Turgenev's novels are “months in the country,” which contain balanced contrasts such as those between youth and age, between the tragic ephemerality of love and the comic transience of ideas, between Hamlet's concern with self and the ineptitudes of the quixotic pursuit of altruism. The last of these contrasts he amplified into a major essay, “Hamlet and Don Quixote” (1860). If he differed from his great contemporaries Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Leo Tolstoy in the scale of his work, he also differed from them in believing that literature should not provide answers to life's question marks. He constructed his novels according to a simple formula that had the sole purpose of illuminating the character and predicament of a single figure, whether hero or heroine. They are important chiefly as detailed and deft sociopsychological portraits. A major device of the novels is the examination of the effect of a newcomer's arrival upon a small social circle. The circle, in its turn, subjects the newcomer to scrutiny through the relation that develops between the heroine, who always belongs to the “place” of the fiction, and the newcomer-hero. The promise of happiness is offered, but the ending of the relation is invariably calamitous.
Self-exile and fame.
Always touchy about his literary reputation, Turgenev reacted to the almost unanimously hostile reception given to Fathers and Sons by leaving Russia. He took up residence in Baden-Baden in southern Germany, to which resort Viardot had retired. Quarrels with Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky and his general estrangement from the Russian literary scene made him an exile in a very real sense. His only novel of this period, Smoke (1867), set in Baden-Baden, is infused with a satirically embittered tone that makes caricatures of both the left and the right wings of the intelligentsia. The love story is deeply moving, but both this emotion and the political sentiments are made to seem ultimately no more lasting and real than the smoke of the title.
The Franco-German War of 1870–71 forced the Viardots to leave Baden-Baden, and Turgenev followed them, first to London and then to Paris. He now became an honoured ambassador of Russian culture in the Paris of the 1870s. The writers George Sand, Gustave Flaubert, the Goncourt brothers, the young Émile Zola, and Henry James were only a few of the many illustrious contemporaries with whom he corresponded and who sought his company. He was elected vice president of the Paris international literary congress in 1878, and in 1879 he was awarded an honorary degree by the University of Oxford. In Russia he was feted on his annual visits.
The literary work of this final period combined nostalgia for the past—eloquently displayed in such beautiful pieces as “A Lear of the Steppes” (1870), “Torrents of Spring” (1872), and “Punin and Baburin” (1874)—with stories of a quasi-fantastic character—“The Song of Triumphant Love” (1881) and “Klara Milich” (1883). Turgenev's final novel, Virgin Soil (1877), was designed to recoup his literary reputation in the eyes of the younger generation. Its aim was to portray the dedication and self-sacrifice of young populists who hoped to sow the seeds of revolution in the virgin soil of the Russian peasantry. Despite its realism and his efforts to give the war topicality, it is the least successful of his novels. His last major work, Poems in Prose, is remarkable chiefly for its wistfulness and for its famous eulogy to the Russian language.
Evaluation.
Turgenev's work is distinguished from that of his most famous contemporaries by its sophisticated lack of hyperbole, its balance, and its concern for artistic values. His greatest work was always topical, committed literature, having universal appeal in the elegance of the love story and the psychological acuity of the portraiture. He was similarly a letter writer of great charm, wit, and probity. His reputation may have become overshadowed by those of Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, but his own qualities of lucidity and urbanity and, above all, his sense of the extreme preciousness of the beautiful in life endow his work with a magic that has lasting appeal.
Richard H. Freeborn Ed.
Additional Reading
R.A. Gettman, Turgenev in England and America (1941); and R. Yachnin and D.H. Stam (comps.), Turgenev in English (1962), are recommended bibliographies. Useful translations include Turgenev's Literary Reminiscences and Autobiographical Fragments, trans. by David Magarshack, with an essay by Edmund Wilson (1958); and Turgenev's Letters: A Selection, ed. and trans. by E.H. Lehrman (1961). Leonard B. Schapiro, Turgenev: His Life and Times (1978, reissued 1982) is a well-researched biography. A. Yarmolinsky, Turgenev the Man: His Art and His Age (1926, rev. ed. 1959); David Magarshack, Turgenev: A Life (1954); and Henri Troyat, Turgenev (1988), are useful complementary biographies. See also H. Granjard, Ivan Tourguénev et les courants politiques et sociaux de son temps (1954), a valuable study of Turgenev's political evolution; R.H. Freeborn, Turgenev: The Novelist's Novelist (1960), a guide to Turgenev's novels; and Patrick Waddington, Turgenev and England
Nekrasov, Nikolay Alekseyevich
▪ Russian poet
born Dec. 10 [Nov. 28, Old Style], 1821, Nemirov, Ukraine, Russian Empire
died Jan. 8, [Dec. 27, 1877], 1878, St. Petersburg, Russia
Russian poet and journalist whose work centred on the theme of compassion for the sufferings of the peasantry. Nekrasov also sought to express the racy charm and vitality of peasant life in his adaptations of folk songs and poems for children.
Nekrasov studied at St. Petersburg University, but his father's refusal to help him forced him into literary and theatrical hack work at an early age. His first book of poetry was published in 1840. An able businessman, he published and edited literary miscellanies and in 1846 bought from Pyotr Pletnev the magazine Sovremennik (“The Contemporary”), which had declined after the death of its founder, Aleksandr Pushkin. Nekrasov managed to transform it into a major literary journal and a paying concern, despite constant harassment by the censors. Both Ivan Turgenev and Leo Tolstoy published their early works in Sovremennik, but after 1856, influenced by its subeditor, Nikolay Chernyshevski, it began to develop into an organ of militant radicalism. It was suppressed in 1866, after the first attempt to assassinate Alexander II. In 1868 Nekrasov, with Mikhail Saltykov (Shchedrin), took over Otechestvenniye zapiski (“Notes of the Fatherland”), remaining its editor and publisher until his death.
Nekrasov's work is uneven through its lack of craftsmanship and polish and a tendency to sentimentalize his subjects, but his major poems have lasting power and originality of expression. Moroz krasny-nos (1863; “Red-nosed Frost,” in Poems, 1929) gives a vivid picture of a brave and sympathetic peasant woman, and his large-scale narrative poem, Komu na Rusi zhit khorosho? (1879; Who Can Be Happy and Free in Russia?, 1917), shows to the full his gift for vigorous realistic satire.
Sovremennik
▪ Russian periodical
(1836–66; “The Contemporary”), Russian literary and political journal founded in 1836 by the poet Aleksandr Pushkin (Pushkin, Aleksandr Sergeyevich). In its first year, the journal established its literary prestige by publishing Pushkin's novel Kapitanskaya dochka (1836; The Captain's Daughter) and Nikolay Gogol's story “Nos” (1836; “The Nose”). Pyotr Pletnev was editor from 1837 to 1847. Nikolay Nekrasov, editor from 1847 to 1866, published works by Ivan Turgenev and Leo Tolstoy and guided the journal into radical politics. Between 1857 and 1860 it was a leading voice in the movement to abolish serfdom. The journal's open criticism of the ruling class led to its suppression by tsarist authorities in 1866.