Criticism
Several studies survey Dostoyevsky's career with a chapter on each major work. The one to read first is Konstantin Mochulsky, Dostoevsky: His Life and Work (1967; originally published in Russian, 1947). Others of note are Edward Wasiolek, Dostoevsky: The Major Fiction (1964); Michael Holquist, Dostoevsky and the Novel (1977, reissued 1986); and Richard Peace, Dostoevsky: An Examination of the Major Novels (1971, reissued 1992).The most brilliant and most controversial book on Dostoyevsky is Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, ed. and trans. by Caryl Emerson (1984; originally published in Russian, 2nd ed., rev. and enlarged, 1963). Other classics of Russian criticism in English include a study by a prominent existentialist theologian, Nicholas Berdyaev, Dostoievsky, trans. by Donald Attwater (1934, reissued 1974; originally published in Russian, 1923). Also available are the studies by the Symbolist poet Vyacheslav Ivanov, Freedom and the Tragic Life: A Study in Dostoevsky (1952, reissued 1989; originally published in Russian, 1932); and an essay originally published in Russian in 1903 by the Russian existentialist and Nietzschean Lev Shestov, “Dostoevsky and Nietzsche: The Philosophy of Tragedy,” in his Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Nietzsche (1969), pp. 141–332.Donald Fanger, Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism: A Study of Dostoevsky in Relation to Balzac, Dickens, and Gogol (1965, reissued 1974), places Dostoyevsky in the context of European literature. On Dostoyevsky's obsessions and creative process, an outstanding, if diffuse, work is Jacques Catteau, Dostoyevsky and the Process of Literary Creation (1989). The best study of Dostoyevsky's aesthetics is Robert Louis Jackson, Dostoevsky's Quest for Form: A Study of His Philosophy of Art, 2nd ed. (1978), while his The Art of Dostoevsky: Deliriums and Nocturnes (1981), is especially good on The House of the Dead. Robert Louis Jackson (ed.), Dostoevsky: New Perspectives (1984), is a fine critical anthology. Dostoyevsky's anti-Semitism is treated in David I. Goldstein, Dostoyevsky and the Jews, trans. from French (1981); and in Gary Saul Morson, “Dostoevsky's Anti-Semitism and the Critics,” Slavic and East European Journal, 27(8):302–317 (Fall 1983).The outstanding study of The Idiot is Robin Feuer Miller, Dostoevsky and The Idiot: Author, Narrator, and Reader (1981). On Crime and Punishment, Robert Louis Jackson (ed.), Twentieth Century Interpretations of Crime and Punishment (1974), is a superb anthology of pithy extracts. Two divergent interpretations of A Writer's Diary by the same author are Gary Saul Morson, The Boundaries of Genre: Dostoevsky's Diary of a Writer and the Traditions of Literary Utopia (1981), and “Dostoevsky's Great Experiment,” an introductory study to the Lantz translation of the Diary mentioned above. There are three outstanding books on The Brothers Karamazov: the reader should begin with Robin Feuer Miller, The Brothers Karamazov: Worlds of the Novel (1992); and then turn to Robert L. Belknap, The Structure of The Brothers Karamazov (1967, reprinted 1989), and The Genesis of The Brothers Karamazov: The Aesthetics, Ideology, and Psychology of Text Making (1990).Gary Saul Morson
Turgenev, Ivan Sergeyevich
▪ Russian author
Introduction
born October 28 [November 9, New Style], 1818, Oryol, Russia
died August 22 [September 3], 1883, Bougival, near Paris, France
Russian (Russian literature) novelist, poet, and playwright, whose major works include the short-story collection A Sportsman's Sketches (1852) and the novels Rudin (1856), Home of the Gentry (1859), On the Eve (1860), and Fathers and Sons (1862). These works offer realistic, affectionate portrayals of the Russian peasantry and penetrating studies of the Russian intelligentsia who were attempting to move the country into a new age. Turgenev poured into his writings not only a deep concern for the future of his native land but also an integrity of craft that has ensured his place in Russian literature. The many years that he spent in western Europe were due in part to his personal and artistic stand as a liberal between the reactionary tsarist rule and the spirit of revolutionary radicalism that held sway in contemporary artistic and intellectual circles in Russia.
Early life and works.
Turgenev was the second son of a retired cavalry officer, Sergey Turgenev, and a wealthy mother, Varvara Petrovna, née Lutovinova, who owned the extensive estate of Spasskoye-Lutovinovo. The dominant figure of his mother throughout his boyhood and early manhood probably provided the example for the dominance exercised by the heroines in his major fiction. The Spasskoye estate itself came to have a twofold meaning for the young Turgenev, as an island of gentry civilization in rural Russia and as a symbol of the injustice he saw inherent in the servile state of the peasantry. Against the Russian social system Turgenev was to take an oath of perpetual animosity, which was to be the source of his liberalism and the inspiration for his vision of the intelligentsia as people dedicated to their country's social and political betterment.
Turgenev was to be the only Russian writer with avowedly European outlook and sympathies. Though he was given an education of sorts at home, in Moscow schools, and at the universities of both Moscow and St. Petersburg, Turgenev tended to regard his education as having taken place chiefly during his plunge “into the German sea” when he spent the years 1838 to 1841 at the University of Berlin. He returned home as a confirmed believer in the superiority of the West and of the need for Russia to follow a course of Westernization.
Though Turgenev had composed derivative verse and a poetic drama, Steno (1834), in the style of the English poet Lord Byron, the first of his works to attract attention was a long poem, Parasha, published in 1843. The potential of the author was quickly appreciated by the critic Vissarion Belinsky (Belinsky, Vissarion Grigoryevich), who became Turgenev's close friend and mentor. Belinsky's conviction that literature's primary aim was to reflect the truth of life and to adopt a critical attitude toward its injustices became an article of faith for Turgenev. Despite the influence of Belinsky, he remained a writer of remarkable detachment, possessed of a cool and sometimes ironic objectivity.
Turgenev was not a man of grand passions, although the love story was to provide the most common formula for his fiction, and a love for the renowned singer Pauline Viardot (Viardot, Pauline), whom he first met in 1843, was to dominate his entire life. His relation with Viardot usually has been considered platonic, yet some of his letters, often as brilliant in their observation and as felicitous in their manner as anything he wrote, suggest the existence of a greater intimacy. Generally, though, they reveal him as the fond and devoted admirer, in which role he was for the most part content. He never married, though in 1842 he had had an illegitimate daughter by a peasant woman at Spasskoye; he later entrusted the upbringing of the child to Viardot.
During the 1840s, Turgenev wrote more long poems, including A Conversation, Andrey, and The Landowner, and some criticism. Having failed to obtain a professorship at the University of St. Petersburg and having abandoned work in the government service, he began to publish short works in prose. These were studies in the “intellectual-without-a-will” so typical of his generation. The most famous was “The Diary of a Superfluous Man” (1850), which supplied the epithet “superfluous man” for so many similar weak-willed intellectual protagonists in Turgenev's work as well as in Russian literature generally.