Turgenev

Turgenev by Edward Garnett (1917)

Edward Garnett's study defends Ivan Turgenev against detractors—chiefly Maurice Baring and Russian critics echoed by Haumant and Brückner—who claimed Turgenev's vision was "weak and narrow" beside Tolstoy's, his understanding "cold and shallow" beside Dostoevsky's, and his characters mere "book-characters" or caricatures compared with the "real" figures of his rivals. Garnett rebuts these charges point by point: that Turgenev's serene, classical artistry (compared to Corot, to Greek sculpture) is mistaken for narrowness; that Bazarov and Rudin, far from being conventional, are irreplaceable syntheses of their era's tendencies, corroborated as true by contemporaries like Kropotkin and Stepniak; that Turgenev's nature descriptions (illustrated at length from "A Tour in the Forest") are dismissed unjustly as merely decorative; and that Turgenev's declining Russian reputation after 1867 stemmed from partisan politics—Slavophil and radical factions alike demanding his art serve their causes—rather than from any real aesthetic deficiency. The essay then traces Turgenev's life and work chronologically. Born 1818 at Orel to a domineering mother, Varvara Petrovna, whose cruelty toward serfs and household shaped his lifelong hatred of tyranny, he studied in Moscow, Petersburg, and Berlin, absorbing German philosophy and Western culture. His debut collection, *A Sportsman's Sketches* (1847–51), sympathetically portraying serfs and landowners, is credited with hastening the Emancipation of 1861; Garnett analyzes sketches like "Yermolai and the Miller's Wife," "The Singers," and "Raspberry Spring" to show how Turgenev fuses human drama with the vast indifference of nature. Garnett then surveys the six major novels. *Rudin* (1855) portrays the eloquent but ineffectual idealist of the 1840s, exposed when his rhetoric fails Natalya at the crucial moment, yet redeemed by his final, futile death on a Paris barricade. *A House of Gentlefolk* (1859) contrasts the worldly Varvara Pavlovna with the self-sacrificing Liza, who enters a convent after Lavretsky's wife reappears. *On the Eve* (1859) centers on Elena, who chooses the Bulgarian patriot Insarov over Russian suitors Shubin and Bersenyev—read by Garnett as an allegory of Young Russia's yearning for a "man of action," with Uvar Ivanovitch symbolizing Russia's slumbering national character. *Fathers and Children* (1862) introduces Bazarov, the Nihilist who provoked violent controversy from both reactionaries and radicals; Garnett interprets him as science's "bare mind" applied to politics, dying almost accidentally from a wound acquired while dissecting a corpse, his father crying "I rebel, I rebel!" at his deathbed. *Smoke* (1867), set among Russians at Baden, satirizes both revolutionary and reactionary parties through Litvinov and the seductive Irina. *Virgin Soil* (1877), Turgenev's last novel, depicts the "going to the people" movement through Nezhdanov's failure and Marianna's self-sacrificing commitment, closing on the phrase "Anonymous Russia." Garnett also surveys Turgenev's shorter tales (*Mumu*, *First Love*, *A Lear of the Steppes*, *The Torrents of Spring*, *A Living Relic*, *Phantoms*) and the late *Poems in Prose*, quoting several in full ("The Sparrow," "The Rose") to demonstrate Turgenev's concentrated lyrical style. The final section covers Turgenev's cosmopolitan later years among French writers (Flaubert, Maupassant, Renan), his devotion to Pauline Viardot, his relations with Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, his generosity toward fellow writers, and his death from spinal cancer at Bougival in 1883, attended by his famous letter urging Tolstoy back to literature. Garnett closes with Renan's funeral oration and reflections—updated in a postscript—on how the 1917 Russian Revolution vindicated Turgenev's political foresight.

By Edward Garnett · First published 1917 · Genre: Biography, Literary Criticism, History · 11 chapters · 45,899 words

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A writer, Mr. Robert Lynd, has said: "It is the custom when praising a Russian writer to do so at the expense of all other Russian writers. It is as though most of us were monotheists in our devotion to authors, and could not endure to see any respect paid to the images of the rivals of the gods of the moment. And so one year Tolstoy is laid prone as Dagon, and another year, Turgenev. And no doubt the day will come when Dostoevsky will fall from his huge eminence."

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Biography · Literary Criticism · Russian Literature · 19th Century · Novelists · Writers · Intellectuals · Romanticism · Realism · Philosophy · Psychology · Character Analysis

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