TURGENEV, IVAN SERGEEVICH. - Russian writer, b. at Orel on 28 Oct. 1818, d. on 22 Aug. 1883 at Bougival in France. He spent a great part of his life in France and in Germany and is generally considered the most "Western" of Russian writers.
This definition, which derives in part from Dostoevsky's polemic against him, in part from the very limpid clarity of his stories, has nevertheless often been reduced to commonplaces: it suffices, in this regard, to think of the fine and profound descriptions of Russian nature and of the Russian soul contained in A Sportsman's Sketches, which is perhaps his most perfect work.
He was in contact with numerous Western men of letters of his time. His work as a narrator is vast. Alongside novels and stories that enjoyed very wide circulation and fame throughout the world, such as A Nest of Gentlefolk and Fathers and Sons, one must recall some of his most delicate and perfect works, such as First Love, Torrents of Spring, The Song of Triumphant Love and Poems in Prose. A most refined narrator, he nevertheless had the stimulus to follow attentively the developments of cultural and political life in Russia, and this interest of his took concrete form in works such as Fathers and Sons and Virgin Soil, in which, alongside artistically remarkable pages, the accent of immediate journalistic inquiry sometimes predominates. To T. goes the creation of the term "nihilist", to designate the new Russian revolutionary generation that was maturing and that passionately appealed to formulas taken from rationalism and materialism, from utilitarianism and socialism. Sincerely humanitarian and democratic, T. collaborated abroad, for a certain time, with Herzen. Fathers and Sons, however, brought him into conflict with the "young generation", which accused him of having deliberately created a caricatural character in the figure of Bazarov. In Dostoevsky's nationalist vision, T. appeared on the other hand as the great Russian gentleman who polemicized from the West against his own country, living off the fruits of that "serfdom" which he deplored. Now that these opposing polemics have long since subsided, T. is considered one of the greatest Russian writers, an almost unsurpassed master of the Russian language, a narrator particularly felicitous and profound when he detaches himself from the temptation of inquiry. He was wholly balanced, and kept himself far from the Russian formulas of "realism", as from all the schemas that were gaining ground among the intellectual youth of his country. Characteristic is his position of respect and criticism at the same time, in the face of Belinsky.
Bibliography
Wolf Giusti