Ivan Turgenev

• 1. Introduction

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  Ivan Turgenev had a brain that weighed 2,012 grams, one of the largest ever recorded. The man who carried it was tall and broad-shouldered, yet timid, restrained, and soft-spoken. He was a Russian novelist, short story writer, poet, playwright, translator, and a popularizer of Russian literature in the West. He was born in Oryol in 1818 and died near Paris in 1883. Across those sixty-five years he wrote a short story collection that helped turn public opinion against serfdom, and a novel whose central character would later be called the first Bolshevik in Russian literature. He spent much of his later life far from his homeland, often near a celebrated opera singer he loved for the rest of his days. How did a child read to by a family serf become a writer whom Henry James and Joseph Conrad preferred to Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky? Why did one obituary land him in prison, and why, on his deathbed, did he beg Leo Tolstoy to return to literature?

• 2. The Estate And The Mother

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  Spasskoye-Lutovinovo was the family estate where Turgenev grew up, granted to an ancestor, Ivan Ivanovich Lutovinov, by Ivan the Terrible. His mother, Varvara Petrovna Turgeneva, was an educated, authoritarian woman who raised Ivan and his brothers Nikolai and Sergei. She had endured an unhappy childhood under a tyrannical stepfather and left his house after her mother's death to live with her uncle. At age 26 she inherited a huge fortune from that uncle, and in 1816 she married Sergei Nikolaevich Turgenev, a colonel in the Russian cavalry who had taken part in the Patriotic War of 1812. His father came from an old but impoverished family of Tula aristocracy. That line traced back to the 15th century, when a Tatar mirza named Lev Turgen, baptized as Ivan Turgenev, left the Golden Horde to serve Vasily II of Moscow. Foreign governesses taught the boys, and Ivan became fluent in French, German, and English. The family used French in everyday life, even for prayers. The father spent little time with them, and although not hostile, his absence hurt his son, a strain captured in the autobiographical novel First Love. Varvara controlled over 500 serfs with the same strict demeanor she used to raise her children, and she later inspired the landlady in Turgenev's story Mumu.

• 3. A Mind Shaped Abroad

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  From 1838 until 1841, Turgenev studied philosophy, particularly Hegel, and history at the University of Berlin. Before that he had attended the University of Moscow for a year, then the University of Saint Petersburg from 1834 to 1837, focusing on Classics, Russian literature, and philology. During those Saint Petersburg years his father died of kidney stone disease, and his younger brother Sergei died of epilepsy. German society impressed him deeply. He returned home convinced that Russia could best improve itself by incorporating ideas from the Age of Enlightenment, and like many educated contemporaries he opposed serfdom. In 1841 he began a career in the Russian civil service, spending two years at the Ministry of Interior from 1843 to 1845. When he was a child, a family serf had read him verses from the Rossiad of Mikhail Kheraskov, a celebrated poet of the 18th century. His early poems and sketches were favorably spoken of by Vissarion Belinsky, then the leading Russian literary critic, who defended sociological realism in literature. Following Belinsky's thinking, Turgenev abandoned Romantic idealism for a more realistic style, and he portrayed the critic himself in Yakov Pasinkov in 1855.

• 4. The Sketches And The Sentence

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  A Sportsman's Sketches drew on Turgenev's observations of peasant life and nature while hunting in the forests around his mother's estate of Spasskoye. Most of its stories appeared in a single volume in 1852, with others added in later editions. The book is credited with influencing public opinion in favor of the abolition of serfdom in 1861. Turgenev himself considered it his most important contribution to Russian literature, and Tolstoy agreed wholeheartedly, calling his evocations of nature unsurpassed. One of its stories, known as Bezhin Lea or Byezhin Prairie, later became the basis for the controversial film Bezhin Meadow in 1937, directed by Sergei Eisenstein. In 1852 Turgenev wrote an obituary for Nikolai Gogol, meant for the Saint Petersburg Gazette. Its key passage read: "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 Saint Petersburg censor banned it, but the Moscow censor allowed publication in a newspaper there. The censor was dismissed, yet Turgenev was held responsible, imprisoned for a month, and exiled to his country estate for nearly two years. During that exile, in 1854, he wrote Mumu, about a deaf and mute peasant forced to drown his dog, the only thing in the world that brought him happiness. John Galsworthy later said of it, "no more stirring protest against tyrannical cruelty was ever penned in terms of art."

• 5. Hamlet, Don Quixote, And Bazarov

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  Eugene Bazarov, the leading character of Fathers and Sons, has been called the first Bolshevik in Russian literature. The novel appeared in 1862 and is regarded as one of the major works of 19th-century fiction. It examined the conflict between an older generation reluctant to accept reforms and the nihilistic youth, with Bazarov drawn as a classical portrait of the mid-nineteenth-century nihilist. The story was set during a six-year period of social ferment, from Russia's defeat in the Crimean War to the Emancipation of the Serfs. Earlier, between 1853 and 1862, Turgenev had written the first four of his novels: Rudin in 1856, A Nest of the Gentry in 1859, On the Eve in 1860, and Fathers and Sons. Rudin tells of a man in his thirties unable to put his talents and idealism to use in the Russia of Nicholas I. On the Eve, written in 1859 after Alexander II ascended the throne in 1855, portrays the Bulgarian revolutionary Insarov. In 1860 Turgenev delivered a speech in Saint Petersburg titled "Hamlet and Don Quixote," picturing man torn between the self-centered skepticism of Hamlet and the idealistic generosity of Don Quixote. Dostoyevsky, just back from exile in Siberia, was present, and eight years later wrote The Idiot, whose hero Prince Myshkin resembles Don Quixote. Turgenev's Spanish, learned through Pauline Viardot and her family, was good enough that he considered translating Cervantes into Russian. Hostile reaction to Fathers and Sons prompted his decision to leave Russia, and most radical critics, with the notable exception of Dimitri Pisarev, did not take it seriously.

• 6. Rivals And Reconciliations

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  "Turgenev is a bore," Leo Tolstoy wrote in his diary while the two traveled together in Paris. Their rocky friendship turned to such animosity in 1861 that Tolstoy challenged Turgenev to a duel, then apologized afterward. The two did not speak for 17 years, yet never broke family ties. Turgenev's relations with both Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky were often strained, partly because they were dismayed by his seeming preference for Western Europe. Unlike them, he lacked religious motives in his writing and was considered an agnostic, representing the more social side of the reform movement. Dostoyevsky parodied him in the 1872 novel The Devils through Karmazinov, a vain novelist anxious to ingratiate himself with radical youth. The publication of Smoke in 1867 had already triggered a quarrel with Dostoyevsky in Baden-Baden. Yet in 1880, Dostoyevsky's Pushkin Speech at the unveiling of the Alexander Pushkin monument brought a reconciliation of sorts. Turgenev, like many in the audience, was moved to tears by his rival's eloquent tribute to the Russian spirit. His closest literary friend was Gustave Flaubert, with whom he shared social and aesthetic ideas; both rejected extremist right and left views and held a nonjudgmental, rather pessimistic outlook. He was also close in temperament to Theodor Storm, the North German poet and master of the novella.

• 7. Viardot And The Years Abroad

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  Pauline Viardot, a celebrated opera singer, shaped much of Turgenev's later life. He lived either at Baden-Baden or Paris, often near her family, and the two shared a lifelong affair. He never married, though he had some affairs with his family's serfs, one of which produced his illegitimate daughter, Paulinette. When he was 19, traveling on a steamboat in Germany, the boat caught fire. His enemies spread rumours that he had reacted in a cowardly manner. He denied them, but the rumours followed him for his entire career and gave him the basis for his story "A Fire at Sea." His move to Western Europe in 1854 came as Tsar Nicholas I's stifling climate drove thousands of Russian intellectuals abroad, among them Alexander Herzen, though for Turgenev the decision had more to do with his love for Viardot than anything else. He occasionally visited England, and in 1879 the University of Oxford conferred on him the honorary degree of Doctor of Civil Law. His last substantial work on contemporary Russian society, Virgin Soil, appeared in 1877, and his autumnal years also produced Torrents of Spring, King Lear of the Steppes, The Song of Triumphant Love, the Poems in Prose, and "Clara Milich," which ran in the journal European Messenger.

• 8. The Largest Brain On Record

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  In January 1883, an aggressive malignant tumor, a liposarcoma, was removed from Turgenev's suprapubic region. By then it had metastasized into his upper spinal cord, causing intense pain through his final months. On the 3rd of September 1883 he died of a spinal abscess, a complication of the metastatic liposarcoma, in his house at Bougival near Paris. His remains were taken to Russia and buried in Volkovo Cemetery in St. Petersburg. On his deathbed he pleaded with Tolstoy, "My friend, return to literature!" Afterward Tolstoy wrote such works as The Death of Ivan Ilyich and The Kreutzer Sonata. Turgenev's artistic purity made him a favorite of the next generation. Henry James wrote no fewer than five critical essays on his work, calling his merit of form of the first order in 1873 and praising his "exquisite delicacy" in 1896. Joseph Conrad, like James, greatly preferred him to Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. Vladimir Nabokov, who praised his "plastic musical flowing prose" but faulted his "labored epilogues," called him a pleasant rather than great writer and ranked him fourth among nineteenth-century Russian prose writers. Isaiah Berlin acclaimed his commitment to humanism, pluralism, and gradual reform over violent revolution as the best of Russian liberalism, the same writer whose readers, Berlin noted, were left in suspense, with problems raised and for the most part left unanswered.