Ivan Turgenev

Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev was born on 9 November 1818 (28 October in the old style calendar) in Oryol, a provincial city south of Moscow ^[1]. His father, Sergei Turgenev, was a cavalry officer from an old but impoverished gentry family. His mother, Varvara Petrovna Lutovinova, was a wealthy heiress who owned the estate of Spasskoye-Lutovinovo along with thousands of serfs ^[2]. The marriage was unhappy, and Varvara Petrovna ran both her household and her estates with a harshness her son never forgot. Biographers agree that the beatings he received as a child, and the cruelty he watched inflicted on the family's serfs, shaped his lifelong hatred of arbitrary power ^[2].

The boy grew up at Spasskoye-Lutovinovo surrounded by tutors, French and German governesses, and the vast birch woods and fields of the Oryol countryside that would later fill his fiction. He learned Russian partly from household serfs, since French was the language of the drawing room, and one serf secretly introduced him to Russian poetry ^[1]. In 1827 the family moved to Moscow so the children could be educated, and Turgenev entered Moscow University in 1833 at the age of fifteen. A year later he transferred to the University of St Petersburg, where he studied classics, Russian literature, and philology, and where the death of his father in 1834 left the family fully under his mother's control ^[1].

After taking his degree in 1837, Turgenev went to the University of Berlin to study philosophy and history, a common path for ambitious young Russians of his generation ^[3]. The years in Germany, from 1838 to 1841, made him a convinced Westernizer: he came home believing that Russia's future lay in adopting European ideas, institutions, and habits of mind rather than in any special national path. This conviction set the course of both his intellectual life and his quarrels for the next four decades ^[3].

Anyone asking who was Ivan Turgenev in the early 1840s would have found a well-connected young gentleman with vague literary ambitions and a brief, unenthusiastic spell in the civil service. He published a long narrative poem, Parasha, in 1843, which drew praise from the influential critic Vissarion Belinsky ^[1]. Belinsky's friendship mattered enormously: the critic championed a socially engaged, realist literature, and his encouragement pushed Turgenev away from verse and toward prose. That same year Turgenev met the celebrated Spanish-French singer Pauline Viardot, an encounter that would define his personal life ^[4].

The decisive breakthrough came with a series of sketches of rural life published in the journal The Contemporary beginning in 1847. Collected in 1852 as A Sportsman's Sketches (also translated as Sketches from a Hunter's Album), these stories described peasants as full human beings, observed by a hunting narrator wandering the Oryol countryside ^[5]. Without open preaching, the sketches made the injustice of serfdom impossible to ignore, and the book is often credited with influencing educated opinion, reputedly including the future Tsar Alexander II, in the years before the emancipation of the serfs in 1861 ^[5].

The authorities noticed. In 1852 Turgenev published an admiring obituary of Nikolai Gogol that the Moscow censors passed after their St Petersburg counterparts had banned it. He was arrested, held for a month, and then confined to Spasskoye-Lutovinovo for over a year of internal exile ^[1]. Most scholars believe the obituary was a pretext and that the real offense was the anti-serfdom tenor of the Sketches. The episode confirmed his stature: by his mid thirties he was among the most watched writers in Russia ^[5].

Turgenev's central achievement was a sequence of six novels, written between 1855 and 1877, that together form a chronicle of Russian society in the decades around emancipation. Rudin (1856) examined the eloquent but ineffectual idealist of the 1840s. A Nest of the Gentry (1859) mourned a fading landowning class. On the Eve (1860) put a Bulgarian revolutionary at the center of a Russian love story, and Smoke (1867) and Virgin Soil (1877) took increasingly skeptical measure of Russian radicalism and reform ^[1]. Alongside the novels he produced novellas and stories of lasting reputation, among them First Love (1860) and the essay-lecture Hamlet and Don Quixote (1860), as well as the play A Month in the Country (written 1850), which anticipated Chekhov's theater by half a century ^[6].

The summit of the sequence, and of any list of Ivan Turgenev achievements, is Fathers and Sons (1862). Its hero, the young medical student Yevgeny Bazarov, rejects art, tradition, and received authority in favor of empirical science, and through him Turgenev fixed the term nihilist in Russian and then in international usage ^[7]. The novel provoked fury from both sides: radicals thought Bazarov a caricature, conservatives thought him flattered. Turgenev was wounded by the reception, but the book endured as one of the finest studies of generational conflict in any literature ^[7].

His second great service was as an ambassador. Living much of his later life in Baden-Baden and Paris, fluent in French, German, and English, Turgenev was the first Russian writer widely read and personally known in Western Europe. He counted Gustave Flaubert among his closest friends, encouraged translations of Tolstoy, and mentored younger writers including Henry James, who called him a novelist's novelist ^[3]. In 1879 the University of Oxford awarded him an honorary Doctorate of Civil Law, the first given to a novelist, a measure of a European standing no Russian writer had previously held ^[3].

The fixed point of Turgenev's private life was Pauline Viardot, the mezzo-soprano he first heard sing in St Petersburg in 1843. She was married to Louis Viardot, a French writer and impresario who became Turgenev's collaborator on translations, and the novelist attached himself to the household for the rest of his life, following the family across Europe and often living in lodgings beside or within their homes ^[4]. The exact nature of the relationship has been debated for well over a century; what is certain is a devotion of forty years that Turgenev himself described as sitting on the edge of another man's nest. He never married ^[4].

He did have a daughter. An affair in his early twenties with Avdotya Ivanova, a seamstress employed on his mother's estate, produced a girl born in 1842. Turgenev later acknowledged her, and Pauline Viardot raised the child in France, where she was known as Paulinette ^[2]. His relations with his formidable mother remained strained until her death in 1850, which made him a rich man and allowed him to free his household serfs and support various dependents and causes ^[2].

Contemporaries described a tall, physically imposing man with white hair from middle age, gentle manners, and a soft, high voice that surprised strangers. He was famously irresolute in practical matters, generous with money and praise, and quick to feel slights. His friendships with the other giants of Russian letters were stormy: a quarrel with Tolstoy in 1861 nearly ended in a duel and produced a seventeen year estrangement, and Dostoevsky mocked him in print as the expatriate novelist Karmazinov in Demons ^[1]. Reconciliations came late but did come, and Tolstoy's last letter to the dying Turgenev urged him to keep writing.

From the mid 1860s Turgenev lived mainly abroad, first in Baden-Baden and then, after the Franco-Prussian War, in and near Paris, with summers at a joint estate with the Viardots at Bougival on the Seine ^[4]. He returned to Russia for visits that grew more triumphant as his fame settled. At the 1880 celebrations for the unveiling of the Pushkin monument in Moscow he was received with ovations, though Dostoevsky's speech on the same occasion overshadowed his own ^[1].

His late work turned inward. Virgin Soil (1877), his longest novel and an attempt to depict the populist movement of the 1870s, was coolly received in Russia, and he wrote no further novels. Instead he produced short, strange, memorable pieces: the mystical tales Klara Milich and The Song of Triumphant Love, and the Poems in Prose (1878 to 1882), brief meditations on death, Russia, and the Russian language that became some of his most quoted pages ^[6].

In 1882 he began to suffer intense pain in the chest and spine. French doctors diagnosed angina and neuralgia, but the true cause was cancer of the spine (contemporary accounts and later scholarship describe a malignant tumor of the spinal column) ^[3]. He endured a harrowing final year at Bougival, nursed by the Viardot family, and died there on 3 September 1883 at the age of 64 ^[1]. As he had wished, his body was returned to Russia and buried in the Volkovo Cemetery in St Petersburg, near the grave of Belinsky, after a funeral that drew enormous crowds despite official nervousness about demonstrations ^[5].

Any Ivan Turgenev biography has to reckon with a double reputation. In Russia he was long ranked slightly below Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, faulted by radicals for moderation and by nationalists for his European loyalties. Outside Russia the order was often reversed for decades: for late nineteenth century French, English, and American readers, Turgenev simply was the Russian novel, prized for economy, formal control, and an even-handed sympathy that never bullied the reader ^[3]. Henry James and Joseph Conrad both wrote admiringly of him, and his influence has been traced in writers as different as Ernest Hemingway, who repeatedly cited A Sportsman's Sketches, and Sherwood Anderson ^[6].

His political legacy is unusually concrete for a novelist. A Sportsman's Sketches gave the anti-serfdom cause a human face at a moment when open agitation was impossible, and Fathers and Sons supplied the vocabulary, above all the word nihilist, through which Russians argued about their revolutionary youth for the rest of the century ^[7]. Turgenev's own position, a gradualist liberalism committed to European models, satisfied almost nobody in his lifetime, yet it has looked more prescient to many later historians of Russian thought ^[3].

The basic Ivan Turgenev facts are now maintained by a network of institutions. Spasskoye-Lutovinovo operates as a state museum-reserve, Oryol has a museum devoted to him, Moscow preserves the house on Ostozhenka Street associated with his mother and the story Mumu, and the bicentenary of his birth was marked in 2018 with exhibitions and new editions in Russia and abroad ^[2]. His novels remain in print in dozens of languages, A Month in the Country holds the stage, and Fathers and Sons is a fixture of university courses on the nineteenth century novel, evidence that the quietest of the great Russians has proved among the most durable ^[1].