Biography Turgenev Ivan Sergeevich
(1818 – 1883)
(1818-83), Russian writer, corresponding member of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences (1860). In the series of short stories “Notes of the Hunter” (1847-52) showed high spiritual qualities and talent of the Russian peasant, the poetry of nature. In the socio-psychological novels Rudin (1856), The Noble Nest (1859), On the Eve (1860), Fathers and Sons (1862), Asya (1858), Veshnie Vody (1872) ) created images of the leaving noble culture and new heroes of the era of raznochintsy and democrats, images of selfless Russian women. In the novels “Smoke” (1867) and “Nov (1877) depicted the life of Russians abroad, the Narodnik movement in Russia. On the slope of life he created lyric-philosophical Poems in Prose (1882). Master of Language and Psychological Analysis, Turgenev had a significant influence on the development of Russian and world literature.
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TURGENEV Ivan Sergeevich [October 28 (November 9) 1818, Orel
Education of the senses
According to his father Turgenev belonged to an old noble family, a mother, nee Lutovinova, a rich landowner; in her estate Spasskoe-Lutovinovo (Mtsensk district of the Oryol province) passed the childhood years of the future writer, who early learned to thinly feel nature and hate serfdom. In 1827 the family moved to Moscow; at first Turgenev studies in private boarding houses and with good home teachers, then, in 1833, enters the verbal department of Moscow University, in 1834 passes to the Faculty of History and Philology of the St. Petersburg University. One of the strongest impressions of her early youth (1833) was the love of Princess E. L. Shakhovskaya, who at that time experienced an affair with Turgenev’s father, was reflected in the novel The First Love (1860).
In 1836 Turgenev shows his poetic experiments in a romantic spirit to the writer of the Pushkin circle, the university professor PA Pletnev; he invites the student to a literary evening (in the
In May 1838 Turgenev went to Germany (the desire to replenish education was combined with the rejection of the Russian way of life, based on serfdom). The catastrophe of the ship “Nicholas I”, on which Turgenev sailed, will be described to them in the essay “Fire at Sea” (1883, in French). Until August 1839 Turgenev lives in Berlin, listens to lectures at the university, deals with classical languages, writes poetry, communicates with TN Granovsky, NV Stankevich. After a short stay in Russia in January 1840 goes to Italy, but from May 1840 to May 1841 he again in Berlin, where he meets MA Bakunin. Arriving in Russia, he visits the estate of Bakunin Premuhino, converges with this family: soon begins an affair with TA Bakunina, which does not interfere with the connection with the seamstress AE Ivanova (in 1842 she gives birth to Turgenev’s daughter Pelagia).
Around the “Notes of the Hunter”
In 1843 a poem appeared on the modern material “Parasha”, which was highly appreciated by VG Belinsky. Acquaintance with the critic, which turned into friendship (in 1846 Turgenev became his son’s godfather), rapprochement with his entourage (in particular, with NA Nekrasov) change his literary orientation: from romanticism he refers to the ironic-moralizing poem (“Landowner” , Andrew, both 1845) and prose, close to the principles of the “natural school” and not alien to the influence of M. Yu. Lermontov (“Andrei Kolosov”, 1844; “Three portraits”, 1846; “Brether”, 1847).
November 1, 1843 Turgenev gets acquainted with the singer Pauline Viardot (Viardot-Garcia), whose love in many respects will determine the external course of his life. In May 1845 Turgenev retired. From the beginning of 1847 to June 1850 he lived abroad (in Germany, France, Turgenev witnessed the French Revolution of 1848): takes care of the sick Belinsky during his journey; closely communicates with PV Annenkov, AI Herzen, gets acquainted with J. Sand, P. Merimee, A. de Musset, F. Chopin, S. Gounod; wrote the story “Petushkov” (1848), “The Diary of a superfluous man” (1850), the comedy “Bach” (1849), “Where subtle, there and burst”, “Provincial” (both 1851), psychological drama “Month in the village” (1855).
The main thing of this period is the Notes of the Hunter, a series of lyrical essays and stories that began with the story “The Chorus and Kalinich” (1847; the subtitle “From the Hunter’s Notes” was coined by I. I. Panayev for publication in the “Mixture” ); a separate two-volume edition of the cycle was published in 1852, later the stories “The End of Chertopkhanov” (1872), “Living Power”, “Knocking” (1874) were added. The fundamental diversity of human types, first isolated from the previously unseen or idealized masses of the people, testified to the infinite value of any unique and free human personality; the serfdom appeared as an ominous and dead force, alien to the natural harmony (detailed specifics of dissimilar landscapes), hostile to man, but incapable of destroying the soul, love, creative gift. Having opened Russia and the Russian man, having begun the “peasant theme” in the domestic literature, the Notes of the Hunter became the semantic foundation of all further creativity of Turgenev: hence the threads stretch to the study of the phenomenon of “superfluous man” (the problem outlined in Hamlet of Shchigrovsky Uyezd) , and to the comprehension of the mysterious (“Bezhin meadow”), and to the problem of the conflict of the artist with the chilling of his everyday life (“Singers”).
1850s. Literary environment
In April 1852, for the response to the death of Nikolai Gogol, banned in St. Petersburg and published in Moscow, Turgenev, by the highest order, was imprisoned (he wrote the story “Mumu”). In May, he was deported to Spasskoye, where he lives until December 1853 (work on an unfinished novel, the story “Two Friends”, acquaintance with AA Fet, active correspondence with S. T. Aksakov and writers from the circle of “Contemporary”); in the efforts to liberate Turgenev, AK Tolstoy played an important role.
Until July 1856 Turgenev lives in Russia: in winter, mainly in Petersburg, in summer in Spassky. His nearest Wednesday edition of the “Contemporary”; acquaintances with IA Goncharov, L. N. Tolstoy and A. Ostrovsky; Turgenev takes part in the publication of “Poems” FI Tyutchev (1854) and supplies it with a preface. Mutual cooling with a distant Viardo leads to a brief but almost finished marriage with a distant relative OA Turgeneva. Published the story “The Lull” (1854), “Jacob Pasynkov” (1855), “Correspondence”, “Faust” (both 1856).
Novels
“Rudin” (1856) opens a series of Turgenev novels, compact in scope, unfolding around the ideological hero, journalistically accurately fixing the actual socio-political issues and, ultimately, putting “modernity” in the face of the unchanging and mysterious forces of love, art, nature. A flaming audience, but incapable of doing “extra person” Rudin; in vain dreaming of happiness and coming to humble self-sacrifice and hope for happiness for people of modern times Lavretsky (“The Noble Nest”, 1859, events occur in the situation of the approaching “great reform”); The “iron” Bulgarian revolutionary Insarov, who becomes the chosen heroine (that is, Russia), but “alien” and doomed to death (“On the Eve”, 1860); “new person” Bazarov, who conceals behind romanticism a romantic riot (Fathers and Sons, 1862, post-reform Russia is not freed from perpetual problems, and the “new” people remain people: “dozens” will live, and those captured by passion or idea will perish); clamped between “reactionary” and “revolutionary” vulgarity characters “Smoke” (1867); the revolutionary Narodnik Nezhdanov, an even more “new” person, but still unable to respond to the challenge of a changed Russia (Nov, 1877); All of them, together with secondary characters (with individual dissimilarity, differences in moral and political orientations and spiritual experience, different degrees of affinity for the author), are closely related, combining in different proportions the features of the two eternal psychological types of the heroic enthusiast, Don Quixote,
In wanderings
Departing abroad in July 1856, Turgenev finds herself in the agonizing whirlpool of ambiguous relations with Viardot and a daughter who was brought up in Paris. After a difficult winter in Paris in 1856-57 (a gloomy “Journey to Polissya” is completed), he travels to England, then to Germany, where he writes Asya, one of the most poetic novels, yielding, however, to interpretation in a public key (N. Chernyshevsky “Russian man at rendez-vous”, 1858), and autumn and winter spend in Italy. By the summer of 1858 he was in Spassky; in the future, often the year Turgenev will be divided into “European, winter” and “Russian, summer” seasons.
After “The Day Before” and devoted to the novel article NA Dobrolyubova “When will the real day come?” (1860), Turgenev’s break with the radicalized “Contemporary” (in particular, with NA Nekrasov, their mutual hostility persisted to the end). Conflict with the “younger generation” was exacerbated by the novel “Fathers and Sons” (M. A. Antonovich’s pamphlet article “Asmodeus of Our Time” in Sovremennik, 1862, the so-called “schism in nihilists” largely motivated a positive evaluation of the novel in the article by D. I. Pisarev “Bazarov”, 1862). In the summer of 1861 a quarrel with LN Tolstoy occurred, almost turned into a duel (reconciliation in 1878). In the story “Ghosts” (1864) Turgenev thickens the mystical motifs outlined in the “Notes of the Hunter” and “Faust”; this line will be developed in “The Dog” (1865), “The Stories of Lieutenant Yergunov” (1868), “The Dream”, “The Story of Father Alexis” (both 1877), “Songs of Triumphant Love” (1881), “After Death (Klara Milich ) “(1883). The theme of the weakness of a person who turns out to be a toy of unknown forces and doomed non-existence, more or less color all of Turgenev’s late prose; most directly it is expressed in a lyrical story “Enough!” (1865), perceived by contemporaries as evidence (sincere or coquettishly hypocritical) of the situationally conditioned crisis of Turgenev (compare the parody of FM Dostoevsky in the novel The Possessed, 1871).
Glory and sadness
In 1863 a new rapprochement between Turgenev and Pauline Viardot takes place; until 1871 they live in Baden, then (after the Franco-Prussian War) in Paris. Turgenev closely converges with G. Flaubert and through him with E. and J. Goncourt, A. Dode, E. Zola, G. de Maupassant; he assumes the function of an intermediary between Russian and Western literatures. Its pan-European glory is growing: in 1878, at an international literary congress in Paris, the writer was elected vice-president; in 1879 he was an honorary doctor of Oxford University. Turgenev maintains contacts with Russian revolutionaries (PL Lavrov, GA Lopatin) and renders material support to emigrants. In 1880 Turgenev participated in the celebrations in honor of the opening of the monument to Pushkin in Moscow. In 1879-81 the old writer was experiencing a violent infatuation with the actress MG Savina, who painted his last visits to his homeland.
Along with stories of the past (Steppenwolf King Lear, 1870, Punin and Baburin, 1874) and the above-mentioned “mysterious” stories in the last years of life, Turgenev turns to memoirs (Literary and Life Memoirs, 1869-80) and “Poems in prose” (1877-82), where almost all the main themes of his work are presented, and the summing up takes place as if in the presence of a near death. Death was preceded by more than a year and a half of painful illness (cancer of the spinal cord). The funeral in St. Petersburg resulted in a mass demonstration.
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