Ivan Turgenev

Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev (1818–1883) was a Russian novelist, short-story writer and playwright, born in Oryol and dead in Bougival, near Paris. He wrote in Russian, but spent much of his life in Western Europe, and he is often seen as the nineteenth-century Russian author most open to European literature. His significance lies in linking Russian fiction with French, German and English readers, and in portraying with precision the young intellectuals of his generation who questioned tradition.

He was born into a comfortable landowning family. His father, a cavalry officer, died when Ivan was sixteen, and the boys were raised by a domineering mother, Varvara Petrovna, whose presence shaped the household. Some biographers argue that this childhood affected his difficulties in sustaining a stable relationship with a woman, though that remains an interpretation rather than a proven fact. He learned French, German and English from an early age. He studied in Moscow and St Petersburg and, in the late 1830s, spent several years in Berlin, where he absorbed the philosophy of Hegel. He came back convinced that Russia could advance by engaging with European ideas, and he opposed serfdom. His first poems and sketches caught the attention of Belinsky, then the most influential critic in Russia.

His breakthrough came with A Sportsman's Sketches, a set of stories drawn from his hunting trips on his mother's estate, where he watched peasants and landscape closely. After publishing a warm obituary of Gogol, he spent a month in prison and was sent to his country estate for almost two years. During this period he wrote longer tales known as povesti, among them The Diary of a Superfluous Man and Mumu, in which he voiced the doubts and hopes of his generation. His later novels, from Rudin to Fathers and Sons (1862), explore disappointment, failed love and the clash between old and young. Bazarov, the hero of Fathers and Sons, became a literary model of the nihilist. In his final years he lived more in Baden-Baden and Paris than in Russia, close to the singer Pauline Viardot, with whom he had a lasting attachment.

His closest literary friend was Gustave Flaubert. His relations with Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky were strained, partly because of his admiration for Western Europe in a period when many of his peers embraced Slavophile ideas. He died in 1883 of cancer. His legacy is twofold: he is counted among the great novelists of his century, and his restrained prose influenced European fiction; he also remains a central name in Russian schooling and one of the writers who introduced Russian literature to readers abroad.