons (Отцы и дети), his most enduring work, was published. Its lead character, Basarov, is heralded as a representative of the new people character of the 1860s Russian novel.

Critics of the day 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. His last work of any length, Virgin Soil (Новь), was published in 1877. Shorter stories, such as Torrents of Spring (Вешние воды), First Love, and Asya were also written around this time. 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, though his style was much different from these American and British writers. Turgenev has often been compared to his Russian contemporaries, Leo Tolstoy and Feodor Dostoevsky, who wrote around the same time and on similar issues.

List of works

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

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 the Triumphant Love
1883 - Klara Milich (Клара Милич); 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); English translation: Fortune's Fool
1857/1862 - Nakhlebnik (Нахлебник); 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

External links

Ivan Turgenev Chronicle by Erik Lindgren
Short biography
Works by Ivan Turgenev at Project Gutenberg

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