Ivan Turgenev

Ivan Turgenev (1818-1883), Russian author, considered the foremost stylist in Russian literature; his novels, poems, and plays are characterized by elegant craftsmanship, lucidity, and a liberal point of view.

Turgenev was born November 9, 1818, in Orel in central Russia and educated at the universities of St Petersburg and Berlin. On his family estates, while still a child, he first witnessed the mistreatment and suffering of the serf class; such abuse, widespread in the Russian economic system, eventually became a recurrent theme in his writings. Before turning to a literary career, Turgenev worked for a short time as a minor civil servant in St Petersburg. His first published work, the long poem Parasha (1843), was well received by literary critics. Through the next few years the publication of several of his short stories established Turgenev as a significant Russian writer. He became involved in the ideological controversy between two groups of intellectuals known as the Westernizers and the Slavophiles. The Westernizers urged Russians to better their lives by incorporating into them the best aspects of European culture. The Slavophiles, rigidly Orthodox, championed native Russian customs and believed that they should remain untainted by foreign influences. Turgenev's sympathies lay decidedly with the Westernizers. Later, he spent long periods of time outside Russia, often mainly to be near the celebrated opera singer Pauline Viardot-Garcia, whom he loved. After 1871 he remained in Paris, coming into contact with other writers such as George Sand, Gustave Flaubert, Émile Zola, and Henry James. He died near there, at Bougival, September 3, 1883.

Turgenev wrote plays, stories, novels, and non-fiction sketches. He had published several poems and prose sketches before the appearance of his first book, A Sportsman's Sketches (1852), a collection of stories of Russian peasant life. Of the many plays he wrote early in his career, the finest is probably A Month in the Country (1850), a gentle but penetrating study of aristocratic life, still frequently performed. Of his stories or short novels, First Love (1860) and Torrents of Spring (1872) are notable as lyric, beautifully realized, though pessimistic, evocations of love. His longer novels include On the Eve (1860) and Smoke (1867), both portraits of passionate young girls and their stormy love affairs. In his greatest novel, Fathers and Sons (1862), Turgenev names, defines, and analyses the philosophy of nihilism; Bazarov, the hero of the novel, is an idealistic young radical, a commoner and a university student, dedicated to universal freedom and destined for tragedy in his own life. Turgenev believed to a certain extent in the goals of his hero, but he also believed that they could be achieved only through a long period of gradual change rather than by revolution.