Ivan Turgenev

Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev lived from 1818 to 1883 and worked as a Russian novelist, short story writer, poet, playwright, translator, and someone who helped make Russian literature known in the West. His first important publication was a collection of short stories called A Sportsman's Sketches from 1852, which marked a key moment for Russian realism. His novel Fathers and Sons, published in 1862, is considered a major work of 19th-century fiction.

Life

Turgenev was born in Oryol to noble Russian parents. His father, Sergei Nikolaevich Turgenev, served as a cavalry colonel and fought in the Patriotic War of 1812. His mother was Varvara Petrovna Turgeneva. The Turgenev family on his father's side was an old but poor aristocratic line from Tula, tracing back to the 15th century when a Tatar mirza named Lev Turgen, later baptized as Ivan Turgenev, left the Golden Horde to serve Vasily II of Moscow.

His mother came from the wealthy noble Lutovinov family of the Oryol Governorate. She had an unhappy childhood under a cruel stepfather and left his home after her mother died to live with her uncle. At age 26, she inherited a large fortune from him and married Turgenev in 1816.

Ivan and his brothers Nikolai and Sergei were raised by their mother, a well-educated and authoritarian woman. They lived at the Spasskoye-Lutovinovo family estate, which had been granted to their ancestor Ivan Ivanovich Lutovinov by Ivan the Terrible. Varvara Turgeneva later inspired the landlady in Turgenev's story Mumu.

The brothers had foreign governesses, and Ivan became fluent in French, German, and English. The family used French in daily life, even for prayers. Their father spent little time with them.

Though he was not hostile, his absence hurt Ivan, and these family relations appear in the autobiographical novel First Love. When Ivan was four, the family traveled through Germany and France. In 1827, they moved to Moscow so the children could get a proper education.

After the usual schooling for a gentleman's son, Turgenev studied for one year at the University of Moscow, then moved to the University of Saint Petersburg from 1834 to 1837, focusing on Classics, Russian literature, and philology. During this time his father died of kidney stone disease, and his younger brother Sergei died of epilepsy. From 1838 to 1841, he studied philosophy, especially Hegel, and history at the University of Berlin. He returned to Saint Petersburg to complete his master's examination.

Turgenev was impressed by German society and came home believing Russia could improve by adopting ideas from the Age of Enlightenment. Like many educated people of his time, he strongly opposed serfdom. In 1841, he began working in the Russian civil service and spent two years at the Ministry of Interior from 1843 to 1845.

As a child, a family serf read to him verses from the Rossiad by Mikhail Kheraskov, a famous 18th-century poet. Turgenev's early attempts at poetry and sketches showed talent and were praised by Vissarion Belinsky, then Russia's leading literary critic. In his later years, Turgenev did not live much in Russia; he stayed mostly in Baden-Baden or Paris, often near the family of the opera singer Pauline Viardot, with whom he had a lifelong affair.

Turgenev never married but had affairs with some of his family's serfs, one of which produced an illegitimate daughter named Paulinette. He was tall and broad-shouldered but timid, restrained, and soft-spoken. When he was 19, traveling on a steamboat in Germany, the boat caught fire.

According to rumors spread by his enemies, he acted cowardly. He denied this, but the story circulated in Russia throughout his career and became the basis for his story "A Fire at Sea." His closest literary friend was Gustave Flaubert; they shared similar social and aesthetic ideas, rejected extremist political views from both right and left, and held a nonjudgmental but rather pessimistic view of the world. His relationships with Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky were often strained, as both were upset by Turgenev's apparent preference for Western Europe.

Unlike Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, Turgenev lacked religious themes in his writing and focused more on the social side of reform. He was considered an agnostic. Tolstoy, more than Dostoyevsky, initially rather despised Turgenev.

While traveling together in Paris, Tolstoy wrote in his diary, "Turgenev is a bore." Their rocky friendship in 1861 became so hostile that Tolstoy challenged Turgenev to a duel, then apologized. They did not speak for 17 years but never broke family ties. In 1878, Tolstoy wrote to Turgenev asking for forgiveness and offering to renew their friendship, also acknowledging Turgenev's role in Tolstoy's literary fame.

Dostoyevsky parodied Turgenev in his novel The Devils from 1872 through the vain novelist Karmazinov, who tries to win favor with radical youth. However, in 1880, Dostoyevsky's Pushkin Speech at the unveiling of the Alexander Pushkin monument brought about a kind of reconciliation with Turgenev, who, like many in the audience, was moved to tears by his rival's eloquent tribute to the Russian spirit.

Turgenev occasionally visited England, and in 1879 he received an honorary Doctor of Civil Law degree from the University of Oxford.