Ivan Turgenev World Literature Analysis
Nineteenth century Russia was divided by a cultural debate between Slavophiles and Westerners. Slavophiles were conservatives who tended to regret the effort of Peter the Great to impose the culture and technology of Western Europe on his people. They believed that Russia was different from the West and superior in that difference. Westerners were liberals who were deeply troubled, if not simply contemptuous, of autocratic repression, which they saw most obviously displayed by the serf system, which effectively made chattels of the peasant class. They favored a reordering of Russian society that would liberate the serfs and establish a constitutional monarchy, if not a people’s democracy. In this debate, Turgenev sided with the Westerners.
His position and how he expressed it in his art were not readily apparent except for his obvious dislike of serfdom. Turgenev’s inclination to a moderate view may be related to the paradoxes in his character. He was a tall, well-made, handsome man who was generally harmless in his relations with women; he seems not to have had much passion in his life despite his attachment to Pauline Viardot. He was a very gentle person who loved shooting game birds. He lived in Western Europe much of the time but almost always wrote of his homeland and native people. Because he saw many sides to life, he could not create stories that would satisfy zealots. He could not divide the world into bad people and good people, but this did not keep him from believing that Russia would be made better by liberal reform.
In January, 1860, Turgenev published the essay “Gamlet i Don Kikhot” (“Hamlet and Don Quixote,” 1930) in the Contemporary Review. He expresses the thought that the world comprises passive, introspective, ineffectual Hamlets and active, energetic, outward-looking Don Quixotes. He suggested that the Russian problem was too many Hamlets and not enough Don Quixotes, that something in the national character kept Russia from realizing its potential, but it is tempting to see these observations as Turgenev’s unwitting revelation of himself. Whether he was consciously dominated by strong women throughout most of his life is a question to be debated but never finally answered. That he wrote fictions that included irresolute men who are perhaps not strong enough for the women whom they desire seems obvious.
In fact, most of Turgenev’s novel-length works are studies in character, which tends to encourage a psychoanalytical approach in reading them critically. It does well to remember that Turgenev also wrote plays, for his stories contain more drama than adventure. People gather in a parlor or garden and talk to one another. Characters enter and exit the scene. Then some of the characters move to another location where the same pattern is repeated, with new characters added to replace those who have been left behind. This pattern repeats until the reader reaches the end of things, which is usually a failed love relationship (A House of Gentlefolk, The Torrents of Spring) or a death (On the Eve, “A Lear of the Steppes”) or both (Fathers and Sons).
What gives Turgenev’s stories their interest is the clarity with which he presents his characters and the subtlety of detail by which he makes them individuals. When Turgenev began a novel, he constructed biographies of his characters and became intimately familiar with them. By this method, he was able to create convincing portraits of that part of Russian society in which he lived, particularly the Russian gentry who, it seemed to him, were becoming increasingly irrelevant as the world changed. His novels make clear that...
(This entire section contains 1845 words.)
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he was aware of the larger world and that he had opinions about it, but the people who drew his attention were those who did not quite fit, who were superfluous. The thought that members of Russia’s leisured class were largely superfluous had been around since the time of Alexander Pushkin’s verse novelEvgeny Onegin (1825-1832, 1833; Eugene Onegin, 1881).
Except for A Sportsman’s Sketches and “First Love,” most of Turgenev’s fiction employs a third-person narrative voice, which takes the reader into thoughts and feelings of a multiplicity of characters. This technique also promotes impressionistic description of the external world, the look of characters and the Russian landscape that they inhabit. For that matter, Turgenev’s first-person narratives are effectively descriptive, but when the story is told by a person within the action itself, nothing more comprehensive than the awareness of that single figure may be included. The author is bound by the narrative vehicle and denied the power of selection that sometimes makes great art.
The point to be made is that Turgenev was an artist. His novels and short stories are frequently cited as examples of the “art” of fiction. Seeing as he did the complexities of life, Turgenev did not incline to a single vision of the human condition that would have given him status as a thinker, but he ranks high among writers of his time for the artistry with which he created his fiction.
A Sportsman’s Sketches
First published: Zapiski okhotnika, 1852 (English translation, 1855)
Type of work: Short stories
Hunting for game birds in the Russian countryside, a member of the gentry has repeated encounters with the humble, frequently mistreated peasant class.
A Sportman’s Sketches effectively describes the stories that constitute the collection. They do not always express the concentration of elements toward the resolution of a clearly defined plot that readers associate with modern short stories. In one of the most famous pieces, “Bezhin lug” (“Bezhin Meadow”), the sportsman-narrator loses his way while hunting. At dusk, he stumbles into a camp of peasant boys who have brought horses out to graze in the cool night air. He sits among them, listens to their ghost stories, and leaves them at dawn with a sharpened sense of them as individuals rather than faceless members of the peasant class.
In “Ermolaj i melnichikha” (“Yermolai and the Miller’s Wife”), the sportsman-narrator hunts with a serf named Yermolai, who seems to have a clandestine relationship with Arina, the miller’s wife. Only toward the end of this sketch does Anna’s story materialize. She was taken to St. Petersburg to be maid to her master’s wife. When she fell in love with Petrushka, the footman, and asked for permission to marry him, she angered her mistress (who would not tolerate the inconvenience that a married servant might entail) and was banished to the countryside, where she now lives in a loveless marriage, dependent on Yermolai for the little happiness that she has.
For all of his sympathy with the peasants, Turgenev is faithful to the realities of the world that he depicts. In “Pevtsy” (“The Singers”), the sportsman wanders into a desolate village where two peasants are about to engage in a singing contest at the local tavern. When the singing begins, the contestants prove by their efforts that beauty can be found even in the voice of a simple peasant, but when the sportsman passes the tavern again at evening, everyone is drunk. In “Biryuk,” the forester Biryuk is harsh with the luckless peasant that he has caught cutting a tree before he finally lets him off, but Biryuk, a handsome, vigorous man, has had his own bad luck, for his wife ran away with a traveling peddler. One of Turgenev’s finest stories, “Zhivye moschi” (“Living Relics”), was not added to A Sportsman’s Sketches until 1874. Seeking shelter from a rainstorm, the sportsman enters a rude hut where he encounters Lukerya, once the most beautiful servant on his family’s estate. Yet shortly before she was to be married, Lukerya injured herself in a fall, and for seven years she has wasted away toward death, patiently and devoutly submitting to her bitter fate.
When A Sportsman’s Sketches appeared in 1852, Nicholas I was still czar of Russia, and direct criticism of his regime was not permitted. Turgenev’s “sketches” were perhaps as effective as anything in their time in bringing the plight of Russia’s underclass to the attention of a literate public.
Fathers and Sons
First published: Ottsy i deti, 1862 (English translation, 1867)
Type of work: Novel
Evgeny Bazarov, a nihilistic disciple of scientific materialism, dies after cutting himself at a carelessly performed autopsy.
Fathers and Sons is probably Turgenev’s most famous work. It addresses ideas of the period more directly than most of his other works and creates debate over these ideas as a conflict of generations. The novel’s story is simple enough. Arkady brings his friend Evgeny Bazarov home with him at the end of his university studies. Home is a country estate occupied by Arkady’s father, Nikolai Petrovich (who is a widower), his uncle Pavel Petrovich, Fenichka (a young woman living under Nikolai’s protection), and Mitya, the son whom Fenichka has borne to Nikolai. Nikolai considers himself a progressive; Pavel cultivates the manner of an English aristocrat. Conflict develops when these middle-aged men enter into discussion with Bazarov, who rejects all authority but the evidence of scientific materialism and regards art with amused contempt.
Presently, Arkady and Bazarov pay a visit to town. They meet Sitnikov and Kukshin, a foolish young man and woman who pose as radical intellectuals. Then, at a governor’s ball, they meet a young widow, Anna Sergeyevna Odintsov, and her younger sister Katya. Arkady and Bazarov are both smitten by Madame Odintsov and visit her at her country estate. When Bazarov declares his passion to Madame Odintsov, he is rejected. He then takes Arkady to visit his parents, traditionalists who belong to the modest gentry. Bazarov is an only child, deeply loved by his gentle, countrified parents.
After a time, Bazarov and Arkady revisit the Kirsanov estate, where Bazarov and Pavel Petrovich fight a nonfatal duel over a misunderstanding about Fenichka. Bazarov and Arkady visit Odintsov again, and now it is clear that Arkady is attracted not by Anna Sergeyevna but by her sister, Katya, a pretty but conventional (and marriageable) young woman.
Bazarov returns to his parents. He assists his father, a retired army doctor, in medical proceedings. One day, he participates in an autopsy on a man who has died of typhus. He cuts his finger, neglects to disinfect the cut, and dies of typhus. As the novel concludes, Arkady and his father unite with Katya and Fenichka in a double wedding.
Fathers and Sons caused controversy in Russia at the time of its appearance. Conservatives thought Turgenev was too sympathetic toward Bazarov. Radicals thought that he was not sympathetic enough and resented Bazarov’s dying while his friend Arkady settled into the conventional happiness of marriage and life on his father’s estate. Turgenev claimed sympathy with his ill-fated hero, declaring that he agreed with Bazarov on everything but his view of art. Yet it is difficult not to see that Bazarov is a half-willing suicide, and this leads the reader to question whether Bazarov himself does not recognize that, without love, which is hardly an element of scientific materialism, life is a dreary business.