Turgenev, Ivan Sergeyevich

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TURGENEV, IVAN SERGEYEVICH

(1818–1883), Russian novelist, playwright, and poet.

Turgenev was born into an extremely wealthy family on an estate with 500 serfs near Oryol, in the Mtsensky uezd, in central European Russia. His mother, a tyrannical shrew, savagely beat her serfs and her sons and despised all things Russian. The family spoke only French in the home. His father was an attractive and dissipated rake. Turgenev's childhood nurtured in him an animosity toward the institution of serfdom and a profound understanding of the culture of rural, aristocratic culture of pre-Reform Russia—the very cultural wellspring from which so many of the characters in his novels were to emerge.

Turgenev is nearly universally mentioned, along with Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Leo Tolstoy, as one of the great masters of the psychological novel, although Turgenev himself disparaged more than once the emphasis on psychological analysis that marks the works of the other two members of that triumvirate. Turgenev further distinguished himself from Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky by beginning his career as a poet: his first major work was the long poem Parasha, published in 1843—a year before Dostoyevsky's entrée into literature and nearly a decade before Tolstoy's. Parasha was followed by a handful of other significant verse works, though Turgenev later wrote that he felt a nearly physical antipathy toward his verse works.

Although his poetry was enthusiastically received by Vissarion Belinsky, the leading literary critic of the time, Turgenev's first work of lasting influence was a series of sketches of what Turgenev knew first-hand from his childhood: the manorial, rural, and peasant milieus. The brief, episodic descriptions were initially published separately, beginning in 1847, and then as a single work, A Huntsman's Sketches, in 1852. The work exercised a profound influence on the public that is often likened to that of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, published the same year. Turgenev's work is one of the highest artistic quality—exquisite, tightly crafted descriptions of the physical world combined with engaging and complex portraits of peasants (generally positively portrayed) and gentry (generally negatively portrayed).

Beginning soon after the death of Nicholas I in 1855, Turgenev, always sensitive to the winds of change, wrote his four most significant novels: Rudin (1856), Home of the Gentry (sometimes translated, more literally, as Nest of Gentlefolk ) (1859), On the Eve (1860) and Fathers and Sons (more precisely Fathers and Children ) (1862). All are penetrating chronicles of the quickly shifting alliances, mores, and institutions that marked the initiatory period of the Great Reforms, with all its optimism and surety of a brighter future. The greatest of these, Fathers and Sons, depicts the intergenerational conflict between the liberal men of the 1840s, with their refined, European (more specifically, Gallic) sensibilities and an inclination toward incrementalism in social and political change; and the new people of the younger generation, nihilists (a word Turgenev brought into coinage), men of science who embraced German-inflected positivism, disparaged aesthetics per se, and believed in the creative potential of destruction. The older generation

found Turgenev's portrait of their brethren dismissive and patronizing, and the younger generation found their reflection insulting and patronizing. Turgenev, criticized from nearly every political angle, responded by quitting Russia for Western Europe. From his refuge in Baden-Baden, Turgenev wrote Smoke (1867), a venomous satire that attacked, inter alia, the radicalized intelligentsia in exile, the Europeanized Russian aristocracy, and the conservative Slavophiles.

Poems in Prose, Turgenev's final work, sealed his reputation as the first Russian stylist. The final poem famously praises the Russian language as great, powerful, truthful, and free, a tribute perhaps nowhere truer than when the Russian words flowed from Turgenev's own pen. He died near Paris in 1882, and, according to his wishes, his body was transported back to St. Petersburg where it was interred in perhaps the largest public funeral in Russian history.

See also: dostoyevsky, fyodor mikhailovich; golden age of russian literature; tolstoy, leo nikolayevich