Ivan Turgenev (1818 - 1883) was a Russian novelist, short-story writer, poet and playwright, and the first Russian author to achieve a wide reputation in Western Europe. [1] His sketches of peasant life contributed to the debate over serfdom, and his novels, above all Fathers and Sons, traced the succession of political generations in nineteenth-century Russia with a restraint that set him apart from his contemporaries Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. [2]
Early life and education
Turgenev was born on 28 October 1818 in Oryol, in central Russia, into a landowning family of the minor nobility. [1] His mother owned a large estate at Spasskoye worked by serfs, and her harsh treatment of them left a lasting impression on him that shaped much of his later writing.
He studied at the University of Moscow and then at Saint Petersburg, and from 1838 spent three years at the University of Berlin, where he absorbed German idealist philosophy and formed the Western European sympathies that marked him for the rest of his life. He returned to Russia intending an academic or official career and briefly entered the civil service.
A Sportsman's Sketches
Turgenev's first significant success was a series of stories published in periodicals and collected in 1852 as Zapiski okhotnika (A Sportsman's Sketches). Narrated by a hunter travelling through the countryside, the sketches depicted serfs as individuals of intelligence and feeling, and they were widely read as an indictment of serfdom. [3]
In the same year he was arrested and confined to his estate, ostensibly for an obituary of Nikolai Gogol that the censors found objectionable. Serfdom was abolished in Russia in 1861, and the Sketches were long credited with having helped prepare opinion for the reform.
Novels and plays
A sequence of novels followed: Rudin (1856), A Nest of the Gentry (1859), On the Eve (1860) and Fathers and Sons (1862). Each examined a type of Russian idealist against the social conditions of its moment. [1]
Fathers and Sons centres on Bazarov, a young physician who rejects all inherited authority; the book popularised the word nihilist and provoked attacks from both radicals, who found the portrait hostile, and conservatives, who found it sympathetic. [4] Stung by the reception, Turgenev spent most of his remaining years abroad, publishing the polemical Smoke in 1867 and Virgin Soil in 1877.
He also wrote finely observed novellas, among them First Love and Torrents of Spring, and the comedy A Month in the Country, which anticipated the mood and dramatic method later associated with Chekhov.
Later life
Turgenev lived for long periods in Germany and France, his movements tied to those of the singer Pauline Viardot and her family, with whom he maintained a lifelong attachment. In Paris he was close to Flaubert, Zola, Daudet and Henry James, and he acted as an intermediary introducing Russian fiction to Western readers. [2]
His relations with Russian literary contemporaries were uneven: he quarrelled with Tolstoy for many years before a reconciliation, and Dostoevsky satirised him in Demons. In 1879 the University of Oxford awarded him an honorary doctorate. He died at Bougival, near Paris, on 3 September 1883 and was buried in Saint Petersburg, where his funeral drew large crowds. [1]
