Ivan Turgenev

Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev (????? ??????j???? ?????????, November 9, 1818, Orel, Russia - September 3, 1883, Bougival, near Paris, France ) was a major Russian novelist and playwright. Although his reputation has suffered some setbacks during the last century, the novel Fathers and Sons should still be regarded as one of the defining works of the 19th-century fiction.

First works

Turgenev first made his name with the striking sketches A Sportsman's Sketches (??????? ????????), also known as Sketches From a Hunter's Album or Notes of a Hunter, in which the deplorable conditions of the peasants was described with mild realism and deeply poetic compassion. Based on the author's own observations while sport hunting birds and hares in his mother's estate of Spasskoye, the work appeared in a collected form in 1852. It was read by all classes, including the Russian Czar himself, and it undoubtedly hastened the emancipation of the serfs. Turgenev had always sympathized with the muzhiks; he had often witnessed the cruelties of his mother, a narrow-minded and vindictive woman. According to Nabokov and Tolstoy, A Sportsman Sketches contain the finest pages ever written by Turgenev.

Related Topics:
A Sportsman's Sketches - 1852 - Emancipation - Nabokov - Tolstoy

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In 1852, between Turgenev's Sketches and his first important novels, he wrote his now notorious obtiuary to his idol Gogol in the St. Petersburg Gazette. The key passage reads: '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 censor of St. Petersburg did not approve of this idolotry and banned its publication, but Turgenev managed to fool the Moscow censor into printing it. These underhanded tactics landed the young writer in prison for a month, and he was forced into exile at his estate for nearly two years.

Related Topics:
Gogol

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His next work was A Nest of Nobles (?????????? ??????)in 1859, and was followed the next year by On the Eve (????????), a tale which contains one of his most beautiful female characters, Helen. 'On the Eve'(of reform), with Turgenev's portrayal of Bulgarian Revolutionary Dmitri, would have been very exciting politically to many contemporaneous readers.

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In 1862 Fathers and Sons (???? ? ????)was published, an admirably-structured novel in which the author famously described the revolutionary doctrines then beginning to spread in Russia. His ledgendary character and formulaic nihilist Basarov is heralded by many as one of the finest characters of the 19th Century novel. Although many contemporary critics consider it a classic, unfortunately 19th Century Russian critics did not take to "Fathers and Sons." The stinging criticism, especially from younger radicals, deeply disappointed Turgenev and he wrote very little in the years following Fathers and Sons.

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