Turgenev's hunting sketches helped turn Russia against serfdom
Ivan Turgenev (1818–1883) made his name with A Sportsman's Sketches (1852), stories drawn from hunts around his mother's Spasskoye estate. He judged that book his chief gift to Russian letters; it is credited with swaying opinion toward abolishing serfdom in 1861.
Born 9 November 1818 in Oryol to cavalry colonel Sergei and wealthy, authoritarian Varvara Lutovinova—who controlled over 500 serfs and inspired the landlady in Mumu—Turgenev grew up at Spasskoye-Lutovinovo with French household speech and German, English, and French fluency. After Moscow and Saint Petersburg study, he read Hegel in Berlin (1838–1841), returned opposing serfdom and favoring Enlightenment reform, and briefly served in the Interior Ministry. He never married; an affair with a family serf produced daughter Paulinette. Lifelong attachment to singer Pauline Viardot pulled him toward Baden-Baden and Paris more than Russia.
Early praise from critic Vissarion Belinsky steered him from Romanticism toward sociological realism. A banned-then-printed Gogol obituary in 1852 cost him a month in prison and nearly two years' estate exile—time used to write Mumu, about a deaf-mute peasant forced to drown his dog. Novels followed in a cluster—Rudin in 1856, the gentry-nest tale in 1859, On the Eve in 1860, and Fathers and Sons in 1862—the last ranked among nineteenth-century fiction's majors. Themes of failed idealism, early love, and frustrated desire mirrored Viardot and his mother's grip. Unlike Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, he wrote without religious motive and was considered an agnostic.
Friendships were stormy. Tolstoy once called him a bore in a Paris diary, challenged him to a duel in 1861, then fell silent for seventeen years before a forgiving 1878 letter that also credited Turgenev with boosting Tolstoy's fame. Dostoyevsky mocked him as vain Karmazinov in The Devils (1872) yet moved him to tears in the 1880 Pushkin Speech. Oxford gave him a Doctor of Civil Law in 1879; in 1878 he vice-chaired a Paris literary congress beside Victor Hugo. He died 3 September 1883 at Bougival of complications from metastatic liposarcoma; his brain weighed 2,012 grams. On his deathbed he urged Tolstoy back to literature—after which Tolstoy wrote The Death of Ivan Ilyich and The Kreutzer Sonata.
Source: Ivan Turgenev
