Ivan Turgenev

Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev was born in 1818 on his mother's estate at Spasskoye-Lutovinovo, in the Russian province of Oryol. His mother Varvara was a wealthy and notoriously cruel landowner who beat her serfs and her sons with impartial regularity; Turgenev's lifelong hatred of serfdom — the institutional backbone of the Russia he grew up in — was rooted in what he watched her do on the estate. He was educated at the universities of Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Berlin, where he absorbed German philosophy and came back a convinced Westernizer, persuaded that Russia's future lay in joining European civilization rather than cultivating a mystical Slavic destiny.

He made his name with A Sportsman's Sketches (1852), a cycle of stories framed as the field notes of a hunter wandering the Russian countryside but actually a quiet, devastating portrait of peasant life under serfdom. The book is plausibly credited with helping push Tsar Alexander II toward the Emancipation of 1861; Turgenev was briefly arrested and exiled to his estate over the obituary he wrote when Gogol died, but the Sketches were allowed to circulate. He followed with a series of short novels — Rudin (1857), On the Eve (1860) — that established his subject: the educated, ineffectual Russian gentleman, full of fine sentiments and incapable of action, set against women of greater moral seriousness than the men who fail them.

Fathers and Sons (1862) is his masterpiece and the book that ruined his standing in Russia for nearly a decade. The novel turns on Yevgeny Bazarov, a young provincial medical student who calls himself a nihilist — Turgenev did not invent the word but he made it a category, attaching it permanently to the generation of the 1860s — and who rejects on principle art, sentiment, religion, the gentry, the peasantry's superstitions, and most of what the older generation in the novel holds dear. The book was attacked from the right as an apology for revolutionary youth and from the left as a caricature of it. Turgenev, wounded by the reception, spent most of the rest of his life abroad.

He had spent much of his adult life abroad already. In 1843 he had heard the Spanish mezzo-soprano Pauline Viardot sing in St. Petersburg and attached himself to her household — she, her husband Louis, and eventually their children — for the rest of his life, following them to Baden-Baden and then to Paris, in an arrangement that was almost certainly not consummated and that he never seriously tried to break. He wrote Spring Torrents (1872) and the late, melancholy Virgin Soil (1877) from European hotels and the Viardots' guest rooms.

His friendships with the other titans of the Russian novel curdled. He quarreled bitterly with Dostoevsky, who caricatured him as the cringing Westernizer Karmazinov in Demons (1872); he and Tolstoy stopped speaking for seventeen years over a misunderstanding at a country house, then reconciled at the end. He died of spinal cancer near Paris in 1883. Henry James, who knew him, called him "the novelist's novelist" — meaning that the technical reticence and structural economy that look effortless on the page were the product of a working life devoted, almost monastically, to the craft.