By Bergotte
Ivan Turgenev is the poet of the moment that has already passed. His novels and stories are pervaded by a melancholy so precise and so gracefully carried that it takes time to recognise it as a philosophical position rather than a temperamental one. But it is a position: the claim that the human condition is defined above all by our relationship to time and its losses, that we understand what mattered to us only after it has gone, that the gap between what we felt and what we managed to say or do about it is one of the permanent structures of a life. He is the Russian writer who most completely absorbed the European literary tradition, who wrote with a Frenchman’s economy and an Englishman’s reserve, and who used those borrowed instruments to say something distinctly and irreducibly his own: that life is beautiful and brief and that we are, most of us, not quite equal to it.
The Space Between Two Worlds
Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev was born in 1818 in Oryol, in central Russia, the second son of a cavalry officer and a wealthy landowner whose estate at Spasskoye-Lutovinovo would haunt his imagination for the rest of his life. His mother, Varvara Turgeneva, was a woman of considerable intelligence and considerable cruelty — she ran her estate with a serf-owning tyranny that her son witnessed from childhood and never forgot, and the Sportsman’s Sketches, his first major work, drew directly on the human cost of serfdom he had observed growing up. He was educated in Moscow and St Petersburg, then at the University of Berlin, where he absorbed the German idealist philosophy — Hegel above all — that shaped the intellectual generation to which he belonged. He spoke French, German, and English with native fluency. He was, in a sense that no other major Russian writer quite was, a European.
The love of his life was the Spanish opera singer Pauline Viardot, whom he met in 1843 and pursued, with a devotion that his friends found baffling and his critics have sometimes found pathetic, for forty years. He spent much of his adult life in the orbit of the Viardot household — in France, in Baden-Baden, in Paris — living in a proximity to a woman who was another man’s wife that satisfied something in him and frustrated everything else. He returned to Russia periodically, but Russia increasingly felt foreign, and the Russian literary world, which had celebrated him and then turned on him, never entirely forgave him for preferring Europe. He died in Bougival, outside Paris, in 1883, of spinal cancer, with Pauline Viardot at his side. Tolstoy, who had quarrelled with him violently in person and admired him enormously in print, wept when he heard the news.
This biography is the ground of the work in the most direct possible sense. The man who lived between two worlds — between Russia and Europe, between an impossible love and its impossibility, between the reforming impulse and the aesthetic temperament that made sustained political engagement difficult — wrote fiction about characters who are similarly suspended, who stand at the threshold of action and do not cross it, who feel everything and do not quite manage to do anything with what they feel. This is not a limitation. It is a precise description of a recognisable human experience, rendered with a honesty and a beauty that only a writer who had lived it from the inside could achieve.
The Sportsman’s Sketches and the Education of Attention
The work that made Turgenev’s reputation was also his most politically consequential: the Sportsman’s Sketches, published as a collection in 1852, a series of loosely connected stories narrated by a hunter wandering through the central Russian countryside, recording his encounters with the peasants he meets. The political impact was enormous — Alexander II later said the sketches contributed to his decision to emancipate the serfs in 1861, and Turgenev was briefly arrested and exiled to his estate after the collection’s publication, ostensibly for an obituary of Gogol but plausibly for the subversive humanity of the sketches themselves.
What made them subversive was not polemic but attention. Turgenev did not argue that serfs deserved freedom. He showed them as people — as individuals with specific faces, specific memories, specific ways of talking and thinking, specific inner lives of considerable richness and complexity. The story Khor and Kalinich opens the collection by presenting two peasants of entirely different character — one practical, earthy, patriarchal; the other romantic, musical, dreaming — with the same precise individuality that the Russian literary tradition had previously reserved for the nobility. The political claim is made entirely through the quality of the attention. To see another person this clearly is already to have conceded that they are fully human, and the full humanity of serfs in a serf-owning society was, in its way, a revolutionary proposition.
This attention — patient, specific, free of sentimentality and free of condescension — is the technical and moral foundation of everything Turgenev wrote. His landscape descriptions have been celebrated since the nineteenth century as among the finest in Russian prose, and they work because the natural world in his fiction is never backdrop. It is the standard against which human life is measured, and the measurement is rarely in humanity’s favour. A meadow at dawn in a Turgenev story carries a fullness, a sufficiency, a complete indifference to human drama that makes the human drama look both more poignant and more small. Nature does not share our urgencies. It was here before us and will be here after, and the beauty it offers is real but it is not offered to us specifically — it is simply there, and we happen to be in it, temporarily.
Rudin and the Superfluous Man
Turgenev’s first novel, Rudin, published in 1856, takes the figure that Pushkin had introduced in Onegin and examines him with a more explicitly sociological and generational intelligence. Dmitri Rudin arrives at a provincial estate full of eloquence, idealism, and philosophical passion. He inspires everyone around him, falls in love with the daughter of the house, proposes a meeting that would require courage and commitment — and fails to appear. He leaves, as he has always left. He spends the rest of his life in a series of projects begun with brilliance and abandoned before completion, until the novel’s epilogue places him on a revolutionary barricade in Paris in 1848, dying with a red flag in his hand — uselessly, incomprehensibly, in a revolution not his own, in a country not his own, for reasons that the novel declines to make entirely clear.
The question the novel asks is the question that haunts all of Turgenev’s fiction: what is the relationship between the capacity to feel and imagine and the capacity to act? Rudin is not a hypocrite. His feelings are genuine. His eloquence is the authentic expression of a mind that has thought deeply about the human situation and found it moving. What he lacks is not sincerity but the ability to translate sincerity into action under the specific pressures of a specific moment, and this lack — so easy to observe from outside, so invisible from inside — is the defining characteristic of the superfluous man as Turgenev understands him.
The term had been in circulation since the 1840s, and Turgenev had written an essay titled The Diary of a Superfluous Man in 1850, but Rudin is where the type achieves its fullest and most sympathetic examination. Rudin is superfluous not because he is worthless but because the world has no mechanism for using what he has to offer — or rather, because the translation from the inner life to the outer act requires something that his education in ideas has not equipped him with. He is the product of a generation formed by German idealism and French romanticism, trained to think about humanity in the abstract, helpless before the specific human being who needs something from him now.
Turgenev’s own relationship to Rudin is complicated and honest. He recognised himself in the type — recognised the gap between his own eloquence and his own capacity for action, the years of circling Pauline Viardot’s life without ever quite taking the step that would have defined his relation to it. The novel does not simply satirise Rudin. It mourns him, and mourns what the social and intellectual conditions of his time made of a man who might, in different circumstances, have been adequate to his own gifts.
Fathers and Sons
Fathers and Sons, published in 1862, is Turgenev’s most celebrated and most argued-over novel, and the one in which the human condition argument achieves its most complex and most politically charged expression. Bazarov, the novel’s protagonist, is a nihilist — or rather, he is the first literary character to use the word of himself — a young medical student who believes in nothing that cannot be dissected, who dismisses art and philosophy and romantic love as sentimentality, who insists that the task of his generation is to clear away the accumulated mystifications of the old order before anything new can be built. He is rude, brilliant, charismatic, and absolutely convinced that his programme is correct.
He falls in love with Anna Odintsova, a wealthy widow of considerable intelligence who finds him fascinating and keeps him at a distance that she understands and he does not, and the love — unexpected, unwanted, contradicting everything he has said he believes — does not transform him in the way that love transforms characters in lesser novels. It exposes him. It reveals that the nihilism was, at least in part, armour: a defense against precisely the vulnerability that Odintsova’s indifference now forces upon him. He cannot dismiss what he feels because what he feels is inconveniently real, and his framework gives him no tools for dealing with real things that resist analysis.
He dies, in the end, of typhus contracted during a post-mortem examination — an accident so bathetic and so arbitrary that its effect is almost comic, and then, on reflection, devastating. The great nihilist, the man who rejected all the consoling fictions of religion and romance and social tradition, dies of a cut finger in a provincial town, tended by the parents he had condescended to and loved in spite of himself, and the last thing he asks for is to see Odintsova. She comes. The scene is brief and terrible in its restraint. He dies. The novel ends with a description of the country graveyard where he is buried, and the wild flowers growing over his grave, and a question — Turgenev’s own — about whether the flowers are signs of eternal reconciliation or simply flowers.
The controversy the novel produced on publication was immediate and intense. The radical left accused Turgenev of caricaturing Bazarov as a way of dismissing the nihilist generation. The conservative right accused him of glorifying him. Turgenev, characteristically, maintained that he had simply tried to draw a true portrait, and the evidence of the novel supports him. Bazarov is neither satirised nor celebrated. He is seen — with the full attention that Turgenev had been practising since the Sportsman’s Sketches, the attention that grants each person the full complexity of their actual situation without arranging that situation to serve a predetermined conclusion.
What the novel says about the human condition, beneath and beyond the generational and political argument, is something more permanent: that the ideological systems through which we organise our understanding of life are always insufficient to life itself, that the real always exceeds the theory, and that the moment of that excess — the moment when the nihilist feels what he has said he cannot feel — is simultaneously the most humanising and the most painful moment a person can experience.
First Love and the Education of Loss
The shorter fiction is where Turgenev is most purely himself, most free of the social and political obligations that give the novels their historical weight and occasionally their argumentative heaviness. First Love, published in 1860, is the work he said was closest to his own experience, and it is among the most beautiful and most honest accounts of adolescent desire ever written.
Vladimir, narrating from middle age, recalls the summer of his sixteenth year when he fell in love with Zinaida, a young woman of twenty who lived in the neighbouring house and who treated his devotion with a mixture of affection and amusement that was its own kind of cruelty, though not an intentional one. The story’s turn — its revelation — is that the man Zinaida actually loves, the man she submits to with a completeness that bewilders and frightens the adolescent narrator, is his own father. He witnesses, without fully understanding, a relationship conducted at a pitch of adult passion that his own love, however genuine, cannot approach. His father strikes Zinaida on the arm with his riding crop and she kisses the weal. The image is incomprehensible to the boy and entirely legible to the man telling the story, and the gap between the two comprehensions is where the story lives.
What First Love says about the human condition is something that only the retrospective form — the middle-aged narrator recovering the summer — can say: that experience is not fully available to us at the time of its occurrence, that we live through things we do not understand and understand them only when they are gone and we are different people than the ones who lived through them. This is not a failure of intelligence or sensitivity. It is a structural feature of being in time — of the fact that understanding requires distance, and distance requires loss, and by the time we understand what something was, it is no longer there to benefit from the understanding.
Asya, Spring Torrents, Mumu — the shorter fiction returns again and again to this structure of belated understanding, of the person who sees clearly only in retrospect what was required of them in the moment. The young men in these stories are not villains. They are ordinary people who fail the moments they are given — who hesitate, who calculate, who consider consequences when what was required was simply to act — and who spend the rest of their lives knowing it. The stories do not punish them beyond this knowledge. The knowledge is sufficient punishment, and it is also, Turgenev insists with great precision, the most common form of suffering that ordinary life produces: not the grand catastrophe but the small, irrecoverable failure of nerve at the moment that mattered.
The Women
Turgenev’s women are more fully alive than his men, and the disproportion is deliberate. His heroines — Elena in On the Eve, Liza in A Nest of Nobles, Marianna in Virgin Soil, Zinaida in First Love, Asya in the story of the same name — are consistently more capable of decisive feeling, more willing to commit to what they love regardless of consequence, more morally serious and more practically courageous than the men who fail them. This is not sentimentality about female virtue. It is a consistent and unsentimental observation about the social conditions of his time: that the men of his generation, formed by idealism and constrained by social calculation, had developed their capacity for feeling at the expense of their capacity for action, while the women — excluded from the public sphere where action was rewarded and punished — had retained a directness of feeling and a willingness to stake everything on it that the men had educated themselves out of.
Elena, in On the Eve, falls in love with Insarov, a Bulgarian revolutionary committed to the liberation of his country, precisely because he is a man of action in a world of talkers. She leaves her comfortable Russian life to follow him, and when he dies before reaching Bulgaria she continues alone, carrying his work forward, disappearing into history. The novel presents her choice without irony and without sentimentality. She does what the moment requires and it costs her everything. The novel’s point is that this is what genuine love — genuine commitment to something outside the self — looks like, and that the Russians around her are not capable of it, not because they are worse people but because their social formation has made them specialists in feeling without action.
Liza, in A Nest of Nobles, is the most spiritually serious of the heroines and the one whose fate is most directly Turgenev’s comment on the Russian situation. She loves Lavretsky, a man who discovers that his apparently dead wife is alive, and her response to the impossibility of their love is to enter a convent — not in grief or defeat but as the logical conclusion of a spiritual seriousness that has always been her defining characteristic. Turgenev treats her choice with complete respect. He does not argue for or against it. He shows, with great precision, the inner life from which the choice issues, and the result is one of the most moving portrayals of religious vocation in secular fiction.
The Poems in Prose
The late Poems in Prose, written in the last years of his life and published in 1882, are where Turgenev’s vision of the human condition finds its most compressed and most undefended expression. They are short prose meditations — some only a paragraph, none more than a few pages — on the themes that had occupied him throughout his career: love and its passing, the indifference of nature, the smallness of human life against the scale of time, the necessity of courage in the face of mortality.
The Russian Language, the most famous of them, consists of a single paragraph: a declaration that in days of doubt and difficult thought about Russia’s destiny, only the Russian language sustains him — great, powerful, truthful and free. It has been quoted as patriotism, as consolation, as a dying man’s last affirmation. It is all of these, and it is also a statement about what language can carry when everything else has given out: that the instrument itself, the medium through which experience has been given form, retains a value independent of any particular use to which it has been put, that the faithfulness of the writer to the language is its own form of hope.
The Sparrow is the one that cuts deepest for the human condition argument. A hunting dog approaches a fallen nestling. A sparrow drops from a tree and places itself between the dog and the chick, ruffling its feathers, making itself as large as it can manage, knowing it is far smaller than the dog and unable to prevent what is coming. The dog stops, surprised, and retreats. The narrator calls the dog off and walks away, thinking about love — about the small creature that threw itself against its own fear in defense of something it loved, and about the force that compelled it to do so, which was stronger than its instinct for self-preservation. Love, Turgenev writes, is stronger than death and the fear of death. Only by it, only by love, is life held together and sustained.
This is the human condition according to Turgenev, stated at its simplest and most direct in the final years of a life spent circling it at an elegant distance. The elegies, the retrospective narrators, the hesitant young men, the decisive women, the landscapes that carry on regardless — all of it has been in the service of this recognition: that what holds life together, what gives the brief and passing thing its value, is the willingness to place yourself between what you love and what threatens it, even when you are very small and the threat is very large and the outcome is not certain.
What Remains
Turgenev’s reputation has oscillated more widely than almost any other writer of comparable stature. In his lifetime he was the Russian writer whom Europe knew — the friend of Flaubert and George Sand and Henry James, the author whose work was read in translation across the continent while Dostoevsky and Tolstoy were still relatively unknown abroad. After his death, as Dostoevsky and Tolstoy came to define the Russian tradition in the Western imagination, Turgenev receded — seen as minor by comparison, as too elegant, too French, too restrained, insufficiently metaphysical, not quite willing to go to the extremity that the great tradition seemed to require.
The charge is interesting and not entirely without foundation. Turgenev did not go to extremity. He believed, as a matter of both temperament and considered artistic principle, that extremity was a distortion of the truth rather than an access to it — that the human condition is most accurately revealed not in the grand crisis but in the ordinary day, not in the moment of maximum pressure but in the long, quiet, passing time that surrounds and dwarfs the moments of crisis. He was, in this sense, Chekhov before Chekhov, though Chekhov’s compression is harder and more radical than Turgenev’s elegance ever quite managed.
What remains, when the debates about ranking and influence have settled, is the fiction itself: the Sportsman’s Sketches that helped end serfdom, the portrait of Bazarov that changed how a generation understood itself, the love stories that are still the most accurate accounts of what it feels like to understand too late what was required of you. And the sparrow on the ground between the dog and the nestling, ruffling its feathers, held in place by something stronger than fear.
That image has not dated. It will not.
Sources and Further Reading
Turgenev, Ivan. Fathers and Sons. Translated by Richard Freeborn. Oxford World’s Classics, 1991.
Turgenev, Ivan. A Sportsman’s Sketches. Translated by Richard Freeborn. Oxford World’s Classics, 1992.
Turgenev, Ivan. First Love and Other Stories. Translated by Richard Freeborn. Oxford World’s Classics, 1989.
Turgenev, Ivan. Rudin. Translated by Richard Freeborn. Penguin Classics, 1975.
Turgenev, Ivan. A Nest of Nobles. Translated by Richard Freeborn. Penguin Classics, 1990.
Turgenev, Ivan. On the Eve. Translated by Gilbert Gardiner. Penguin Classics, 1962.
Turgenev, Ivan. Poems in Prose. Translated by Roger Cockrell. Angel Books, 1990.
Schapiro, Leonard. Turgenev: His Life and Times. Oxford University Press, 1978.
Allen, Elizabeth Cheresh. Beyond Realism: Turgenev’s Poetics of Secular Salvation. Stanford University Press, 1992.
Freeborn, Richard. Turgenev: The Novelist’s Novelist. Oxford University Press, 1960.
James, Henry. “Ivan Turgenev.” In Partial Portraits. Macmillan, 1888.
Pritchett, V. S. The Gentle Barbarian: The Life and Work of Turgenev. Random House, 1977.
Waddington, Patrick. Turgenev and England. Macmillan, 1980.
Berlin, Isaiah. Fathers and Children: Turgenev and the Liberal Predicament. Oxford University Press, 1972.
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