IVAN TURGENEV

'Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev' ( ) ( – ) was a major Russian novelist and playwright. His novel ''Fathers and Sons'' is regarded as a major work of 19th-century fiction.

Contents

Life

Career

Bibliography

See also

External links

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, died when Ivan was sixteen, leaving Turgenev and his brother Nicholas to be brought up by their abusive mother, Varvara Petrovna Lutovinova. 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 the 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 imitating the West. 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 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 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 life-long 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 1880 famous speech at the unveiling of the Pushkin monument brought about his reconciliation with Turgenev. 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 4 September 1883. On his deathbed he pleaded with Tolstoy: "My friend, return to literature!" Tolstoy after this wrote such works as ''The Death of Ivan Ilych'' and ''The Kreutzer Sonata''.
Turgenev's brain was weighed in 1883 at an incredible 2021 grams.

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 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 Nikolay 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.
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Bibliography

'Novels'

★ 1857 - ''Рудин'' (''Rudin'')

★ 1859 - ''Дворянское Гнездо'' (''Dvoryanskoye Gnezdo'' or ''Home of the Gentry'', ''A Nest of Gentlefolk'', or ''A Nest of Nobles'')

★ 1860 - ''Накануне'' (''Nakanune'' or ''On the Eve'')

★ 1862 - ''Отцы и Дети'' (''Ottsy i Deti'' or ''Fathers and Sons'')

★ 1867 - ''Дым'' (''Dym'' or ''Smoke'')

★ 1877 - ''Новь'' (''Virgin Soil'')
'Short Stories'

★ 1850 - ''Дневник Лишнего Человека'' (''Dnevnik Lishnego Cheloveka'' or ''The Diary of a Superfluous Man'')

★ 1851 - ''Провинциалка'' (''Provintsialka or ''The Provincial Lady'')

★ 1852 - ''Записки Охотника'' (''Zapiski Okhotnika'' or ''The Hunter's Sketches'')

★ 1855 - ''Yakov Pasynkov''

★ 1856 - ''Faust: A Story in Nine Letters''

★ 1858 - ''Aся'' (''Asia '')

★ 1860 - ''Первая Любовь'' (''Pervaia Liubov' or ''First Love'')

★ 1870 - ''Stepnoy Korol' Lir'' (''A Lear of the Steppes'')

★ 1872 - ''Вешние Воды'' (''Veshnie Vody'' or ''Torrents of Spring'' or ''Spring Torrents'')

★ 1881 - ''Песнь Торжествующей Любви'' (''The Song of the Triumphant Love'')

★ 1882 - ''Klara Milich'' (''The Mysterious Tales'')
'Plays'

★ 1843 - ''Неосторожность''

★ 1847 - ''Где тонко, там и рвется''

★ 1849/1856 - ''Zavtrak u Predvoditelia''

★ 1850/1851 - ''Razgovor na Bol'shoi Doroge'' (''A Conversation on the Highway'')

★ 1846/1852 - ''Bezdenezh'e'' (''Fortune's Fool'')

★ 1857/1862 - ''Nakhlebnik'' (''The Family Charge'')

★ 1855/1872 - ''Mesiats v Derevne'' (''A Month in the Country'')

★ 1882 - ''Vecher V Sorrente'' (''An Evening in Sorrento'')

See also

★ Asteroid 3323 Turgenev, named after the writer

★ Lee Hoiby an American composer and his opera based upon "A Month in the Country"

External links

★ Ivan Turgenev Chronicle by Erik Lindgren

★ Short biography

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