narrow-minded father; his harsh and fierce Aunt Glafira; his idealistic and poor university friend, Mikhyalevich, who speaks nobly about the duties of landed gentry toward the country and the peasants—these figures and others are to be added to the characters of Lavretsky, Varvara, and above all Liza herself, an array of portraits that pleased the artistic reader and an espousing of ideas that pleased the social forces of the time (the model landlord for the radicals, the Russian consciousness for the Slavophiles, the profound faith and devotion, rectitude, and determination of Liza for those seeking a sociomoral message, like Turgenev’s good, religious friend Countess Elizabeth Lambert).

On the Eve

On the Eve is also relatively plotless yet sensitive in its drawing of characters; it turns one’s eyes back to the West, though the heart of the story throbs in Bulgaria through the most ideal pair of lovers Turgenev ever conceived. There is a contrast between the trifling pedantry of young Russians and the vital commitment of youth elsewhere: The elegant and superficial Pavel Yakovlich Schubin, a fine-arts student, represents the French leaning, while the awkward but good and learned Andrei Petrovich Bersenyev represents the German. Both pursue the superior and beautiful Elena Nikolaevna Strahof, an ardent and noble-minded daughter of a dissipated aristocrat and a faded society belle. Her willpower is no match for her wooers, and it is not surprising that when the Bulgarian patriot Dmitri Insarov passes through (his cause is the liberation of Bulgaria from the Turks), she falls in love with him. Both of his parents having been victims of the Turks, Insarov, though not of sound health, is regarded as the leader of the coming revolt. (The “eve” of the revolt could be the approaching Crimean War and the forthcoming reforms of Alexander II that followed that war.)

Because he returns her love, Insarov fears on the eve of the conflict that Elena is distracting him from his mission and leaves her, but she seeks him out and tells him that her idealism will make her forsake everything for him and his cause. They marry and leave for Bulgaria but get only as far as Venice before he dies. Elena follows the coffin to Bulgaria, where, having no country now, she joins the Sisters of Mercy, who act as army nurses. Turgenev said that he derived the plot outline from a manuscript handed to him by one V. V. Karataev, who left for Crimea at the outbreak of the war in 1853. It would be reading something into the novel that is not there to see in the Bulgarian Insarov a forerunner of the Russian revolutionary hero, as it would be incorrect to see in the self-sacrificing and idealistic Elena, who is reminiscent of Anita, the wife of the famous Italian patriot Giuseppe Garibaldi, whom Turgenev much admired, a prototype of the revolutionary heroine. In their own way, one religious and one secular, Liza and Elena are the same. At first, the novel disappointed the public, which expected to see the willful Russian man dedicated to a noble cause; theprotagonists pointed Westward, as it were, the way Ivan Goncharov’s active Stolz, a German, pointed away from the dreamy Russian Oblomov. Here again, however, the value of the work is better sought less in the ideological orientation than in the series of types it presented—in other words, in the characterization (for example, of Uvar Ivanovich).

Fathers and Sons

Time and again, discussion of Turgenev’s novels focused on his social concerns, relegating the artistic side of his endeavors, characterization (which, to be sure, is central to the communication of these concerns), to a secondary plane. Hence, his most famous novel, Fathers and Sons, completed in 1861, around the time of the emancipation of the serfs, and published with some modifications supposedly prompted by publisher M. N. Katkov in 1862, aroused widespread polemics about the ideological facets of the characters, particularly Bazarov, rather than about the balanced objectivity of the characterizations themselves. There is no doubt that Turgenev liked what his “nihilist” (a term that, while not coined by the author, gained currency through this novel) protagonist stood for, but there is equally no doubt that he did not like the way that he stood for it.

Evgeni Bazarov, a medical student, and his friend, Arkadi Kirsanov, stop at the latter’s provincial home after a three-year absence. The widowed father, who has taken up with a peasant girl and is a mismanaging member of the landed gentry, especially after the emancipation, lives with Arkadi’s uncle, a frustrated and intolerant ex-officer of the guard. In this sedentary, conservative atmosphere, the ineffectualness of which represented everything that the younger generation—the materialistic and utilitarian “new men and women” that Chernyshevsky (in his novel Chto delat’?, 1863; What Is to Be Done?, c. 1863) and Dobrolyubov (in his essay “Chto takoye Oblomovshchine,” 1859-1860; “What Is Oblomovism?,” 1903) praised with such ingenuous dullness—could not stand, the insolently cynical and aggressive libertarian views of Bazarov, let alone his uninhibited manner, are hardly received with smiles. In the words of his less militant friend Arkadi, Bazarov “bows before no authority and accepts no principle without examination.”

His intellectually cold and antiromantic attitude toward women shocks the old Kirsanov brothers. When the students leave the estate, however, Bazarov meets a widow at a ball, Ana Odintsova, and falls in love withher, despite much self-struggle, in the sentimental, unmaterialistic way he most despised. She eludes him; Arkadi’s admiration for his friend cools as he, too, leaves him, preferring to shape his life according to more traditional values. Now Bazarov goes to his own provincial parents (a former army doctor and an uneducated daughter of the lower nobility), lovable if rather naïve, who both love him and fear him. Through an infection sustained in a finger while performing an autopsy on a tubercular body, left unattended because of a lack of cauterizing medication as well as his own apathy, young Bazarov dies.

In the contrast between two generations, the novel divided Russia between “fathers” and “sons.” Neither group liked what it read, and both forgot about the fine lines of character, the accurate descriptions of milieus, and the impressive landscapes. The two generations looked at rebellion or not, authority or not, tradition or not, the need to live (to Live) or not, the necessity for change (progress) or not, and in so doing betrayed their desire to have things stated in black-and-white terms: The revolutionaries were scum or could do no wrong; the conservatives were dangerous regressives or the sole pillars of moral strength. Turgenev made Bazarov not sufficiently satanic for the “sons” and not sufficiently godly for the “fathers.”

Turgenev appreciated the social-minded impetus of Bazarov’s ideas, and at times he gave his protagonist moving, human touches, but he also gave the character offensive, elitist attitudes toward the “oafs” he would use to do the dirty work. Bazarov’s quixotic integrity and relentless single-mindedness under the banner of a social cause are not enough to offset his brash intemperance and lack of rational circumspection. Turgenev, like all true creators of types, drew from life synthetically, making his characters composites of what they represented. Bazarov’s brutal cynicism and his anticlimactic end, almost making him a pointless victim of his “new realism” founded on science, encouraged the interpretation that Turgenev had parodied Chernyshevsky and Dobrolyubov by caricaturing the revolutionary—an act of faithlessness in the “new men and women.” Such had not been his intent, however. Rather, his purpose had been to demonstrate the gap between generations, but more than that, on a more universal level that his immediate reading public by and large missed, to suggest the transience of all ideology—social, political, economic, even moral—in the light of the eternal and fundamental realities of love and death.

Smoke

This same stress on milieu and characterization examined at arm’s length (except for the author’s mouthpiece Potúgin), but now with an even more intensified appreciation of the natural setting, obtains in Smoke, and the same displeasure on the parts of both radicals and conservatives ensued. Turgenev’s idea of putting together a simple love story outside the homeland, in Baden-Baden, Germany, the meeting spot of the European international set, merged with a desire to follow up his observations on postreform Russia, on the biases interfering with the reform itself, the lack of depth of both revolutionaries and aristocracy, and the continuing controversy between Slavophiles and Westernizers. Too many things to say, perhaps, between the covers of one book, but Turgenev, whose career had already peaked, tried it anyway.

The love story involves the protagonist Grigóry Mikhailovich Litvinov and his former fiancé, Irína Pavlovna. Shortly before their wedding was to take place, Irína, embarrassed by her impoverished situation, and after a successful appearance at a high-society ball, jilted Litvinov and married for rank a fatuous and unattractive young general, Ratmírov. Now in Baden-Baden, Litvinov awaits the arrival of his new betrothed, his cousin Tátiana Petrovna Shestova, whose mother will accompany her. Irína is there, too, and the old love is rekindled; she and Litvinov plan to run away together—a plan that Litvinov divulges to the saddened Tátiana—but at the last moment, the general’s wife changes her mind, thus disrupting Litvinov’s life for a second time. Disconsolate, the latter returns to Russia, where his dedication to work succeeds in bringing about a reconciliation with Tátiana—unconvincing as this happy ending (unusual for Turgenev) sounds.

Innocent and naïve enough as a story, and whatever its autobiographical innuendos (the author had almost married his cousin Olga Turgeneva after a parting from Pauline Viardot in 1850), the novel hits hard at two groups of people: the hypocritical, mercenary, rabble-rousing intellectuals who call themselves radicals, and the vapid, narrow-minded bosses—the “planters”—who do not mend their ways after the emancipation as far as the serfs are concerned. In addition, a good part of the book deals with arguments quite extraneous to the story line: the long discourses by Potúgin, who upholds intransigently the Westernizing ideology as opposed to the cultural distinctiveness of Russia in which the Slavophiles believed. Aleksandr Herzen, with whom Turgenev had crossed swords and who could not embrace the Potúgin-Turgenev philosophy, ultimately seemed sympathetic to the novel (unlike publisher Katkov, who found this occasion to break away from the outspoken author), but the spiritualistically and nationalistically irritable Dostoevski found reason to be thoroughly vexed by it. The point, however, had been made: Matters Russian were enveloped in a symbolic smoke, whether in the cultural ineffectiveness inside the homeland or in its citizens’ flavorless lives in Germany. Superfluous men abounded. Turgenev had lived too long away from this homeland to understand what was going on there—this became the facile charge, obviously a weak one, since what he had to say aroused such furor and such partisan passions.

Virgin Soil

Without relinquishing his interest in portraying types, Turgenev turned to depicting the new (post-Alexander II) Russia in his longest and most complex novel, Virgin Soil, about the “going to the people” period of the mid-1870’s. At the University of St. Petersburg, there is a student, the revolutionary Nezhdánov, the illegitimate son of a nobleman. Nezhdánov earns his living as preceptor at the home of a high dignitary and self-fancying though cautious liberal, Sipyágin. There Nezhdánov meets Sipyágin’s crafty and attractive wife and a pair that shares his political persuasion: Sipyágin’s poor niece Marianna and his fanatical brother-in-law Markélov, who loves the niece, though his love is unrequited. In fact, Marianna, who dislikes the Sipyágin couple, is drawn in her quest for freedom to Nezhdánov and his revolutionary goals. He, however, is too introspective for action and unsure of those goals, even of loving Marianna. A manager of a paper factory, Solómin, an active, progressive, but practical man, shields Nezhdánov and Marianna (they have fled the Sipyágin household) from the authorities. While Markélov tries to incite insurgency, Nezhdánov distributes pamphlets and attempts ineffectually to stir up revolution, and Marianna does her share by teaching the peasants’ children. Attempts are aborted, the intellectuals are suspected by the peasants themselves, Markélov is arrested, and Nezhdánov, dramatically facing his besetting weakness—his inability to decide and to act, whether in a political or a personal context (as Leonard Schapiro has aptly said, “the tragedy of a Hamlet who longs to be a Don Quixote”—escapes arrest through suicide. Solómin and Marianna go into hiding and marry.

Turgenev’s message was not revolution, as some of his contemporaries sought to demonstrate, but rather the Solómin brand of compassionate and sober evolution, constantly, efficiently, and practically working toward a diminishing of inequality. Only the educated class, not the well-intentioned and liberal gentry, will bring about reform, unless the gentry develop a true capacity for action and self-sacrifice. Around Solómin, the novel’s hero, and the other frontline characters drift a host of secondaries—as usual, as important in the Turgenevian scheme as the primaries, for the message would lack both formation and relief without them: the homely and poor student revolutionary Mashurina, the lively but spineless Páklin (who speaks the author’s mind), the wealthy and illiberal landlord Kollomietsev, the old aristocrats Fimushka and Fomushka, Sipyágin’s beautiful man-eating wife, and many more. Again, Turgenev drew from reality, and his fundamental greatness continues today to lie in his naturalistic characterizations (alongside his stylistic and descriptive powers), without which he could not feel any confidence in his own ideas. He himself once wrote, When I do not have concrete figures before my eyes I am immediately disoriented and don’t know where to go. I always feel that an idea opposite to my own could be affirmed with equal reason. But if I speak of a red nose or of a white hair, then the hair is white and the nose is red. No dialectics will be able to alter this state of things.