Turgenev by Edward Garnett

"All my life is in my works," said Turgenev, and his biographers' account of his education and youth reveals how it was that from the age of twenty-three Turgenev was to become both an interpreter of the Russian mind to Europe and an interpreter of Western culture to his countrymen. His father, Sergey Ivanovitch, a handsome, polished officer of impoverished but ancient family, married an heiress, Varvara Petrovna Lutovinov, and their eldest son, Ivan Sergeyevitch, was born, October 28, 1818, at Orel, in central Russia. The natural loathing of the soft, poetic and impulsive boy for tyrannical harshness was accentuated by his parents', especially by his mother's, severity, unmerited whippings and punishments being his portion in the "noble and opulent country-house" at Spasskoe, where foreign tutors and governesses succeeded one another quickly.

That Turgenev had before his eyes from his childhood in his capricious and despotic mother a distressing object-lesson of a typical Russian vice, viz. unbridled love of power, could only deepen his instinct for siding with weak and gentle natures. Turgenev's psychological penetration into hard, coarse and heartless characters, so antithetic to his own, seems surprising till we learn that the unscrupulous and cruel "Lutchinov," the hero of _Three Portraits_, was drawn from a maternal ancestor. From the Lutovinov family, cruel, despotic and grasping, Turgenev no doubt inherited a mental strand which enabled him to fathom the workings of hardness and cruelty in others. The injustice and humiliations he and his brothers, along with a large household of dependents, suffered at Madame Turgenev's hands,[4] early aroused in him a detestation of the system of serfdom.