Turgenev by Edward Garnett

At this date, 1847, Russia, long prostrate beneath the drill sergeants of that "paternal" autocrat Nicholas I.,[12] with the lynx-eyed police rule, servile press and general atmosphere of bureaucratic subservience stupefying the country, was slowly awakening to the new ideas of reform. Grigorovitch's novel _The Village_ (1846), which painted the wretched life of the serfs, marked the changing current of social ideas, but to Turgenev was to fall the honour of hastening "the Emancipation. " There is perhaps a little exaggeration in this eloquent passage of M. de Vogüé: "Russia saw its own image with alarm in the mirror of serfdom held towards it. A shiver passed through the land: in a day Turgenev became famous, and his cause was half won. I have said that serfdom stood condemned in everybody's heart, even in the Emperor Nicholas's. " But we are assured by Turgenev himself that Alexander II. 's resolution to abolish serfdom was due in no small part to _A Sportsman's Sketches_.

The old generation in fact was soon to pass away with Nicholas's rule. As the sketch "The Peasant Proprietor Ovsyanikov" demonstrates, to this old race of landowners, frankly despotic in their manners, was succeeding a milder class -- one which "did not like the old methods," but was ineffective and self-distrustful. And it was to this younger Russia in silent protest against the "official nationalism" prescribed by the ministers of Nicholas, and against the stagnation of provincial life which Gogol had satirized so unsparingly in _Dead Souls_ (1842), that Turgenev made his appeal with his first sketch "Hor and Kalinitch" in the magazine _The Contemporary_. Turgenev's reputation was made, and Byelinsky, who declared that Turgenev was "not a creator but a painter of realities," immediately predicted his future greatness.