Ivan Turgenev Biography and List of Works

Novelist, poet, and playwright, known for his detailed descriptions of everyday live in Russia in the 19th century. Turgenev realistically portrays the peasantry and the rising intelligentsia in its attempt to move the country into a new age. Although his contemporaries Dostoevsky and Tolstoy have overshadowed Turgenev, he remains one of the major figures in 19th-century Russian literature.

"A nihilist is a man who does not bow to any authorities, who does not take any principle on trust, no matter with what respect that principle is surrounded."
(from Fathers and Sons, 1862)

Ivan Turgenev was born in Oryol, in the Ukraine region of Russia, into a wealthy family. He studied at St. Petersburg (1834-37), Berlin Universities (1838-41), and completed his master's exam in St Petersburg. At the age of 19 Turgenev Travelled to Germany. He was on a steamer when it caught fire and rumours spread in Russia that he had acted cowardly. This revealing experience, which shadowed the author throughout his life, formed the basis for his story A Fire at Sea. In 1841 Turgenev started his career at the Russian civil service. He worked for the Ministry of Interior (1843-45) for a short time. After the success of two of his story-poems Turgenev devoted himself to literature, country pursuits and travel. He had a relationship with the opera singer Pauline Garcia Viardot, living near her or at times with her and her husband. Turgenev travelled to France with them in 1845-46 and 1847-50. Viardot remained Turgenev's great and unfulfilled love; in his youth he had had one or two affairs with servant-girls, and produced an illegitimate daughter, Paulinette.

During his studies in Berlin, Turgenev became convinced of the need for Westernisation of Russia. Lacking the religious faith of his two great compatriots, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, he represents the moderate side of the reform movement. In a letter he wrote about Tolstoy's 'charlatanism' and from his deathbed he begged Tolstoy to cast away his prophet's mantle. Dostoyevsky, on the other had, caricatured Turgenev as Karmazinov in The Possessed. Turgenev's solution was not revolution, mystical nationalism, or spiritual renewal but the industriousness of the confident, methodical builders embodied by the engineer Vassily Fedotitch Solomin, a side character, in Virgin Soil. The 'positive hero' was a new type of personality, who will liberate Russia from her backwardness. In the centre of the book, (full of discussions about progression, literature, aesthetic life, emancipation, beauty, patriotic principles, etc), is a love story, in which a young woman must choose her of way in life.

"You have only to look at Solomin. A head as clear as the day and a body as strong as an ox. Isn't that a wonder in itself? Why, any man with us in Russia who has had any brains, or feelings, or a conscience, has always been a physical wreck. Solomin's heart aches just as ours does; he hates the same things that we hate, but his nerves are of iron and his body is under his full control. He's a splendid man, I tell you! Why, think of it! here is a man with ideals, and no nonsense about him; educated and from the people, simple, yet all there . . . What more do you want?"
(from Virgin Soil)

In the 1840s Turgenev wrote poems, criticism, and short stories under the influence of Nikolay Gogol. With the short-story cycle A Sportsman's Sketches, he (1852) made his reputation. It is said that the work contributed to Tsar Alexander II's decision to liberate the serfs. The short pieces are written from the point of view of a young nobleman who learns to appreciate the wisdom of the peasants who live on his family's estates. However, Turgenev's opinions brought him a month of detention in St. Petersburg and 18 months of house arrest.

Under the influence of the critic Vissarion Belinsky, Turgenev abandoned Romantic idealism for a more realistic style. Throughout the decade 1853-62 he wrote some of his finest stories and novellas and the first four of his six novels: RUDIN (1856), DVORIANSKOE GNEDO (1859), NAKANUNE (1860) and OTTSY I DETI (1862). Central themes are the beauty of early love, failure to reach one's dreams, and frustrated love, which reflected his lifelong passion for Pauline. Another woman who deeply influence Turgenev was his mother, who ruled her 5,000 serfs capriciously with a whip and whose dreadful personality left traces on his work.

"Whatever a man prays for, he prays for a miracle. Every prayer reduces itself to this: Great God, grant that twice two be not four."
(From Fathers and Sons)

Hostile reaction to Fathers and Sons (1862) prompted Turgenev's decision to leave Russia. As a consequence he also lost the majority of his readers. The novel examines the conflict between the older generation, who oppose reforms, and the youth, who want change. In the central character, Bazarov, Turgenev draws a classic portrait of the mid-nineteenth-century nihilist - the author invented the word. Later the temperament of nihilist found a number of different manifestations: the terrorist, the anarchist, the atheist, the materialist, and the Communist. Turgenev lived in Germany, and then moved to London, where Fathers and Sons had great success. He settled finally in Paris, where he lived with the Viardots from 1871 until his death. He became a corresponding member of the Imperial Academy of Sciences in 1860 and Doctor of Civil Law at Oxford University (1879).

"The whole life of Andreï Nikolaevitch was passed in the prompt performance of all the ceremonies established from remote times, in strict conformity with all the customs of the ancient, orthodox, holy Russian existence. He rose and went to bed, ate and drank and bathed, was merry or angry (though the second, in truth, rarely happened), even smoked his pipe and played cards (two great innovations!), not as it occurred to him to do after his own fashion, but after the law and ordinance of his fathers -- exactly and formally."
(From Turgenev's 'Desperate', 1888, written in Bougival, 1881)

One of Turgenev's close friend's in France was the writer Gustave Flaubert, with whom he shared similar social and aesthetic ideals. They both rejected extremist of the right and left and stuck to non-judgemental if somewhat pessimistic depiction of the world. Struggling with his last, unfinished work, he wrote to Flaubert: "On certain days I feel crushed by this burden. It seems to me that I have no more marrow in my bones, and I carry on like an old post horse, worn out but courageous." Turgenev died in Bougival, near Paris, on September 3, 1883. His remains were taken to Russia and buried in the Volkoff Cemetery, St.Petersburg. Turgenev's later works include the novellas A King Lear of the Steppes (1870) and Spring Torrents, which rank with First Love (1860) as his finest achievements in the genre. His last published work was a collection of meditations and anecdotes, entitled Poems in Prose (1883).

Fathers and Sons (1862) - set during the six-year period of social ferment, from Russia's defeat in the Crimean War to the Emancipation of the Serfs. The central character is the young medical student and nihilist Evgenii Bazarov, who has been described as the 'first Bolshevik' in Russian literature. "I share no man's opinions; I have my own." Against the radicals of the new generation (the 'sons') Turgenev sets the older generation (the 'fathers'), who are represented in the novel by the landowner Nikolai Petrovich Kirsanov and his brother Pavel. Bazarov makes a journey to the Kirsanov estate to meet his friend Arkadii, Nikolai's son. Arkadii falls in love with Anna Odintsova, the beautiful landowner, who rejects Bazarov. When Bazarov flirts with the young peasant-girl Fenechka, Nikolai's mistress and the mother of his child, Pavel challenges him to a duel. Pavel is wounded in the leg; Bazarov returns to his home and helps his father who is a doctor. Bazarov dies as a result of his failure to cauterise a cut that he suffers while performing an autopsy on a peasant who had died from typhus.

For further reading: Ivan Turgenev by A.V. Knowles (1988); Turgenev: A Biography by Henry Troyat (1988); Worlds within Worlds: The Novels of Ivan Turgenev by Jane T. Costlow (1990); Turgenev's 'Fathers and Sons' by James Woodward (1996). - See also: Guy de Maupassant, Isaiah Berlin

PARASHA, (1843)