Ivan Turgenev1818-1883

Иван Тургенев

Early Years

• Son of rich landowning family.

• Grew up on estate Spasskoe in Oryol province: the Russian heartland.

• educated at home, learned French, German, passable English

Spasskoe…

…and its surroundings.

Student years

• Studied at Moscow University, then St Petersburg (1834-37).

• Went to Berlin in 1838 - 1841 to study philosophy with Hegel.

• Berlin and the philosophical school very great influence on young Russians of his generation.

• Turgenev a Westernizer, not a Slavophile.

A Fateful Meeting

• 1843-1845 appointment as civil servant in St Petersburg.

• 1843 Pauline Viardot comes for the season to St Petersburg.

• Turgenev falls in love, becomes attached to the Viardots for the rest of his life.

• Hunts with Louis, collaborates on French translations of Russian literature.

First a poet…

• First tries his hand at a long poem in the style of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin.

• Then turns to hunting sketches in prose, first published in The Contemporary (Современник) 1847-1851.

The new Realism …

• First seen in Sportsman’s Sketches (Записки охотника)

• art turns its back on mythological themes, romantic scenes, important personages.

• Emphasis on detail – reflection of the invention of photography.

• Social conscience, depiction of scenes of country life: in France gives rise to the Barbizon school, J.-F. Millet.

Jean-Francois MilletThe Gleaners / Les Glaneuses 1857

The novels by le géant russe…

• Turgenev later turns to novels, the best known is Fathers and Sons (1862).

• His theme is Moscow and the Russian countryside rather than St Petersburg.

• Moscow: the oldfashioned centre of Russian life

• St Petersburg: The fantastic creation of Peter with its extremes of pomp and poverty

The novels by le géant russe…

• Turgenev later turns to novels, the best known is Fathers and Sons (1862).

• Becomes a fixture in Paris, friend of Flaubert, Henry James, the Goncourts.

• Builds a villa next to the home of the Viardots at Bougival.

• Dies of cancer at Bougival in 1883.

Turgenev in 1872 (Vasily Perov)

From Romanticism…

- symbolic representation- multiple meanings- focus on the formal aspects of the text (e.g.,

vocabulary, rhyme).- predominance of metaphors- fantastic occurrences- poetry as dominant genre- exotic themes

… to Realism

- direct, unambiguous representation

- focus on the events described

- predominance of metonymy – i.e. detail that gives a description

- believable occurrences

- prose as dominant genre

- themes of everyday reality

Alexei SavrasovStorm over the Kremlin

Vasily PolenovA Moscow Yard

“First Love” (1860)

• Psychological realism

• Frame tale: introduction

• First-person narrative as opposed to the omniscient third-person narrative

• Tale structured around the young man’s growing realization of the truth

• Careful, poetic structuring into short chapters with a final, telling sentence.