Turgenev studied for one year at the University of Moscow (Moscow State University)
Gallery of Ivan Turgenev
7/9 Universitetskaya Emb., 199034, Saint Petersburg, Russia
Turgenev studied at the University of Saint Petersburg from 1834 to 1837, focusing on Classics, Russian literature, and philology.
Gallery of Ivan Turgenev
Ivan Turgenev in his youth. Painting by K. A. Gorbunov, 1838
Career
Gallery of Ivan Turgenev
1844
A portrait of Turgenev by Eugene Louis Lami
Gallery of Ivan Turgenev
1856
Members of the magazine "Sovremennik". Upper row: L. N. Tolstoy, D. V. Grigorovich; lower row: I. A. Goncharov, I. S. Turgenev, A. V. Druzhinin, A. N. Ostrovsky. Photo by S. L. Levitsky.
Members of the magazine "Sovremennik". Upper row: L. N. Tolstoy, D. V. Grigorovich; lower row: I. A. Goncharov, I. S. Turgenev, A. V. Druzhinin, A. N. Ostrovsky. Photo by S. L. Levitsky.
(Turgenev's first major prose work is a series of twenty-f...)
Turgenev's first major prose work is a series of twenty-five Sketches: the observations and anecdotes of the author during his travels through Russia satisfying his passion for hunting.
(Rudin is the first of Turgenev's social novels, and is a ...)
Rudin is the first of Turgenev's social novels, and is a sort of artistic introduction to those that follow, because it refers to the epoch anterior to that when the present social and political movements began.
(The guests at a party decide to tell each other about the...)
The guests at a party decide to tell each other about their first loves. When it is his turn to speak, Vladimir Petrovich decides that he would rather write down the story of his futile love for an older woman, the beautiful and capricious Zinaida Alexandrovna Zasyekina.
(Bazarov is a nihilist who scorns the purposelessness of e...)
Bazarov is a nihilist who scorns the purposelessness of everything but science—until he falls in love. His friend, Arkady Kirsanov, tries to embrace nihilism, but finally submits to the comforts of a traditional life. A depiction of the ideological divide between two generations, “Fathers and Sons” is one of the first modern Russian novels.
(A novel of haunting beauty, Spring Torrents (1870-1) is a...)
A novel of haunting beauty, Spring Torrents (1870-1) is a fascinating, partly autobiographical account of one of Turgenev's favourite themes - a man's inability to love without losing his innocence and becoming enslaved to obsessive passions.
Literary Reminiscences: And Autobiographical Fragments
(Toward the end of his career as a brilliant novelist, Tur...)
Toward the end of his career as a brilliant novelist, Turgenev turned his pen to the essays that comprise these Literary Reminiscences. Here he discusses the character of creative writing, the attitude of the artist to his environment, and the transmutation of the artist's experience into a work of art.
Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev was a Russian novelist, short story writer, and playwright. He is known as one of the greatest stylists in the Russian language, as well as a founder of the Russian realistic novel and popularizer of Russian literature in the W.
Background
Turgenev was born on November 9, 1818, at the family seat of Spasskoye in Oryol Province (modern-day Oryol Oblast, Russia); the second of three sons of Sergei Nikolaevich Turgenev, a colonel in the Russian cavalry, and Varvara Petrovna Turgeneva (née Lutovinova). The Turgenevs were old stock, dating back to a Tatar prince of the 15th century. Turgenev's father, however, was forced to marry Varvara Petrovna in order to shore up his family's sagging fortunes. It was an unhappy marriage, the handsome father constantly embroiled with mistresses, and the mother running her family as despotically as she did her estates.
Turgenev first visited Europe when he was 4 years old, when the whole family made the grand tour. His father narrowly saved Turgenev's life in Bern, where Turgenev almost fell into the bear pit.
Education
Turgenev was educated by private tutors at Spasskoye until he was 9 years old. His education at home had been conducted by German and French tutors, and was altogether foreign, his mother only speaking Russian to her servants, as became a great lady of the old school.
In 1827 he attended various preparatory schools in Moscow, entering the university there in 1833. In 1834 Turgenev transferred to the University of St. Petersburg when the family moved to the capital. The father died the same autumn. At this time Turgenev was planning to become a university professor, but he was writing poetry in his spare time. His first work, a Gothic melodrama in verse, was severely criticized by his favorite professor, P. A. Pletnyov. However, in 1838 Pletnyov published Turgenev's first poetry in Contemporary.
Turgenev took his degree in 1837, and the following spring went to Berlin University, intending to become a professor of philosophy. In Berlin, Turgenev studied Latin, Greek, and philosophy, immersing himself in the works of G. W. F. Hegel. In July 1840 Turgenev met Mikhail Bakunin, and for a whole year they lived together, arguing philosophy day and night. In 1841 Turgenev returned to Russia.
In 1879 the author was awarded the honorary degree of Doctor of Civil Law from the University of Oxford.
In 1842 Turgenev abandoned his plans for an academic career and entered the Ministry of Interior Affairs. He left the civil service - to the mutual satisfaction of both parties - after 18 months. His mother was infuriated and cut off his funds, thus forcing him to lead a rather precarious existence, complicated by the fact that everyone thought he was rich.
Turgenev met the critic Vissarion Belinsky, with whom he remained very close until the latter's death. Belinsky was instrumental in turning the young man away from vaporous poetry to greater realism and a more natural tone. Parasha (1843) showed Turgenev to be an imitative poet in these early years (especially of Aleksandr Pushkin and Mikhail Lermontov), and Turgenev later dismissed his verse as having been written before he found his true vocation.
From 1845 to 1847 Turgenev spent most of his time in Russia, plunging now into his nation's literary life, coming into contact with all its leading literary figures. In 1847 he went abroad, resolved to fight serfdom with his pen. That year he wrote the first of his Hunter's Sketches, "Khor and Kalinich", which was published in Sovremennik ("The Contemporary") magazine. He also visited Salzbrunn to comfort the dying Belinsky, but he spent most of his time at Courtavenel, the Viardot summer home where he did most of his work at this time.
In 1850 Turgenev returned to Russia, where his mother lay dying. Her death made him master of 11 estates, including Spasskoye, some 30,000 acres, with thousands of serfs. He did his best to lighten the load of these peasants, and he freed the household workers among them. In that year he wrote A Month in the Country, of all his stage pieces the one that has remained in the repertoire. A Provincial Lady was written in 1851. While Turgenev always claimed he had no dramatic talent (and he stopped writing plays in 1852), the lyrical tone of his plays has a close affinity to that of Chekhov's masterpieces, and his dramas are just as difficult to classify.
More of the Hunter's Sketches appeared at frequent intervals during these years. In many of them the serfs seemed nobler than their masters, and both master and serf seemed stunted by the institution of serfdom. The sketches angered the government. The stage for some action against Turgenev was set.
In November 1852 he wrote a laudatory article on the recently dead author Nikolai Gogol. This article was not passed by the St. Petersburg censors; Turgenev then took it to Moscow, where it was published. Its publication was regarded as a "treasonable act"; he was arrested, and after a month in prison, he was put under house arrest at Spasskoye for almost 2 years. The greatest irony was that after his arrest the collected Hunter's Sketches were published in book form. The volume created a revulsion against serfdom much greater than the separate sketches had.
During his month in prison, Turgenev wrote "Mumu," a piece called by Thomas Carlyle "the most pathetic story in the world." In 1854 Turgenev was back in St. Petersburg. He had long felt the need to experiment with a longer form and after several false starts wrote his first novel, Rudin, in 7 months in 1855 (published 1856). It was a portrait of the talky, idealistic generation of the 1840s, and many readers felt its hero was modeled on Bakunin.
Turgenev met Nikolai Chernyshevsky and Leo Tolstoy that same year; he was destined to quarrel with both. In 1856, on one of his frequent trips abroad, Turgenev met Harriet Beecher Stowe, the American novelist; the effect of Hunter's Sketches on the abolition of serfdom in Russia had often been compared to the effect of her Uncle Tom's Cabin on the abolition of slavery in the United States.
In 1857 Turgenev wrote "Assya," and he also began work on A Nest of Gentlefolk. The following year on a trip to England, he met Benjamin Disraeli, William Makepeace Thackeray, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Carlyle, and other authors. In 1859 Turgenev returned to Russia, where his A Nest of Gentlefolk had brought him great acclaim.
In the spring of that year he dusted off a manuscript given him earlier by a young soldier, Vassily Karatayev, who had felt he would not survive the Crimean War (he had died soon afterward of typhus). The manuscript was an autobiographical tale, and it served as the core for Turgenev's next major work, On the Eve. When this novel was published in 1860, it created a stir: the old and rich attacked it, and the young and radical defended it. A two-edged review of this novel by N. A. Dobrolyubov in Nikolai Nekrasov's journal, Contemporary, caused Turgenev to break with that review and its increasingly radical orientation.
The unhappiness this rupture with his old friend Nekrasov brought was compounded by a violent break with Tolstoy, who went as far as to threaten Turgenev with a duel. Turgenev declined, but the two were never truly close again. In 1860 Turgenev also endured further unhappiness caused by a literary friend. Ivan Goncharov, who had been working on his novel The Precipice (1869) for many years, often discussing it with Turgenev, accused him of stealing ideas from it for On the Eve. An informal court was set up, with three authors acting as judges. They cleared Turgenev, but he was infuriated and was never again close to Goncharov (whose paranoia later became clinical).
Part of Turgenev's pain was eased by hard work on his new novel, which, when it appeared as Fathers and Sons (1862), marked a watershed in the literary, intellectual, and political life of Russia. This novel ranks as his masterpiece. Everyone was forced to take sides on the issue of Bazarov, the book's hero, and his nihilist philosophy. Bazarov became the archetype for the generation of the 1860s; he was a socialist in politics and a scientific materialist in philosophy. Conservatives accused Turgenev of prostrating himself before the younger generation, while radicals charged him with a cruel satire of their ideals. Some felt that Bazarov was a parody of the radical critic Dobrolyubov, who had died tragically young.
In 1863 Turgenev bought a villa in Baden-Baden, Germany. In 1866 Turgenev published Smoke, a novel that offended all Slavophiles and all conservative religious opinion in Russia. Many accused him of selling out to the West, of having lost contact with his homeland. The following year he was visited by Fyodor Dostoevsky, who attacked him as a slanderer of the motherland.
At the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, Turgenev fled to England. A few months later he settled in France, first in Paris and then at his summer home on the Seine at Bougival near Paris. In these years he regularly attended dinners with Zola, Alphonse Daudet, and Maupassant. Flaubert was a particular favorite of Turgenev's. During these years Turgenev wrote several of his best-known short stories: "First Love" (1870), "A Lear of the Steppe" (1870), and "The Torrents of Spring" (1871).
In 1877 Turgenev published the novel on which he had labored for the past 6 years: Virgin Soil. It is his longest work and another of his generational studies. The story this time is of the young people of the 1870s. Fed up with the talk and empty idealism of their fathers, these young people have decided on action. The book was a best-seller in Europe, but it was condemned by all factions in Russia.
Turgenev was greatly disillusioned by the failure of this novel in Russia, and some of the pessimism thus generated crept into the short pieces he wrote in 1878 called Senilia (later entitled Poems in Prose). A new misfortune occurred the winter of the following year. Turgenev had to go to Russia, after his wealthy older brother's death, to fight for a fair share of the inheritance. But this unpleasantness soon became a blessing. Turgenev's return to his native land, where he thought he was in disgrace and discredited, turned into a triumphal procession. He made up his old literary feuds, and he was even reconciled with his uncle, Nikolai, who, as his estate manager, had almost ruined him. Turgenev was feted day and night.
In 1880 Turgenev returned to Russia for the unveiling of the Pushkin Memorial in Moscow. In the same year he wrote one of his most beautiful stories, "The Song of Triumphant Love." The following year he published most of the Poems in Prose and wrote the ghostly love story "Clara Milich." The prose poems that he felt to be too intimate were not published by his wish until 1930.
Turgenev was considered to be an agnostic, as he lacked religious motives in his writings, representing the more social aspect to the reform movement.
Politics
Like his close friend Gustave Flaubert, Turgenev rejected extremist right and left political views, and carried a nonjudgmental, although rather pessimistic, view of the world.
Views
Turgenev poured into his writings a deep concern for the future of his native land. He lived in Western Europe for most of his life and admired the advancements of the Western civilization. Thus he believed that Russia could best improve itself by incorporating ideas from the Age of Enlightenment. Like many of his educated contemporaries, he was particularly opposed to serfdom and in his works focused on the social and political troubles brewing in Russia. In his masterpiece "Fathers and Sons" (1862) Turgenev presented a man of the new generation, an educated and open-minded medical student Basarov, in a conflict with the old generation of 'fathers', who are standing for the ultra-conservative Russia.
Quotations:
"If we wait for the moment when everything, absolutely everything is ready, we shall never begin."
"We sit in the mud, my friend, and reach for the stars."
"Nothing is worse and more hurtful than a happiness that comes too late. It can give no pleasure, yet it deprives you of that most precious of rights - the right to swear and curse at your fate!"
"I was afraid of looking into my heart...afraid of thinking seriously about anything...I did not want to know whether I was loved, and I did not want to admit to myself that I was not loved..."
"As we all know, time sometimes flies like a bird, and sometimes
crawls like a worm, but people may be unusually happy when they do not
even notice whether time has passed quickly or slowly."
"I don't see why it's impossible to express everything that's on one's mind."
"So many memories and so little worth remembering, and in front of me — a long, long road without a goal..."
"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."
"Nature cares nothing for logic, our human logic: she has her own, which we do not recognize and do not acknowledge until we are crushed under its wheel."
"A poet must be a psychologist, but a secret one: he should know and feel the roots of phenomena but present only the phenomena themselves in full bloom or as they fade away."
"I'm incapable of describing the feeling with which I left. I wouldn't want it ever to be repeated, but I would have considered myself unfortunate if I'd never experienced it."
"However passionate, sinning, and rebellious the heart hidden in the tomb, the flowers growing over it peep serenely at us with their innocent eyes; they tell us not of eternal peace alone, of that great peace of "indifferent" nature: they tell us, too, of eternal reconciliation and of life without end."
"So long as one's just dreaming about what to do, one can soar like an eagle and move mountains, it seems, but as soon as one starts doing it one gets worn out and tired."
Personality
Ivan Turgenev was a writer of remarkable detachment, possessed of cool and sometimes ironic objectivity. The author was not a man of grand passions, although the love story was to provide the most common formula for his fiction, and a love for the renowned singer Pauline Viardot.
Turgenev was at one time one of the most famous hunters in Russia. His uncle Nikolai Turgenev, a recognized expert in horses and hunting dogs, instilled a love for hunting into the future writer. He was engaged in raising a boy during his summer holidays in Spassky. Turgenev was also taught the hunting business by A. I. Kupfershmidt, whom the author considered his first teacher. Owing to him, Turgenev already in his youthful years could call himself a rifle hunter. Even Ivan’s mother, who had previously thought of hunters as idlers, embraced her son’s hobby. Over the years, the hobby has grown into a passion. It happened that he did not let the gun out of his hands all seasons long, he proceeded thousands of miles across many provinces of central Russia. Turgenev said that hunting in general is peculiar to the Russian man.
Physical Characteristics:
Turgenev was a man of large and impressive physique - he was known in France as "that Russian giant" - and had a handsome face and great charm. All his life Turgenev had been a hypochondriac; in 1882 real symptoms appeared. He was afflicted with cancer of the spine and died on September 3, 1883.
Quotes from others about the person
"The conscious use of art for ends extraneous to itself was detestable to him. .. He knew that the Russian reader wanted to be told what to believe and how to live, expected to be provided with clearly contrasted values, clearly distinguishable heroes and villains. Turgenev remained cautious and skeptical; the reader is left in suspense, in a state of doubt: problems are raised, and for the most part left unanswered" – Isaiah Berlin, Lecture on Fathers and Children
"His first important book, A Sportsman's Sketches, revealed to the world two things: the dawn of a new literary genius, and the wretched condition of the serfs. This book has often been called the Uncle Tom's Cabin of Russia; [...] It is interesting that Uncle Tom's Cabin and A Sportsman's Sketches should have appeared at about the same time, and that emancipation in each country should have followed at about the same interval..." - William Lyon Phelps, Essays on Russian Novelists
"Our author first made a name by his striking sketches "The Papers of a Sportsman" (Zapiski Okhotnika), in which the miserable condition of the peasants was described with startling realism. The work appeared in a collected form in 1852. It was read by all classes, including the emperor himself, and it undoubtedly hurried on the great work of emancipation." - William Richard Morfill
"Unquestionably Turgueniev may be considered one of the great novelists, worthy to be ranked with Thackeray, Dickens and George Eliot; with the genius of the last of these he has many affinities. His studies of human nature are profound, and he has the wide sympathies which are essential to genius of the highest order. A melancholy, almost pessimist, feeling pervades his writings, a morbid self-analysis which seems natural to the Slavonic mind. The closing chapter of 'A Nest of Nobles' is one of the saddest and at the same time truest pages in the whole range of existing novels." - William Richard Morfill
Interests
hunting
Philosophers & Thinkers
G. W. F. Hegel
Connections
Turgenev never married, but had several relationships throughout his life. In 1842 while carrying on a high-flown platonic romance with one of Mikhail Bakunin's sisters, Tatyana, Turgenev entered into an earthier alliance with Avdotya Ivanov, one of his mother's seamstresses which resulted in the birth of a daughter, known in later life as Paulinette.
In 1843 Turgenev met the woman with whom he struggled for the rest of his life. Pauline Viardot-Garcia belonged to a talented Spanish family of gypsies. When Turgenev first saw her, she was well on her way to becoming the reigning mezzo-soprano in European opera. She was considered by many unattractive, but her voice was remarkable, and she was a great actress. Turgenev saw her during a tour in St. Petersburg and fell immediately in love. A curious relationship began that ended only with Turgenev's death in her arms.
She was married to Louis Viardot, a man 20 years her senior, a director of the Italian Opera in Paris, but her marriage was no complication because her husband was extremely permissive. The problem lay in Pauline herself, who, unlike many other women, was not especially attracted to Turgenev. She had many affairs with other men, never entering into an exclusive alliance with Turgenev, even though he devoted much of his life and fortune to her, and even though she, as well as her husband and children, lived with Turgenev for years.
While Turgenev's life had always, since 1843, been bound up with Pauline Viardot-Garcia, their relationship was not a simple one in which he gave only unalloyed worship to the diva. The two had many fights but always reconciled, even long after Pauline had lost her voice and was more or less dependent upon Turgenev. He had other mistresses and even contemplated marriage with other women. During the tumult of his acclaim in 1879 he found time to pay court to an actress, the young and beautiful Maria Savina.
Turgenev: His Life and Times
This work is a graceful and meticulous portrayal of the artist’s life―the personal and intellectual preoccupations of the man as he thought and formed opinions about contemporary events.
1982
Turgenev: A Biography by the Author of Chekhov
An in-depth portrait of a Russian literary genius explores the darker side of Turgenev's privileged childhood--the impoverished lives around him and a violent mother--which resulted in both a compassionate nature and a compulsion to be dominated.
The Edge of The Nest: The Solitude of Ivan Turgenev
This fictional biography, solidly founded on historical and literary research, explores Turgenev's life and work – from his childhood, dominated by his tyrannical mother, to his last years, in the tender care of Pauline Viardot, the Franco-Spanish diva who was the love of his life.