Ivan Turgenev

Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev (1818–1883) was born on his family’s estate at Oryol, in central Russia, into the provincial gentry — the class whose decline and moral dilemmas he would chronicle with unmatched delicacy. He became the first Russian novelist to achieve a major international reputation, the writer who introduced Russian literature to Western Europe, and the author of Fathers and Sons (1862), one of the most perfectly constructed novels of the nineteenth century.

Life and Career

Turgenev’s mother, Varvara Petrovna, was a wealthy landowner of legendary cruelty who tyrannised her serfs and her children in equal measure — she became the model for various domineering women in his fiction. He was educated at Moscow and St. Petersburg, then at the University of Berlin, where he absorbed German Idealism and fell under the spell of Hegel. The Berlin years confirmed his Westernising orientation: Turgenev believed that Russia’s future lay in adopting European institutions and values, a conviction that put him at odds with the Slavophiles and the radicals alike.

Zapiski okhotnika (A Sportsman’s Sketches / Sketches from a Hunter’s Album, 1852) — a collection of stories depicting Russian peasants with sympathetic individuality — was his first major work. Alexander II reportedly said the book helped persuade him to emancipate the serfs in 1861. The Russian authorities, less pleased, arrested Turgenev and confined him to his estate for eighteen months.

His six novels — Rudin (1856), A Nest of the Gentry (1859), On the Eve (1860), Fathers and Sons (1862), Smoke (1867), and Virgin Soil (1877) — form a sequence that tracks the intellectual and political currents of Russian life across three decades with an acuity that is simultaneously novelistic and historical.

Fathers and Sons (1862) is his masterpiece. The character of Bazarov — the young nihilist who rejects all authority, all tradition, all sentiment, and who is destroyed by an accidental infection while performing an autopsy — is one of the great creations of world fiction. The novel defined the concept of nihilism for an entire generation and provoked furious responses from both conservatives and radicals, each of whom felt misrepresented.

Turgenev spent most of his adult life abroad — in Baden-Baden and Paris — near Pauline Viardot, the mezzo-soprano with whom he was in love for forty years. Their relationship (she was married; her husband tolerated the arrangement) is one of the great enigmatic love stories of the nineteenth century. He was a close friend of Flaubert, the Goncourts, George Sand, Henry James, and Daudet. He died in Bougival, near Paris, on 3 September 1883.

Major Works and Themes

Turgenev’s subject is the conflict between generations, between idealism and reality, between the old Russian gentry and the new intelligentsia. His novels are shorter and more perfectly shaped than those of Tolstoy or Dostoevsky — he was a miniaturist by temperament, and his natural form was the novella and the sketch.

First Love (1860) is perhaps his most emotionally powerful work — a novella about a sixteen-year-old’s infatuation that contains one of the most devastating revelations in Russian fiction.

The Tolstoy-Turgenev Quarrel and the Question of Scale

Turgenev’s complicated relationship with Tolstoy illuminates the fault lines of Russian literature. The two met in the 1850s and immediately recognised each other as rivals. Their temperaments were antithetical: Turgenev was cosmopolitan, ironic, aesthetically fastidious, and emotionally restrained; Tolstoy was parochial, dogmatic, formally expansive, and emotionally volcanic. In 1861, they quarrelled violently at a dinner party — Tolstoy challenged Turgenev to a duel (it did not come off) — and did not speak for seventeen years.

The quarrel had artistic significance. Turgenev believed that the novel should be short, shaped, and precise — that form was a moral discipline. Tolstoy believed that the novel should include everything — that formal perfection was a kind of lie, a refusal to confront the messiness of life. The argument was never resolved, and Russian literature was the richer for it. Turgenev’s influence runs through Chekhov, Henry James, and the tradition of the well-made novel; Tolstoy’s runs through Proust, Joyce, and the tradition of encyclopedic fiction.

Dostoevsky, the third member of the great triad, disliked Turgenev personally (they quarrelled over money and over the Smoke controversy) but recognised his artistry. The three of them — Turgenev the Westerner, Dostoevsky the Slavophile mystic, Tolstoy the prophet — between them created the nineteenth-century Russian novel, and the tensions among their visions are the tensions of Russian culture itself.

Critical Reception and Legacy

Turgenev was the most admired Russian writer in the West during his lifetime — Henry James revered him as “the novelist’s novelist.” His reputation in Russia declined after his death, overshadowed by Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, and his liberal gradualism seemed inadequate to the revolutionary century that followed. His critical stock has risen again: Fathers and Sons is now recognised as one of the supreme political novels, and his influence on the form of the short novel — the compressed, perfectly shaped narrative that says more in two hundred pages than most writers manage in six hundred — is increasingly acknowledged.

Key Works

• A Sportsman’s Sketches (1852)
• Rudin (1856)
• A Nest of the Gentry (1859)
• First Love (1860)
• Fathers and Sons (1862)
• Smoke (1867)
• Virgin Soil (1877)

Collecting Turgenev

Russian first editions published in St. Petersburg and Moscow are the primary targets.

Zapiski okhotnika (1852, first collected edition) and Ottsy i deti (Fathers and Sons, 1862) are the two most important titles. Russian-language first editions of the novels bring $1,000–$5,000.

English translations — particularly Constance Garnett’s versions (Heinemann, 1890s–1900s) and the later Penguin Classics translations by Rosemary Edmonds — are the secondary market. Henry James’s critical prefaces to the English translations of Turgenev are collected as landmarks of literary criticism.

Turgenev’s autograph letters — in Russian and French — surface at European auction houses. Letters to Flaubert, James, or Viardot command the highest premiums.