In 1881, while visiting Tolstoy at Yasnaya Polyana, Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev (1818-83) joined in the birthday merrymaking, much to the chagrin of his host who by this time was deep into his life of austerity. Firstly Turgenev confessed, in the spirit of the party game he was trying to encourage, ‘The most shining moment of my life naturally has to do with love. It is the one in which your eyes meet those of the woman you love and you guess that she loves you, too. That happened to me once . . . perhaps twice.’ Then, this big, well-dressed silver-haired sixty-three year old pranced for the company, demonstrating ‘the Paris cancan’. It brought the house down, but earned him only the following diary entry from his host  

‘August  

22nd.  

Turgenev  

–  

cancan.  

Pity.’

There are some novelists that loom so large in biographical terms, like Tolstoy  

himself,  

or  

Dickens,  

that  

they  

stand  

alongside  

their  

own  

fictions  

as creations of the writers and readers who are obsessed with them. Then there are  

others  

–  

a  

little  

less  

loud  

–  

who,  

with  

some  

prying  

on  

the  

reader’s  

part,  

 reveal  

their  

lives  

to  

be  

symbiotic  

with  

the  

preoccupations  

of  

their  

fiction.  

 Of  

these,  

Turgenev  

is  

my  

favourite.  

What  

attracts  

me  

to  

this  

cosmopolitan,  

 nineteenth century Russian is ultimately his temperament, both as an author and as a man, that and the fact he writes so wonderfully.

Leaving behind the irascible Tolstoy, the openness in pursuit of social pleasure seem to have been among the qualities that made Turgenev an attractive  

 figure,  

 ‘such  

 good  

 company’  

 as  

 Sofia  

 Tolstoy  

 recorded  

 of  

 the  

 same evening in a later recollection. Meeting him in 1863, the novelist brothers Goncourt found him ‘a delightful colossus, a gentle, white-haired giant, who looks like a druid or the kindly old monk in Romeo and Juliet. He is handsome, but in an awe-inspiring, impressive way.’ Was there an element of calculation in Turgenev? As he observed in his novel, Home of the Gentry, (1859) ‘so long as a man is good-natured, no one can resist him.’

Yet monk and cancaneer, art and artlessness, are apt metaphors to capture the contradictions of the man and of the writer who has traditionally been a little obscured by those other great Russians, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, in what Henry James called ‘the great glazed tank of art’. After all, his novels lack the grand canvas sweep of Tolstoy, or the churned psychological depths of Dostoevsky. They tend more toward the novella, often sharing Jane Austen’s interest in the displacement caused by the introduction of a character into the ostensible calm of an estate. As a writer, Turgenev’s sense of the turbulence of his period is prescient, his creation of character deft, his observational powers acute and his descriptive skills poetical. In the novels and stories, he is always the educated observer. His realism is gentle and biased toward belief in human worth.

Two fascinating themes run through Turgenev’s work, biographical strands  

 of  

 his  

 life.  

 One  

 is  

 rooted  

 in  

 his  

 intellectual  

 preoccupations,  

 the  

 other  

in  

his  

personal  

relationships.  

The  

first  

is  

the  

study  

of  

the  

dichotomy  

 between  

thought  

and  

action  

in  

the  

Russian  

character,  

which  

reflected  

his  

 complicated nationalism. The second is his preoccupation with the power of love to enthral.

Turgenev was a conservative liberal with a Western outlook. Like Tchaikovsky, he was controversial in the Russia of his day, but an early favourite in the West, despite the fact his work was generally badly translated. He was particularly at home in France, where his literary friendships included Flaubert, George Sand and Zola. The urgency of Turgenev’s  

work  

is  

lost  

on  

us  

today,  

indeed  

he  

seems  

at  

first  

glance  

quite  

 conventionally  

 Victorian  

 –  

 he  

 described  

 himself  

 in  

 a  

 late  

 letter  

 as  

 ‘an  

 old-style  

liberal  

in  

the  

English  

.  

.  

.  

sense’  

–  

but  

in  

Russia  

his  

depiction  

of  

 peasants and landowners was something new and risky. The point was made by John Reed, the author of Ten Days That Shook the World and subject of the 1981 movie, Reds:

The tremendous interest aroused by Turgenev’s books in Russia was partly due to the fact that they were all concerned with politics  

–  

that,  

beside  

their  

delicate  

and  

restrained  

literary  

art,  

 through  

 them  

 all  

 ran  

 a  

 strain  

 of  

 propaganda  

 –  

 that  

 they  

 dealt  

 with the actual burning questions of the times.

The philosopher Isaiah Berlin, who translated two of Turgenev’s works, admitted similarly that the author’s popularity was as much a matter of his ‘social content’ as artistic quality.

In Turgenev’s day, Russia was an autocratic state which had made tentative steps towards European Enlightenment and retreated. It was strongly influenced  

by  

its  

Slavic  

history,  

religious  

and  

deeply  

conservative.  

Unlike  

 the West it was a late industrial power. The modernising efforts of Peter the Great (1672-1725), furthered by those of Catherine II (1762-1796), had been welcomed but, in exempting the nobility from state service, the latter had inadvertently isolated them. After brutal success in the Napoleonic Wars, the ill-fated Decembrist Revolt of 1825, an attempt to liberalise the country, had unleashed reactionary forces. Yet by the time of the accession of Alexander II in 1855, the need for reform had become urgent again and the new Tsar abolished the serfdom of the twenty million, a third of Russia’s  

 population.  

 Vital  

 as  

 this  

 measure  

 was,  

 the  

 downside  

 lay  

 in  

 the  

 incomplete nature of serf freedom and the radicalism it inspired among disaffected intellectuals.

Indeed what is most compelling about Turgenev is his urge to dramatise the experience of the Russian intelligentsia from the 1840s to the 1870s. In the apathy of his male characters we see the country’s progress stymied. They tend to be Don Quixotes (active idealists) or Hamlets (crippled introspectives), to use the terms of a famous lecture he delivered in January 1860.  

In  

his  

fiction  

there  

are  

any  

number  

of  

them,  

all  

equally  

undone,  

the  

 radicals with their populist incitement which founders on the indifference of others and the conservatives by their inability to countenance change. Turgenev himself was sympathetic toward the radicals, though by temperament understanding more clearly the latter.

These  

he  

describes  

as  

‘superfluous  

men’,  

which  

are  

at  

once  

educated  

and  

 aimless. In Rudin, (1857) the eponymous hero is typical of the type: his eloquence inspires others, but he himself lacks the commitment to change. His  

‘thoughts  

seemed  

to  

be  

directed  

towards  

the  

future;;  

this  

lent  

them  

an  

 air of impetuosity and youthfulness.’ In Turgenev’s greatest novel, Fathers and Sons  

(1862),  

the  

three  

Petrovich  

men  

are  

all  

superfluous.  

‘They  

are  

 the best of the gentry class and that is precisely why I chose them, to show their bankruptcy’, he explained in an 1862 letter to the poet, Sluchevsky. In contrast, Bazarov the novel’s active nihilist (a term Turgenev also popularised  

–  

meaning  

revolutionary)  

fulminates,  

but  

changes  

nothing.

This is the grim background to Turgenev’s writing, and Russian literature would really begin with Turgenev’s generation, building on the work of Pushkin and Gogol. It was writing ‘out of the profundities of a silent country’, as Richard Freeborn has noted. This was the result of the harsh censorship of the times. Whilst gradualists like Turgenev believed at one time in future concessions from above, radicals like his sometime friend, Herzen, believed in a revolution from below that would destroy bourgeois capitalism. More shrewdly, Turgenev saw capitalism in the heart of the very peasants radicals wished to incite. This is why in Virgin Soil (1877), an  

account  

of  

a  

group  

of  

misfit  

populists  

trying  

to  

take  

revolution  

to  

the  

 uncomprehending peasantry, they are destined to fail.

Smoke, 1867 in particular, was Turgenev’s contribution to the great controversy between the Slavophiles and those who championed Western ideals for Russia. We might identify some of Turgenev’s opinions in his character Potugin, a retired government clerk who believes that Russians hate the West, but accept its superiority. To him they are possessed of unwarranted optimism, whilst never having achieved anything, the cultured classes being worthless, the people weak-minded. Warming to his theme Potugin concludes:

I am a Westerner. I am devoted to Europe . . . I am devoted to culture . . . and I love it with my whole heart and believe in it, and I have no other belief, and never shall have. That word, ci-vi-li-sa-tion . . . is intelligible, and pure, and holy, and all the other  

 ideals,  

 nationality,  

 glory,  

 or  

 what  

 you  

 like  

 –  

 they  

 smell  

 of blood.

Turgenev’s love of the West preceded his living there. He was called ‘The American’ at Moscow University because of his admiration of democratic principles. He might have said, as he had Potugin say, ‘I both love and hate my Russia, my strange, sweet, nasty, precious country.’ Turgenev was born into the landowning gentry on the country estate Spasskoye-

Lutovinovo, one hundred and seventy miles from Moscow, where his childhood unhappiness was compounded by his mother’s ruthlessness with her sons and servants. He was educated at the universities of Moscow and St Petersburg. In 1838, leaving to complete his education in Germany, Turgenev  

was  

involved  

in  

a  

dramatic  

fire  

at  

sea,  

during  

which  

he  

scandalised  

 his family by offering a sailor ten thousand rubles to save his life. As he explained many years later, ‘It is quite true that nothing can compare with the  

tragedy  

of  

a  

shipwreck  

or  

a  

fire  

at  

sea  

except  

its  

comedy.’

When  

 he  

 returned,  

 ‘fizzing  

 with  

 Hegelism’,  

 Turgenev  

 began  

 a  

 career  

 in  

 the  

Russian  

civil  

service  

(1843-1845),  

but  

also  

came  

under  

the  

influence  

of  

 the  

literary  

critic  

Vissarion  

Belinsky  

and  

his  

moral  

realism.  

He  

began  

to  

 write for the liberal periodical Contemporary  

from  

1847,  

filling  

the  

editor’s  

 ‘miscellany’  

 column.  

 Here  

 Turgenev  

 provided  

 the  

 first  

 of  

 his  

 peasant  

 sketches. In 1852 he was exiled to his estate, nominally for praising Gogol in print. In that year he expanded and gathered his Sketches from a Hunter’s Album, which made his name. Though these stories are the recollections of a member of the gentry, who viewed his class with implicit criticism, what was alarmingly new was the depiction of the serfs as sentient individuals. To the armchair British reader, raised to assume individual differences in peasant and lord alike, Turgenev seems apolitical. Yet the effect of the sketches was likened to that of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in its effect on the abolition debate.

Turgenev subsequently published Rudin, Home of the Gentry and On the Eve. All were contentious to different degrees, but with the storm of criticism over Fathers and Sons, which was held to be insulting by both radicals and conservatives, Turgenev left Russia to join the famous mezzo- soprano  

Pauline  

Viardot,  

whom  

he  

had  

first  

heard  

sing  

in  

1843.  

  

He  

lived  

 with her, her accommodating husband and their children for the rest of his life,  

first  

in  

Baden-Baden  

(1862-70)  

and  

then  

in  

France  

(1871-83).  

There  

is  

 much speculation as to the real nature of this ménage à trois. As a young man Turgenev had fathered a child from a paid liaison with a seamstress in  

his  

mother’s  

service.  

A  

daughter  

was  

born,  

who  

Pauline  

Viardot  

took  

 into her family. However, there was to be no closeness between father and daughter:  

‘she  

does  

not  

like  

music,  

poetry,  

nature  

–  

or  

dogs  

–  

and  

that  

is  

 all that I like.’

The second great theme in Turgenev’s novels, plays and stories involves the dangerous nature of love, its joys and particularly its enslavements. Turgenev was always ambivalent about love. In his play A Month in the Country (1848-50) the bored Natalya Petrovna, wife of another, thinks her friend  

Rakitin  

‘too  

kind  

.  

.  

.  

you  

give  

way  

to  

me  

too  

much  

–  

you  

have  

spoilt  

 me’. For him love is torture. As he explains to her new object of interest: ‘You’ll  

 find  

 out  

 what  

 it  

 means  

 to  

 be  

 tied  

 to  

 a  

 petticoat,  

 to  

 be  

 a  

 woman’s  

 slave,  

to  

feel  

the  

poison  

in  

one’s  

veins’.  

On  

the  

other  

hand,  

in  

On the Eve, ones of his characters suggests: ‘if at this moment you were holding the hand of a woman you loved, if that hand and all of her were yours, if you even saw with her eyes and felt, not with your own lonely feelings, but with hers  

.  

.  

.  

you’d  

find  

Nature  

itself  

would  

exult  

and  

sing.’

The novels frequently end in missed opportunities to love and it is inevitable that  

biographers  

would  

see  

Turgenev’s  

ambivalence  

as  

a  

reflection  

of  

his  

 life  

 with  

 Mme  

 Viardot.  

 Yet  

 they  

 often  

 overlook  

 what  

 Leonard  

 Schapiro  

 called ‘the sublimity of agape, when once, all passion spent, that can be attained.’ Devotion to a woman seems to have meant more to Turgenev than sexual love. What is indisputable is that the writer was terminally infatuated  

with  

Viardot.  

In  

a  

letter  

he  

wrote  

to  

her  

in  

December  

1870,  

he  

 expressed it thus: ‘Your absence gives me a sort of physical feeling of fear, just as if I had lacked air to breathe.’ More colourfully, he is said to have told  

a  

friend.  

‘Even  

now,  

after  

fifteen  

years,  

I  

love  

this  

woman  

so  

much  

that  

 I am prepared to dance on the roof, stark naked and painted yellow all over, if she orders me to do so’. My own favourite is his simple declaration, ‘A day which is not lit up by your eyes is lost’. Yet we may see him, as he saw himself,  

as  

Rakitin  

and  

all  

the  

frustrated  

lovers  

in  

his  

fiction.  

While  

his  

 men  

may  

be  

superfluous  

in  

this  

sense  

too,  

his  

women  

characters  

are  

often  

 admirable and fated, like the dedicated Elena Nikolayevna of On the Eve, or Liza Kalitina of Home of the Gentry, who became revered as a symbol of Russian womanhood.

Although Turgenev’s skill in character creation is traditionally indisputable, more  

recently  

his  

definitive  

approach  

has  

had  

its  

critics.  

Vladimir  

Nabokov  

 suggested that like most authors of his time he was ‘far too explicit, leaving nothing  

to  

the  

reader’s  

intuition;;  

suggesting  

and  

then  

ponderously  

explaining  what the suggestion was.’ There is some justice in this observation, but ultimately it is a matter of taste. I am equally comfortable with Turgenev’s tendency to conventionality in exercising that old, deceptive proverb that the eyes are the windows to the soul. In Rudin the man himself has ‘a liquid brilliance in his lively dark-blue eyes’. We also learn that the social climber Pandalevsky ‘was very affectionate, solicitous, sensitive and secretly voluptuous, had a pleasant voice, was a competent pianist, and had a  

habit,  

when  

talking  

to  

someone,  

of  

literally  

transfixing  

that  

person  

with  

 his  

eyes.’  

Of  

Volyntsev  

a  

little  

later  

we  

read,  

‘In  

the  

features  

of  

his  

face  

he  

 closely  

 resembled  

 his  

 sister;;  

 but  

 there  

 was  

 less  

 playfulness  

 and  

 vivacity  

 in them and his eyes, handsome and tender though they were, somehow looked sad’. In each case, though the eyes have it, one comes away with a powerful sense of personality. I remember reading Turgenev’s novels one after another with a similar view to that expressed by the twenty three year old Isaiah Berlin, who wrote in a 1932 letter to Stephen Spender, that he was ‘reading him wildly in a sort of intoxication.’

Too great a focus on character can inhibit plot, which is why Turgenev is concise. Yet in his famous preface to The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James wrote of how his friend felt his subtlety at times was lost upon his audience:

I’m often accused of not having ‘story’ enough. I seem to myself to  

have  

as  

much  

as  

I  

need  

–to  

show  

my  

people,  

to  

exhibit  

their  

 relations  

with  

each  

other;;  

for  

that  

is  

all  

my  

measure.  

If  

I  

watch  

 them long enough I see them come together, I see them placed. I see  

them  

engaged  

in  

this  

or  

that  

act  

and  

in  

this  

or  

that  

difficulty.  

 How they look and move and speak and behave, always in the setting I have found for them, is my account of them.

There are many wonderful conversation scenes throughout Turgenev’s work which would play well on any stage. There is also an intimate understanding of the life depicted, its manners and pastimes, in which he  

can  

be  

gently  

satiric:  

‘Valentina  

Mihalovna  

flung  

the  

Revue des Deux Mondes on a little table, and leaning back on the lounge, she turned her eyes upwards and looked thoughtful, which suited her extremely’ (Virgin Soil).

When Sanin, the hero of Spring Torrents expresses his desire for the hand of her daughter Gemma, the widowed mother’s ‘transition from despair to sadness, and from sadness to quiet resignation, took place fairly rapidly’. In Smoke, we meet, ‘The poet Yazikov, who they say used to sing the praises of Bacchic revelry, sitting over a book and sipping water’. We also meet ladies ‘in whose arms Chopin died (the ladies in Europe in whose arms he expired are to be reckoned by thousands)’ and Princess Annette, ‘who would have been perfectly captivating, if the simple village washerwoman had not suddenly peeped out in her at times like a smell of cabbage wafted across the most delicate perfume’. There is more steel at times, as with the touching ingenuousness of the martyr in the story ‘Living Relic’: ‘I told the priest of it, only he said it couldn’t have been a vision, because visions are vouchsafed only to those of ecclesiastical rank.’

The other area of excellence in Turgenev’s prose is to be found in his poetic descriptions, which Nabokov called his ‘watercolours’. They are wonderfully alive to the senses. For instance, in Virgin Soil we have:

the willows rustled, gleamed, and rippled, everything was moving,  

 fluttering,  

 the  

 peewit’s  

 cry  

 came  

 whistling  

 from  

 the  

 distant slopes, across the green ravines, just as though the cry had  

wings  

and  

was  

flying  

on  

them.

In On the Eve:

They turned away from the river and proceeded along a narrow sunken path between two tall walls of golden rye, which cast a  

 blue-tinged  

 shadow  

 on  

 them  

 as  

 they  

 walked;;  

 the  

 radiant  

 sunshine seemed to be skimming along the tops of the ears of corn.

And in Spring Torrents,  

the  

author  

writes,  

‘A  

powerful,  

soporific  

scent  

 of heather, ferns, pine resin and of last year’s decaying leaves pervaded the place.’

So, this is the Turgenev that I love. I do have to remind myself that I come to his work in translation, by several hands, and inevitably therefore some of the lyrical power of his rhythms and perhaps of his outlook may have been lost. He remains charismatically coherent nevertheless, and I end

with an anecdote that gives a Russian perspective. During the German army’s rapid advance on Moscow in the Second World War, Soviet writer Ilya Ehrenburg recounted how, ‘When Turgenev’s museum was being evacuated  

from  

Orel,  

the  

curator  

had  

to  

appeal  

at  

every  

station  

for  

the  

van  

 carrying the museum material not to be uncoupled.’ Though people were at first  

angry,  

when  

the  

curator  

explained  

that  

the  

threadbare  

sofa  

was  

the  

one  

 Turgenev loved to lounge on, they relented. Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev, long may he rest.

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