Personal life and secrets of Turgenev. Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev. Turgenev in the encyclopedic dictionary of Brockhaus and Efron

It is difficult to imagine a greater contrast than the general spiritual appearance of Turgenev and the environment from which he directly emerged.

Ivan Turgenev's parents

His father is Sergey Nikolaevich, a retired cuirassier colonel, was a remarkably handsome man, insignificant in his moral and mental qualities. The son did not like to remember him, and in those rare moments when he spoke to his friends about his father, he characterized him as "a great fisher before the Lord." The marriage of this ruined zhuire to the middle-aged, ugly, but very rich Varvara Petrovna Lutovinova was exclusively a matter of calculation. The marriage was not a happy one and did not hold back Sergei Nikolaevich (one of his many "pranks" is described by Turgenev in the story "First Love"). He died in 1834, leaving three sons - Nikolai, Ivan and Sergei, who soon died of epilepsy - at the complete disposal of his mother, who, however, had previously been the sovereign ruler of the house. It typically expressed that intoxication with power, which was created by serfdom.

Genus Lutovinov was a mixture of cruelty, greed and voluptuousness (Turgenev portrayed its representatives in "Three Portraits" and in "Odnodvorets Ovsyanikov"). Having inherited their cruelty and despotism from the Lutovinovs, Varvara Petrovna was also embittered by her personal fate. Having lost her father early, she suffered both from her mother, depicted as a grandson in the essay "Death" (an old woman), and from a violent, drunken stepfather, who, when she was small, savagely beat and tortured her, and when she grew up, began to pursue vile offers . On foot, half-dressed, she escaped to her uncle, I.I. Lutovinov, who lived in the village of Spassky - the same rapist who is described in Odnodvorets Ovsyanikov. Almost completely alone, insulted and humiliated, Varvara Petrovna lived until the age of 30 in her uncle's house, until his death made her the owner of a magnificent estate and 5,000 souls. All the information that has been preserved about Varvara Petrovna depicts her in the most unattractive way.

Childhood of Ivan Turgenev

Through the environment of “beatings and tortures” created by her, Turgenev carried unscathed his soft soul, in which it was the spectacle of the fury of the landowners’ power, long before theoretical influences, that prepared a protest against serfdom. He himself was also subjected to cruel "beatings and tortures", although he was considered the beloved son of his mother. “They beat me,” Turgenev later said, “for all sorts of trifles, almost every day”; one day he was quite prepared to run away from home. His mental upbringing went under the guidance of French and German tutors who changed frequently. Varvara Petrovna had the deepest contempt for everything Russian; family members spoke exclusively in French among themselves.

Love for Russian literature was secretly inspired in Turgenev by one of the serf valets, depicted by him, in the person of Punin, in the story "Punin and Baburin".

Until the age of 9, Turgenev lived in the hereditary Lutovinovsky Spassky (10 versts from Mtsensk, Oryol province). In 1827 the Turgenevs settled in Moscow to educate their children; they bought a house on Samotek. Turgenev first studied at the boarding house of Weidenhammer; then he was given as a boarder to the director of the Lazarevsky Institute, Krause. Of his teachers, Turgenev recalled with gratitude a fairly well-known philologist in his time, a researcher of The Tale of Igor's Campaign, D.N. Dubensky (XI, 200), mathematics teacher P.N. Pogorelsky and young student I.P. Klyushnikov, later a prominent member of the circle of Stankevich and Belinsky, who wrote thoughtful poems under the pseudonym - F - (XV, 446).

Student years

In 1833, 15-year-old Turgenev (such an age of students, with the then low requirements, was a common phenomenon) entered the verbal department of Moscow University. A year later, because of the older brother who entered the guards artillery, the family moved to St. Petersburg, and Turgenev then moved to St. Petersburg University. Both scientific and general level Saint Petersburg the university was then low; of his university mentors, with the exception of Pletnev, Turgenev did not even name anyone in his memoirs. Turgenev became close with Pletnev and visited him at literary evenings. As a student of the 3rd year, he presented to his court his written in iambic pentameter drama "Stenio", in Turgenev's own words - "a completely absurd work in which, with furious ineptitude, a slavish imitation of Byron's Manfred was expressed." At one of the lectures, Pletnev, without naming the author by name, analyzed this drama quite strictly, but nevertheless admitted that "there is something" in the author. The response encouraged the young writer: he soon gave Pletnev a number of poems, of which two Pletnev published in his Sovremennik in 1838. This was not his first appearance in print, as Turgenev writes in his memoirs: back in 1836, he placed in the Journal of the Ministry of National Education a rather detailed, slightly pompous, but quite literary review - "On a journey to holy places", A.N. Muravyov (not included in Turgenev's collected works). In 1836, Turgenev completed the course with the degree of a real student.

After graduation

Dreaming of scientific activity, he again took the final exam the next year, received a candidate's degree, and in 1838 went to Germany. Having settled in Berlin, Turgenev diligently took up his studies. He did not so much have to "improve" as to sit down at the alphabet. Listening to lectures at the university on the history of Roman and Greek literature, he was forced to "cram" the elementary grammar of these languages ​​at home. At that time, a circle of gifted young Russians was grouped in Berlin - Granovsky, Frolov, Neverov, Mikhail Bakunin, Stankevich. All of them were enthusiastically carried away by Hegelianism, in which they saw not only a system of abstract thinking, but a new gospel of life.

"In philosophy," says Turgenev, "we were looking for everything except pure thinking." A strong impression was made on Turgenev and the whole system of Western European life in general. The conviction entered into his soul that only the assimilation of the basic principles of universal culture could lead Russia out of the darkness in which it was immersed. In this sense, he becomes the most convinced "Westernizer". Among the best influences of Berlin life is Turgenev's rapprochement with Stankevich, whose death made a tremendous impression on him.

In 1841 Turgenev returned to his homeland. At the beginning of 1842, he submitted a request to Moscow University for admission to the examination for a master's degree in philosophy; but there was no tenured professor of philosophy in Moscow at that time, and his request was turned down. As can be seen from the "New Materials for the Biography of I.S. Turgenev" published in the "Bibliographer" for 1891, Turgenev in the same 1842 passed the exam for a master's degree at St. Petersburg University quite satisfactorily. All he had to do now was write his dissertation. It wasn't difficult at all; for dissertations of the verbal faculty of that time, solid scientific preparation was not required.

Literary activity

But in Turgenev the fever for professional scholarship had already caught cold; he is more and more attracted to literary activity. He publishes small poems in Otechestvennye Zapiski, and in the spring of 1843 he publishes a separate book, under the letters of T. L. (Turgenev-Lutovinov), the poem Parasha. In 1845, another poem of his, "Conversation" was also published as a separate book; in the "Notes of the Fatherland" in 1846 (N 1) a large poem "Andrey" appears, in the "Petersburg Collection" by Nekrasov (1846) - the poem "Landlord"; in addition, small poems by Turgenev are scattered among the Notes of the Fatherland, various collections (Nekrasov, Sologub) and Sovremennik. Since 1847, Turgenev completely ceased to write poetry, except for a few small comic messages to friends and a "ballad": "Croquet in Windsor", inspired by the beating of the Bulgarians in 1876. Despite the fact that the performance in the poetic field was enthusiastically received by Belinsky , Turgenev, having reprinted even the weakest of his dramatic works in the collection of his works, completely excluded poetry from it. “I feel a positive, almost physical antipathy to my poems,” he says in one private letter, “and not only do I not have a single copy of my poems, but I would give dearly if they did not exist in the world at all.”

This severe disdain is decidedly unfair. Turgenev did not have a great poetic talent, but under some of his small poems and under separate places of his poems, any of our famous poets would not refuse to put his name. Best of all, he succeeds in pictures of nature: here one can already clearly feel that poignant, melancholic poetry, which is the mainbeautyTurgenev landscape.

Turgenev's poem "Parash"- one of the first attempts in Russian literature to describe the sucking and leveling power of life and worldly vulgarity. The author married his heroine to the one who fell in love with her and rewarded her with "happiness", the serene appearance of which, however, makes him exclaim: "But, God! did I think when, full of mute adoration, I predicted the year of the grateful saint to her soul suffering." "Conversation" is written in excellent verse; there are lines and stanzas of the true beauty of Lermontov. In terms of its content, this poem, with all its imitation of Lermontov, is one of the first "civilian" works in our literature, not in the later sense of exposing individual imperfections of Russian life, but in the sense of a call to work for the common good. Both protagonists of the poem consider one personal life to be an insufficient goal of a meaningful existence; each person must accomplish some "feat", serve "some god", be a prophet and "punish weakness and vice".

Two other big poems by Turgenev, "Andrey" and "Landlord", are significantly inferior to the first. In "Andrey" the growing feeling of the hero of the poem for one married woman and her reciprocal feelings are described in a verbose and boring way; "The Landowner" is written in a humorous tone and is, in the terminology of that time, a "physiological" sketch of the landowner's life - but only its external, ridiculous features are captured. Simultaneously with the poems, Turgenev wrote a number of stories, in which Lermontov's influence was also very clearly affected. Only in the era of the boundless charm of the Pechorin type could a young writer's admiration for Andrei Kolosov, the hero of the story of the same name (1844), be created. The author gives him to us as an "extraordinary" person, and he is really quite extraordinary ... an egoist who, without experiencing the slightest embarrassment, looks at the whole human race as an object of his amusement. The word "duty" does not exist for him: he throws the girl who loves him with more ease than others throws old gloves, and with complete unceremoniousness uses the services of his comrades. He is especially credited with the fact that he "does not stand on stilts." In the halo with which the young author surrounded Kolosov, the influence of Georges Sand, with her demand for complete sincerity in love relationships, undoubtedly also affected. But only here the freedom of relations received a very peculiar shade: what for Kolosov was vaudeville, for the girl who passionately fell in love with him turned into a tragedy. Despite the vagueness of the general impression, the story bears the bright traces of a serious talent.

The second story of Turgenev, "Brether"(1846), represents the author's struggle between Lermontov's influence and the desire to discredit posturing. The hero of the story, Luchkov, with his mysterious gloom, behind which something unusually deep seems to be, makes a strong impression on those around him. And so, the author sets out to show that the unsociableness of the bully, his mysterious silence is very prosaically explained by the unwillingness of the most miserable mediocrity to be ridiculed, his "denial" of love - by the rudeness of nature, indifference to life - by some kind of Kalmyk feeling, an average between apathy and bloodthirstiness.

The content of the third Turgenev's story "Three Portraits"(1846) is drawn from the family chronicle of the Lutovinovs, but everything unusual in this chronicle is concentrated in it. Luchinov's confrontation with his father, the dramatic scene when the son, clenching his sword in his hands, looks at his father with angry and rebellious eyes and is ready to raise a hand against him - all this would be much more appropriate in some novel from a foreign life. Too thick are the paints superimposed on Luchinov the father, whom Turgenev forces for 20 years not to say a single word to his wife because of the suspicion of adultery vaguely expressed in the story.

dramatic field

Along with poems and romantic stories, Turgenev tries his hand at the dramatic field. Of his dramatic works, the most interesting is the lively, funny and scenic genre picture written in 1856. "Breakfast at the Leader" which is still in the repertoire. Thanks in particular to their good stage performance, they were also successful "Freeloader" (1848), "Bachelor" (1849),"Provincial", "Month in the countryside".

The success of "The Bachelor" was especially dear to the author. In the preface to the 1879 edition, Turgenev, "without recognizing his dramatic talent," recalls "with a feeling of deep gratitude that the brilliant Martynov honored him with playing in four of his plays and, by the way, at the very end of his brilliant, too soon interrupted career , turned by the power of great talent, the pale figure of Moshkin in "The Bachelor" into a living and touching face.

The heyday of creativity

The undoubted success that fell to the lot of Turgenev at the very beginning of his literary activity did not satisfy him: he carried in his soul the consciousness of the possibility of more significant ideas - and since what was pouring out on paper did not correspond to their breadth, he "had a firm intention to abandon literature altogether. When, at the end of 1846, Nekrasov and Panaev decided to publish Sovremennik, Turgenev found, however, a "trifle", to which both the author himself and Panaev attached so little importance that it was not even placed in the fiction department, and in "Mixture" of the first book of "Sovremennik" in 1847. To make the public even more indulgent, Panaev to the modest title of the essay: "Khor and Kalinich" added another title: "From the Notes of a Hunter". The audience turned out to be more sensitive than an experienced writer. By 1847, the democratic or, as it was then called, "philanthropic" mood began to reach its highest tension in the best literary circles. Prepared by Belinsky's fiery sermon, literary youth are imbued with new spiritual currents; in one or two years, a whole galaxy of future famous and simply good writers - Nekrasov, Dostoevsky, Goncharov, Turgenev, Grigorovich, Druzhinin, Pleshcheev and others - come out with a number of works that make a radical revolution in literature and immediately inform it of the mood that later received its national expression in the era of great reforms.

Among this literary youth, Turgenev took first place, because he directed all the strength of his high talent to the most sore spot of the pre-reform public - serfdom. Encouraged by the major success of "Khorya and Kalinych"; he wrote a number of essays, which in 1852 were published under the general name "Hunter's Notes". The book played a first-class historical role. There is direct evidence of the strong impression that she made on the heir to the throne, the future liberator of the peasants. All the generally sensitive spheres of the ruling classes succumbed to her charm. "The Hunter's Notes" plays the same role in the history of the liberation of the peasants as in the history of the liberation of the Negroes - "Uncle Tom's Cabin" by Beecher Stowe, but with the difference that Turgenev's book is incomparably higher in artistic terms.

Explaining in his memoirs why he went abroad at the very beginning of 1847, where most of the essays in the Hunter's Notes were written, Turgenev says: "... I could not breathe the same air, stay close to what I hated; I it was necessary to move away from my enemy in order to attack him more strongly from my own.In my eyes, this enemy had a certain image, bore a well-known name: this enemy was serfdom. Under this name, I collected and concentrated everything against which I decided to fight to the end - with which I swore never to reconcile ... This was my Annibal oath.

Turgenev's categoricalness, however, refers only to the internal motives of the Hunter's Notes, and not to their execution. The morbidly captious censorship of the 1940s would not have missed any vivid "protest", any vivid picture of serf outrages. Indeed, serfdom is directly touched upon in the "Notes of the Hunter" with restraint and caution. "Notes of the Hunter" is a "protest" of a very special kind, strong not so much by reproof, not so much by hatred, as by love.

People's life is passed here through the prism of the mental make-up of a person from the circle of Belinsky and Stankevich. The main feature of this warehouse is the subtlety of feelings, admiration for beauty and, in general, the desire to be not of this world, to rise above the "dirty reality". A significant part of the folk types of "Notes of the Hunter" belongs to people of this cut.

Here is the romantic Kalinich, who comes to life only when he is told about the beauties of nature - mountains, waterfalls, etc., here is Kasyan with a Beautiful Sword, from whose quiet soul something completely unearthly blows; here is Yasha ("Singers"), whose singing touches even the visitors of the tavern, even the tavern owner himself. Along with deeply poetic natures, the Hunter's Notes seek out majestic types among the people. Ovsyanikov, a wealthy peasant (for whom Turgenev was already reproached for idealization in the 1940s), is majestically calm, perfectly honest, and with his “simple but sound mind” perfectly understands the most complex social and state relations. With what amazing calmness the forester Maxim and the miller Vasily die in the essay "Death"; how much purely romantic charm in the gloomy majestic figure of the inexorably honest Biryuk!

Of the female folk types of the Hunter's Notes, Matryona deserves special attention ( "Karataev"), Marina ( "Date") and Lukerya ( "Living Powers" ) ; the last essay lay in Turgenev's portfolio and was published only a quarter of a century later, in the charitable collection Skladchina, 1874): they are all deeply feminine, capable of high self-denial. And if we add surprisingly cute children from "Bezhina Meadows", then you get a whole one-color gallery of faces, regarding which it is by no means possible to say that the author gave here folk life in its entirety. From the field of folk life, where nettles, thistles, and thistles grow, the author picked only beautiful and fragrant flowers and made a beautiful bouquet from them, the fragrance of which was all the stronger because the representatives of the ruling class, bred in the "Notes of the Hunter", amaze its moral ugliness. Mr. Zverkov ("Yermolai and the Miller") considers himself a very kind person; he is even jarred when a serf girl throws herself at his feet with a plea, because in his opinion "a man should never lose his dignity"; but with deep indignation he refuses permission to marry this "ungrateful" girl, because his wife will then be left without a good maid. Retired Guards officer Arkady Pavlych Penochkin ( "Burmister") arranged his house quite in English; at his table everything is superbly served, and well-trained lackeys serve admirably. But then one of them served red wine not warmed up; the graceful European frowned and, not embarrassed by the presence of an outsider, ordered "about Fyodor ... dispose of it." Mardarii Apollonych Stegunov ( "Two Landlords") - he is quite a good-natured man: he sits idyllically on the balcony on a beautiful summer evening and drinks tea. Suddenly the sound of measured and frequent blows reached our ears. Stegunov "listened, nodded his head, took a sip, and, putting the saucer on the table, said with the kindest smile and, as if involuntarily echoing the blows: chuck-chuck-chuck! chuck-chuck! chuck-chuck!" It turned out that they were punishing the "naughty Vasya", the barman "with big sideburns". Thanks to the stupidest whim of the feisty mistress ("Karataev"), the fate of Matryona is tragic. Such are the representatives of the landlord class in the "Notes of the Hunter". If there are decent people among them, then this is either Karataev, who ends his life as a regular in a tavern, or a brawler Tchertop-hanov, or a miserable hanger-on - Hamlet of the Shchigrovsky district. Of course, all this makes The Hunter's Notes a one-sided work; but it is that holy one-sidedness which leads to great results. The content of the Hunter's Notes, in any case, was not invented - and that is why in the soul of every reader, in all its irresistibility, the conviction grew that people in whom the best aspects of human nature are embodied so vividly should not be deprived of the most elementary human rights. From a purely artistic point of view, the "Notes of the Hunter" fully correspond to the great idea underlying them, and this harmony of design and form is the main reason for their success. All the best qualities of Turgenev's talent were vividly expressed here. If conciseness is generally one of the main features of Turgenev, who did not write voluminous works at all, then in the "Notes of the Hunter" it is brought to the highest perfection. With two or three strokes, Turgenev draws the most complex character: let's name, for example, at least the final two pages of the essay, where the spiritual image of "Biryuk" receives such unexpected illumination. Along with the energy of passion, the strength of the impression is increased by a general, surprisingly soft and poetic coloring. Landscape painting "Notes of the Hunter" knows nothing equal in all our literature. From the Central Russian, at first glance, colorless landscape, Turgenev managed to extract the most sincere tones, at the same time both melancholy and sweetly invigorating. In general, Turgenev's "Notes of a Hunter" in technology took first place among Russian prose writers. If Tolstoy surpasses him in breadth of grasp, Dostoevsky in depth and originality, then Turgenev is the first Russian stylist.

Turgenev's personal life

In his mouth, "the great, mighty, truthful and free Russian language", to which the last of his "Poems in Prose" is dedicated, received its most noble and elegant expression. Turgenev's personal life, at a time when his creative activity was so brilliantly unfolding, was unhappy. Disagreements and clashes with his mother took on an increasingly acute character - and this not only unscrewed him morally, but also led to an extremely cramped financial situation, which was complicated by the fact that everyone considered him a rich man.

By 1845, the beginning of the mysterious friendship between Turgenev and the famous singer Viardo-Garcia dates back. Repeated attempts were made to characterize this friendship with Turgenev's story: "Correspondence", with an episode of the hero's "dog" attachment to a foreign ballerina, a stupid and completely uneducated creature. However, it would be a gross mistake to see this as directly autobiographical material.

Viardot is an unusually subtle artistic nature; her husband was a fine man and an outstanding critic of art (see VI, 612), whom Turgenev greatly appreciated and who, in turn, highly regarded Turgenev and translated his works into French. There is also no doubt that at first, friendship with the family of Viardo Turgenev, to whom his mother did not give a penny for his attachment to the “damned gypsy” for three whole years, very little resembled the type of “rich Russian” popular behind the scenes. But, at the same time, the deep bitterness with which the episode told in the "Correspondence" is imbued, undoubtedly had a subjective lining. If we turn to Fet's memoirs and some of Turgenev's letters, we will see, on the one hand, how right Turgenev's mother was when she called him "monogamous", and on the other, that, having lived in close contact with the Viardot family for 38 years, he still felt deeply and hopelessly alone. On this basis, Turgenev's image of love grew, so characteristic even of his always melancholy creative manner.

Turgenev is the singer of unfortunate love par excellence. He has almost no happy ending, the last chord is always sad. At the same time, none of the Russian writers paid so much attention to love, no one idealized a woman to such an extent. It was an expression of his desire to lose himself in a dream.

The heroes of Turgenev are always timid and indecisive in their affairs of the heart: Turgenev himself was like that. - In 1842, Turgenev, at the request of his mother, entered the office of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. He was a very bad official, and the head of the office, Dal, although he was also a writer, was very pedantic about the service. The matter ended with the fact that after serving 1 1/2 years, Turgenev, to the considerable chagrin and displeasure of his mother, retired. In 1847, Turgenev, together with the Viardot family, went abroad, lived in Berlin, Dresden, visited the sick Belinsky in Silesia, with whom he was united by the closest friendship, and then went to France. His affairs were in the most deplorable state; he lived on loans from friends, advances from the editors, and, moreover, on the fact that he reduced his needs to a minimum. Under the pretext of the need for solitude, he spent the winter months all alone in the empty villa of Viardot, then in the abandoned castle of Georges Sand, eating whatever he could. The February revolution and the June days found him in Paris, but made no particular impression on him. Deeply imbued with the general principles of liberalism, Turgenev in his political convictions was always, in his own words, a "gradualist", and the radical socialist excitement of the 40s, which seized many of his peers, touched him relatively little.

In 1850, Turgenev returned to Russia, but he never saw his mother, who died the same year. Having shared with his brother a large fortune of his mother, he eased the hardships of the peasants he inherited as much as possible.

In 1852, a thunderstorm unexpectedly hit him. After Gogol's death, Turgenev wrote an obituary, which the St. Petersburg censors did not let through, because, as the well-known Musin-Pushkin put it, "it is criminal to speak so enthusiastically about such a writer." Just to show that "cold" St. Petersburg was excited by the great loss, Turgenev sent an article to Moscow, V.P. Botkin, and he published it in Moskovskie Vedomosti. This was seen as a "rebellion", and the author of "The Hunter's Notes" was placed on the congress, where he stayed for a whole month. Then he was sent to his village, and only thanks to the intensified efforts of Count Alexei Tolstoy, two years later he again received the right to live in the capitals.

Turgenev's literary activity from 1847, when the first sketches of the Hunter's Notes appeared, until 1856, when Rudin began the period of great novels that glorified him most, was expressed, in addition to the Hunter's Notes completed in 1851 and dramatic works, in a number of more or less remarkable stories: "The Diary of a Superfluous Man" (1850), "Three Meetings" (1852), "Two Friends" (1854), "Mumu" (1854), "Calm" (1854), "Yakov Pasynkov "(1855), "Correspondence" (1856). Apart from "Three Meetings", which are a rather insignificant anecdote, beautifully told and containing a surprisingly poetic description of the Italian night and the Russian summer evening, all other stories can be easily combined into one creative mood of deep longing and some kind of hopeless pessimism. This mood is closely connected with the despondency that gripped the thinking part of Russian society under the influence of the reaction of the first half of the 50s (see Russia, XXVIII, 634 et seq.). A good half of his significance is due to ideological sensitivity and the ability to capture the "moments" of social life, Turgenev brighter than his other peers reflected the gloom of the era.

It is now in his creative synthesis that type of "extra person"- this is a terribly vivid expression of that strip of Russian public opinion, when a naughty person, who was wrecked in matters of the heart, had absolutely nothing to do. Foolishly ending his cleverly begun life, Hamlet of the Shchigrovsky district ("Notes of the Hunter"), stupidly dying Vyazovnin ("Two Friends"), the hero of "Correspondence", exclaiming in horror that "we Russians have no other life task than the development of our personality" , Veretiev and Masha ("Calm"), of which the first, the emptiness and aimlessness of Russian life leads to a tavern, and the second to a pond - all these types of useless and distorted people were born and embodied in very brightly painted figures precisely in the years of that stagnation, when even the moderate Granovsky exclaimed: "Best for Belinsky, who died on time." Let us add here from the last essays of the "Notes of the Hunter" the poignant poetry of "Singers", "Date", "Kasyan with a Beautiful Sword", the sad story of Yakov Pasynkov, finally "Mumu", which Carlyle considered the most touching story in the world - and we get a whole strip darkest despair.

The far from complete collected works of Turgenev (there are no poems and many articles) since 1868 have gone through 4 editions. One collected works of Turgenev (with poems) was given at the "Niva" (1898). Poems published under the editorship of S.N. Krivenko (2 editions, 1885 and 1891). In 1884, the Literary Fund published "The First Collection of I.S. Turgenev's Letters", but many of Turgenev's letters, scattered in various journals, are still waiting for a separate publication. In 1901, Turgenev's letters to French friends were published in Paris, collected by I.D. Galperin-Kaminsky. Part of Turgenev's correspondence with Herzen was published abroad by Dragomanov. Separate books and brochures about Turgenev were published by: Averyanov, Agafonov, Burenin, Byleev, Vengerov, Ch. Vetrinsky, Govoruha-Otrok (Yu. Nikolaev), Dobrovsky, Michel Delines, Evfstafiev, Ivanov, E. Kavelina, Kramp, Lyuboshits, Mandelstam, Mizko, Mourrier, Nevzorov, Nezelenov, Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky, Ostrogorsky, J. Pavlovsky (fr.), Evg. Solovyov, Strakhov, Sukhomlinov, Tursch (German), Chernyshev, Chudinov, Jungmeister and others. A number of extensive articles about Turgenev were included in the collected works of Annenkov, Belinsky, Apollon Grigoriev, Dobrolyubov, Druzhinin, Mikhailovsky, Pisarev, Skabichevsky, Nick. Solovyov, Chernyshevsky, Shelgunov. Significant excerpts from both these and other critical reviews (by Avdeev, Antonovich, Dudyshkin, De Pulay, Longinov, Tkachev, etc.) are given in the collection of V. Zelinsky: "Collection of critical materials for studying the works of I.S. Turgenev" (3rd ed. 1899). Reviews of Renan, Abu, Schmidt, Brandes, de Vogüe, Merimee and others are given in the book: "Foreign criticism of Turgenev" (1884). Numerous biographical materials scattered through the journals of the 1880s and 90s are listed in D.D. Yazykov, issue III - VIII.

Part 2.

Every love, happy, as well as unhappy, is a real disaster when you give yourself all to it.
I.S. Turgenev

Women in the life of Ivan Turgenev

Now let's get back to the topic of true love. The woman was the main supreme deity of all the work of Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev... K.D. Balmont, the great Russian poet, wrote: the true essence, reverent in artistic creativity, is the Girl-Woman"...

Yes, it was the Woman who was his Muse. Only in love did he draw inspiration.
Traveling in Italy, Ivan Turgenev meets Moscow acquaintances in Rome - the Khovrin family. And he begins a short-term affair with Shushu, the eldest daughter of the Khovrins, Alexandra (later a children's writer).

A year later, he became close to his mother's civilian seamstress Avdotya Ermolaevna Ivanova, who gave birth to his daughter Pelageya. At the same time, he has a stormy romance with Tatyana Alexandrovna Bakunina (sister of the revolutionary anarchist M.A. Bakunin).

Traveling around Europe, in 1843 Ivan Turgenev met Pauline Viardot (anal-skin-visual with sound), and since then his heart belongs to her alone. Contemporaries unanimously admitted that she was not at all beautiful. Rather, the opposite is true. Indeed, Viardot's appearance was far from ideal. She was stooped, with bulging eyes, large, almost masculine features, and a huge mouth. But when she began to sing, her appearance changed. At the time of one of these transformations, Pauline Viardot was seen on the stage of the opera house by the beginning Russian writer Ivan Turgenev.

Pauline Viardot

By the way, Turgenev himself was very fond of singing, while he had absolutely no hearing and had a very thin, almost female voice. And although he could not hit a single right note, the audience was delighted with this comic spectacle. “Yes, what should I do? After all, I myself know that I don’t have a voice, but just a pig!” - Ivan Turgenev lamented (the sound engineer often speaks in a barely audible, quiet voice and often does not like the sound of his voice).

Despite all the obstacles, the writer's romance with the singer lasted more than 40 years. Ivan Turgenev knew that she was married to Louis Viardot, but the passion captured him so much that he could no longer think of anyone else. He even meets her husband and they become friends. His further trips around Europe are reduced only to visiting the cities where Viardot toured. But his indecision, characteristic of people with an anal vector, does not allow Turgenev to take any more active steps. He does not insist on intimacy with his beloved and is content with the role of a devoted admirer. Marriage for an anal person is sacred. They will never encroach on someone else's, including someone else's woman.

Meanwhile, Pelageya's daughter is growing up in her grandmother's estate, about whom Ivan Turgenev does not yet know anything. The imperious landowner treats her granddaughter like a serf. As a result, Turgenev offers Polina to take the girl to be brought up in the Viardot family, where she will live until she comes of age (developed anal sex always takes care of their offspring) together with the children of Polina Viardot.

Turgenev's daughter

For some time, Ivan Sergeevich lives in the Viardot family. Polina's husband (with a skin vector) does not interfere with this at all, tk. they live at the expense of Ivan Turgenev. After some time, the writer returned to Russia, where he lives in his estate practically under house arrest. The authorities did not like the obituary he wrote after Gogol's death - in it the secret office saw a threat to imperial power. He madly misses his beloved. “I cannot live away from you, I must feel your closeness, enjoy it. The day when your eyes did not shine for me is a lost day, ”he wrote to Polina. At the same time, Ivan Turgenev was not at all alone. From hunting, he returned to the house where Feoktista, the maid, whom he bought for a huge amount of money from his cousin Elizaveta Alekseevna Turgeneva, was waiting for him.

By the way, Pauline Viardot also did not deny herself carnal pleasures (like a real skin-visual woman who undifferentiated pheromones for all men). Soon she gave birth to a son, Paul. But to this day it remains a mystery from whom: from Ivan Turgenev, from the famous artist Ari Schaeffer, who painted her portrait, or ...

A few years later, Viardot comes to Russia on tour. Turgenev hurries to meet her, but Polina's feelings have cooled down. Yes, if a visual person does not see the object of his adoration for a long time, then emotional ties are quickly torn. As the saying goes, "out of sight, out of mind." But Ivan Turgenev is ready to be content with a simple friendship, if only to see Viardot at least from time to time (anal-visual people can create very long-lasting emotional bonds).

A year after this unpleasant event, Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev meets his cousin's daughter, 18-year-old Olga Turgeneva, and falls in love with her. He even begins to think about marriage for the first time. And, I must say that the young lady reciprocated the Lovelace. But the memory carefully kept the image of Polina and helpfully sent him to a happy past. Ivan Sergeevich breaks off relations with Olga.

Olga Turgeneva

Only after a long 9 years there is a new rapprochement between Ivan Turgenev and Pauline Viardot. First they live in Baden, then (at the end of the Franco-Prussian war) in Paris. But two such bright personalities cannot get along together, and Ivan Sergeevich returns to Russia again.
In 1879, Ivan Turgenev makes his last attempt to start a family. The young actress Maria Savinova is ready to become his life partner. The girl is not even afraid of a huge age difference - at that moment Turgenev was already over 60.

I.S. Turgenev 1880

In 1882 Savinova and Turgenev went to Paris. Unfortunately, this trip marked the end of their relationship. In Turgenev's house, every little thing reminded of Viardot, Maria constantly felt superfluous and was tormented by jealousy.
And yet, in the last minutes of his life, Polina was next to Ivan Turgenev. HIS POLINA. In the last hours of his life, he no longer recognized anyone. When Pauline Viardot bent over him, Ivan Sergeevich said: “Here is the queen of queens!” Those were his last words.
Ivan Turgenev died in Bougival, near Paris, on August 22 (September 3), 1883. Those who saw him during the farewell testify that his face was calm and beautiful as ever. After all, it was not in vain that the classic said that “love is stronger than death and the fear of death.”

The future master of the living word was born on October 28 (November 9), 1818, by nobles living in Orel. Turgenev's father came from a very old family and at one time was a hussar officer, captain of the Cavalier Guard Regiment. The writer's mother came from a wealthy landowning family.

Ivan Sergeevich's childhood years were spent in the family estate of Spasskoe-Lutovinovo. His trustees and educators were teachers and tutors who came from Germans and Swiss. The nannies took care of the child. Little Ivan grew up in rather harsh conditions. An atmosphere of autocracy reigned in the parents' estate. A rare day went by for the young Turgenev without punishment from the domineering mother, who in this way taught her son to.

His own experience and observation of the life of forced peasants from a young age awakened in Turgenev an aversion to serfdom.

As a child, Turgenev did not like to mess with toys. He was very interested in nature, which attracted him to itself with its mystery, mystery and simplicity. Young Turgenev liked to wander for a long time through the forest and the park, he often visited the pond. The hunters and foresters who lived on the estate encouraged the future writer's emerging interest in nature, telling him about the life of birds and forest animals.

In 1827, the Turgenevs moved to Moscow, where Ivan received his education under the guidance and supervision of private teachers. Much later, the writer admitted that he was very keenly experiencing a break in ties with his usual former life.

History of the Turgenev House

The house and estate of the Turgenevs were located in the current Sovetsky district of the city of Orel. Since the time of the original development, the city has been subject to frequent fires. Wooden houses were placed quite close to each other, so entire city blocks often perished in the destructive fire element. Historical sources contain indications that the house where Turgenev was born was subsequently burned down in one of these fires.

The Turgenev estate occupied almost the entire block entirely along Borisoglebskaya and Georgievskaya streets. Unfortunately, historians have not been able to find a reliable image of the writer's home.

A few years after the fire, a one-story house was built on the site of the burnt building, which subsequently passed in turn to several owners.

In modern Orel, there are no buildings on the site of the former Turgenev house. A memorial plaque dedicated to the writer is fixed a little in the back of the courtyard, on the wall of the administrative building.

Turgenev Ivan Sergeevich
Aliases:	Vb; -e-; I.S.T.; I.T.; L.; Nedobobov, Jeremiah; T.; T…; T. L.; T……in; ***
Date of Birth:
Place of Birth:	City of Orel, Russian Empire
Date of death:
A place of death:	Bougival, French Third Republic
Citizenship:	Russian empire
Occupation:	Prose writer, poet, playwright, translator
Years of creativity:
Direction:
	Short story, novella, novel, elegy, drama
Art language:
	"Evening", 1838

Biography

Origin and early years

After graduation

The heyday of creativity

Dramaturgy

1850s

Last years

Death and funeral

Personal life

"Turgenev girls"

Passion for hunting

The value and appreciation of creativity

Turgenev on stage

Foreign criticism

Bibliography

Novels and stories

Turgenev in illustrations

Screen adaptations

In St. Petersburg

Toponymy

Public institutions

monuments

Other objects

Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev(October 28, 1818, Oryol, Russian Empire - August 22, 1883, Bougival, France) - Russian realist writer, poet, publicist, playwright, translator; corresponding member of the Imperial Academy of Sciences in the category of Russian language and literature (1860), honorary doctor of Oxford University (1879). One of the classics of Russian literature, who made the most significant contribution to its development in the second half of the 19th century.

The artistic system he created influenced the poetics of not only Russian, but also Western European novels in the second half of the 19th century. Ivan Turgenev was the first in Russian literature to begin to study the personality of the "new man" - the sixties man, his moral qualities and psychological characteristics, thanks to him the term "nihilist" began to be widely used in the Russian language. He was a propagandist of Russian literature and dramaturgy in the West.

The study of the works of I. S. Turgenev is an obligatory part of the general education school programs in Russia. The most famous works are the cycle of stories "Notes of a Hunter", the story "Mumu", the story "Asya", the novels "The Noble Nest", "Fathers and Sons".

Biography

Origin and early years

The family of Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev came from an ancient family of Tula nobles, the Turgenevs. In her memorial book, the mother of the future writer wrote: “ On October 28, 1818, on Monday, the son Ivan, 12 inches tall, was born in Orel, in his house, at 12 o'clock in the morning. Baptized on the 4th of November, Feodor Semenovich Uvarov with his sister Fedosya Nikolaevna Teplovoy».

Ivan's father Sergei Nikolaevich Turgenev (1793-1834) served at that time in the cavalry regiment. The careless lifestyle of the handsome cavalry guard upset his finances, and in order to improve his position, he entered into a marriage of convenience in 1816 with an elderly, unattractive, but very wealthy Varvara Petrovna Lutovinova (1787-1850). In 1821, with the rank of colonel of the cuirassier regiment, my father retired. Ivan was the second son in the family. The mother of the future writer, Varvara Petrovna, came from a wealthy noble family. Her marriage to Sergei Nikolayevich was not happy. The father died in 1834, leaving three sons - Nikolai, Ivan and Sergei, who died early from epilepsy. Mother was a domineering and despotic woman. She herself lost her father early, suffered from the cruel attitude of her mother (whom the grandson later portrayed as an old woman in the essay "Death"), and from a violent, drinking stepfather, who often beat her. Due to constant beatings and humiliation, she later fled to her uncle, after whose death she became the owner of a magnificent estate and 5000 souls.

Varvara Petrovna was a difficult woman. Serfdom habits coexisted in her with erudition and education, she combined care for the upbringing of children with family despotism. Ivan was also subjected to maternal beatings, despite the fact that he was considered her beloved son. The boy was taught literacy by frequently changing French and German tutors. In the family of Varvara Petrovna, everyone spoke exclusively in French among themselves, even prayers in the house were pronounced in French. She traveled a lot and was an enlightened woman, she read a lot, but also mostly in French. But her native language and literature were not alien to her either: she herself had an excellent figurative Russian speech, and Sergei Nikolayevich demanded that the children write letters to him in Russian during their father's absences. The Turgenev family maintained ties with V. A. Zhukovsky and M. N. Zagoskin. Varvara Petrovna followed the novelties of literature, was well aware of the work of N. M. Karamzin, V. A. Zhukovsky, A. S. Pushkin, M. Yu. Lermontov and N. V. Gogol, whom she willingly quoted in letters to her son.

Love for Russian literature was also instilled in young Turgenev by one of the serf valets (who later became the prototype of Punin in the story "Punin and Baburin"). Until the age of nine, Ivan Turgenev lived in the hereditary mother's estate, Spasskoe-Lutovinovo, 10 km from Mtsensk, Oryol province. In 1827, the Turgenevs, in order to educate their children, settled in Moscow, buying a house on Samotyok. The future writer studied first at the Weidenhammer boarding house, then became a boarder with the director of the Lazarev Institute, I. F. Krause.

Education. The beginning of literary activity

In 1833, at the age of 15, Turgenev entered the verbal department of Moscow University. At the same time, A. I. Herzen and V. G. Belinsky studied here. A year later, after Ivan's elder brother entered the Guards Artillery, the family moved to St. Petersburg, where Ivan Turgenev moved to the Faculty of Philosophy at St. Petersburg University. At the university, T. N. Granovsky, the future famous historian of the Western school, became his friend.

At first, Turgenev wanted to become a poet. In 1834, as a third-year student, he wrote the dramatic poem "Steno" in iambic pentameter. The young author showed these tests of the pen to his teacher, professor of Russian literature P. A. Pletnev. During one of the lectures, Pletnev analyzed this poem quite strictly, without disclosing its authorship, but at the same time he also admitted that “there is something” in the writer. These words prompted the young poet to write a number of more poems, two of which Pletnev published in 1838 in the Sovremennik magazine, of which he was the editor. They were published under the signature "....v". The debut poems were "Evening" and "To Venus Mediciy".

Turgenev's first publication appeared in 1836 - in the "Journal of the Ministry of Public Education" he published a detailed review "On a Journey to Holy Places" by A. N. Muravyov. By 1837, he had already written about a hundred small poems and several poems (the unfinished "The Old Man's Tale", "Calm at Sea", "Phantasmagoria on a Moonlit Night", "Dream").

After graduation

In 1836 Turgenev graduated from the university with the degree of a real student. Dreaming of scientific activity, the following year he passed the final exam and received a Ph.D. In 1838 he went to Germany, where he settled in Berlin and took up his studies in earnest. At the University of Berlin he attended lectures on the history of Roman and Greek literature, and at home he studied the grammar of ancient Greek and Latin. Knowledge of ancient languages ​​allowed him to freely read the ancient classics. During his studies, he became friends with the Russian writer and thinker N.V. Stankevich, who had a noticeable influence on him. Turgenev attended the lectures of the Hegelians, became interested in German idealism with its doctrine of world development, the "absolute spirit" and the lofty vocation of the philosopher and poet. In general, the whole way of Western European life made a strong impression on Turgenev. The young student came to the conclusion that only the assimilation of the basic principles of universal culture can lead Russia out of the darkness in which it is immersed. In this sense, he became a convinced "Westernizer".

In the 1830-1850s, an extensive circle of literary acquaintances of the writer was formed. Back in 1837 there were fleeting meetings with A. S. Pushkin. Then Turgenev met V. A. Zhukovsky, A. V. Nikitenko, A. V. Koltsov, a little later - with M. Yu. Lermontov. Turgenev had only a few meetings with Lermontov, which did not lead to a close acquaintance, but Lermontov's work had a certain influence on him. He tried to master the rhythm and stanza, style and syntactic features of Lermontov's poetry. Thus, the poem "The Old Landowner" (1841) in some places is close in form to Lermontov's "Testament", in "Ballad" (1841) one feels the influence of "The Song about the Merchant Kalashnikov". But the connection with Lermontov's work is most tangible in the poem "Confession" (1845), whose accusatory pathos brings him closer to Lermontov's poem "Duma".

In May 1839, the old house in Spassky burned down, and Turgenev returned to his homeland, but already in 1840 he again went abroad, visiting Germany, Italy and Austria. Impressed by a meeting with a girl in Frankfurt am Main, Turgenev later wrote the story Spring Waters. In 1841 Ivan returned to Lutovinovo.

In early 1842, he applied to Moscow University for admission to the examination for the degree of Master of Philosophy, but at that time there was no full-time professor of philosophy at the university, and his request was rejected. Not settling in Moscow, Turgenev satisfactorily passed the exam for a master's degree at St. Petersburg University and wrote a dissertation for the verbal department. But by this time, the craving for scientific activity had cooled down, and literary creativity began to attract more and more. Refusing to defend his dissertation, he served until 1844 in the rank of collegiate secretary in the Ministry of the Interior.

In 1843 Turgenev wrote the poem Parasha. Not really hoping for a positive response, he nevertheless took the copy to V. G. Belinsky. Belinsky highly appreciated Parasha, publishing his review in Fatherland Notes two months later. Since that time, their acquaintance began, which later grew into a strong friendship; Turgenev was even godfather to Belinsky's son, Vladimir. The poem was published in the spring of 1843 as a separate book under the initials "T. L." (Turgenev-Lutovinov). In the 1840s, in addition to Pletnev and Belinsky, Turgenev met with A. A. Fet.

In November 1843, Turgenev created the poem "Mistful Morning", set to music in different years by several composers, including A. F. Gedike and G. L. Catuar. The most famous, however, is the romance version, which was originally published under the title "Music of Abaza"; its belonging to V. V. Abaza, E. A. Abaza or Yu. F. Abaza has not been finally established. Upon publication, the poem was seen as a reflection of Turgenev's love for Pauline Viardot, whom he met during this time.

In 1844, the poem "Pop" was written, which the writer himself described rather as fun, devoid of any "deep and significant ideas." Nevertheless, the poem attracted public interest for its anti-clerical orientation. The poem was curtailed by Russian censorship, but it was printed in its entirety abroad.

In 1846, the novels Breter and Three Portraits were published. In Breter, which became Turgenev's second story, the writer tried to present the struggle between Lermontov's influence and the desire to discredit posturing. The plot for his third story, Three Portraits, was drawn from the Lutovinov family chronicle.

The heyday of creativity

Since 1847, Ivan Turgenev participated in the reformed Sovremennik, where he became close to N. A. Nekrasov and P. V. Annenkov. His first feuilleton "Modern Notes" was published in the journal, and the first chapters of "Notes of a Hunter" began to be published. In the very first issue of Sovremennik, the story "Khor and Kalinich" was published, which opened countless editions of the famous book. The subtitle "From the notes of a hunter" was added by the editor I. I. Panaev in order to draw the attention of readers to the story. The success of the story turned out to be huge, and it brought

Turgenev to the idea of ​​writing a number of others of the same kind. According to Turgenev, "Notes of a Hunter" was the fulfillment of his Annibal oath to fight to the end with the enemy, whom he had hated since childhood. "This enemy had a certain image, bore a well-known name: this enemy was - serfdom." To carry out his intention, Turgenev decided to leave Russia. “I couldn’t,” wrote Turgenev, “breathe the same air, stay close to what I hated. I needed to move away from my enemy so that from my very place I would be given a stronger attack on him.”

In 1847, Turgenev went abroad with Belinsky and in 1848 lived in Paris, where he witnessed revolutionary events. As an eyewitness to the killing of hostages, the attacks, the barricades of the February French Revolution, he forever endured a deep disgust for revolutions in general. A little later, he became close to A. I. Herzen, fell in love with Ogaryov's wife N. A. Tuchkova.

Dramaturgy

The end of the 1840s - the beginning of the 1850s became the time of Turgenev's most intense activity in the field of dramaturgy and the time of reflection on issues of history and theory of drama. In 1848 he wrote such plays as "Where it is thin, there it breaks" and "The Freeloader", in 1849 - "Breakfast at the Leader" and "The Bachelor", in 1850 - "A Month in the Country", in 1851- m - "Provincial". Of these, "The Freeloader", "The Bachelor", "The Provincial Girl" and "A Month in the Country" were successful due to their excellent productions on stage. The success of The Bachelor was especially dear to him, which became possible largely thanks to the performing skills of A. E. Martynov, who played in four of his plays. Turgenev formulated his views on the position of the Russian theater and the tasks of dramaturgy as early as 1846. He believed that the crisis in the theatrical repertoire that was observed at that time could be overcome by the efforts of writers committed to Gogol's dramaturgy. Turgenev counted himself among the followers of Gogol the playwright.

To master the literary techniques of dramaturgy, the writer also worked on translations of Byron and Shakespeare. At the same time, he did not try to copy Shakespeare's dramatic techniques, he only interpreted his images, and all the attempts of his contemporary playwrights to use Shakespeare's work as a role model, to borrow his theatrical techniques only caused Turgenev's irritation. In 1847 he wrote: “The shadow of Shakespeare hangs over all dramatic writers, they cannot get rid of memories; these unfortunates read too much and lived too little.

1850s

In 1850, Turgenev returned to Russia, but he never saw his mother, who died that same year. Together with his brother Nikolai, he shared a large fortune of his mother and, if possible, tried to alleviate the hardships of the peasants he inherited.

In 1850-1852 he lived either in Russia or abroad, he saw N.V. Gogol. After Gogol's death, Turgenev wrote an obituary, which the St. Petersburg censors did not let through. The reason for her dissatisfaction was that, as the chairman of the St. Petersburg Censorship Committee M. N. Musin-Pushkin put it, “it is criminal to speak so enthusiastically about such a writer.” Then Ivan Sergeevich sent the article to Moscow, V.P. Botkin, who published it in Moskovskie Vedomosti. The authorities saw a rebellion in the text, and the author was placed on the exit, where he spent a month. On May 18, Turgenev was sent to his native village, and only thanks to the efforts of Count A.K. Tolstoy, two years later, the writer again received the right to live in the capitals.

There is an opinion that the real reason for the exile was not a seditious obituary to Gogol, but the excessive radicalism of Turgenev's views, manifested in sympathy for Belinsky, suspiciously frequent trips abroad, sympathetic stories about serfs, a laudatory review of an emigrant Herzen about Turgenev. The enthusiastic tone of the article about Gogol only overwhelmed the gendarmerie's patience, becoming an external reason for punishment, the meaning of which was thought out by the authorities in advance. Turgenev feared that his arrest and exile would interfere with the publication of the first edition of the Hunter's Notes, but his fears were not justified - in August 1852 the book was censored and published.

However, the censor Lvov, who let the “Notes of a Hunter” go to print, was dismissed from service by personal order of Nicholas I and deprived of his pension. Russian censorship also imposed a ban on the re-edition of the Hunter's Notes, explaining this step by the fact that Turgenev, on the one hand, poeticized the serfs, and on the other hand, depicted “that these peasants are oppressed, that the landowners behave indecently and illegal ... finally, that it is more free for a peasant to live in freedom.

During his exile in Spasskoye, Turgenev went hunting, read books, wrote stories, played chess, listened to Beethoven's Coriolanus performed by A.P. Tyutcheva and his sister, who lived at that time in Spasskoye, and from time to time was subjected to raids by the bailiff .

In 1852, while still in exile in Spasskoye-Lutovinovo, he wrote the textbook story "Mumu". Most of the "Notes of a Hunter" was created by the writer in Germany. "Notes of a Hunter" in 1854 was published in Paris as a separate edition, although at the beginning of the Crimean War this publication was in the nature of anti-Russian propaganda, and Turgenev was forced to publicly protest against the poor quality French translation by Ernest Charrière. After the death of Nicholas I, four of the most significant works of the writer were published one after another: Rudin (1856), The Noble Nest (1859), On the Eve (1860) and Fathers and Sons (1862). The first two were published in Nekrasov's Sovremennik, the other two in Russkiy Vestnik by M. N. Katkov.

Employees of Sovremennik I. S. Turgenev, N. A. Nekrasov, I. I. Panaev, M. N. Longinov, V. P. Gaevsky, D. V. Grigorovich sometimes gathered in a circle of "warlocks" organized by A. V. Druzhinin. The humorous improvisations of the “warlocks” sometimes went beyond the scope of censorship, so they had to be published abroad. Later, Turgenev took part in the activities of the Society for Assistance to Needy Writers and Scientists (Literary Fund), founded on the initiative of the same A. V. Druzhinin. From the end of 1856, the writer collaborated with the journal Library for Reading, published under the editorship of A. V. Druzhinin. But his editing did not bring the expected success to the publication, and Turgenev, who in 1856 hoped for a close magazine success, in 1861 called the "Library", edited by that time by A. F. Pisemsky, "a dead hole."

In the autumn of 1855, Leo Tolstoy was added to Turgenev's circle of friends. In September of the same year, Tolstoy's story "The Cutting of the Forest" was published in Sovremennik with a dedication to I. S. Turgenev.

1860s

Turgenev took an ardent part in the discussion of the upcoming Peasant Reform, participated in the development of various collective letters, draft addresses addressed to Tsar Alexander II, protests, and so on. From the first months of publication of Herzen's "The Bell" Turgenev was his active collaborator. He himself did not write in The Bell, but he helped in collecting materials and preparing them for publication. Turgenev's equally important role was to mediate between Herzen and those correspondents from Russia who, for various reasons, did not want to be in direct contact with the disgraced London emigrant. In addition, Turgenev sent detailed review letters to Herzen, information from which, without the author's signature, was also published in Kolokol. At the same time, Turgenev always spoke out against the harsh tone of Herzen’s materials and excessive criticism of government decisions: “Please don’t scold Alexander Nikolayevich, otherwise all the reactionaries in St. - so he, perhaps, will lose his spirit.

In 1860, Sovremennik published an article by N. A. Dobrolyubov “When will the real day come?” In which the critic spoke very flatteringly about the new novel “On the Eve” and Turgenev’s work in general. Nevertheless, Turgenev was not satisfied with the far-reaching conclusions of Dobrolyubov, made by him after reading the novel. Dobrolyubov connected the idea of ​​Turgenev's work with the events of the approaching revolutionary transformation of Russia, with which the liberal Turgenev could not come to terms. Dobrolyubov wrote: “Then the full, sharply and vividly outlined image of the Russian Insarov will appear in literature. And we do not have to wait long for him: this is vouched for by the feverish, painful impatience with which we await his appearance in life. He will come, finally, this day! And, in any case, the eve is not far from the day following it: just some kind of night separates them! ... ”The writer gave Nekrasov an ultimatum: either he, Turgenev, or Dobrolyubov. Nekrasov preferred Dobrolyubov. After that, Turgenev left Sovremennik and stopped communicating with Nekrasov, and subsequently Dobrolyubov became one of the prototypes for the image of Bazarov in the novel Fathers and Sons.

Turgenev gravitated towards the circle of Western writers who professed the principles of "pure art", opposed to the tendentious creativity of raznochintsev revolutionaries: P. V. Annenkov, V. P. Botkin, D. V. Grigorovich, A. V. Druzhinin. For a short time, Leo Tolstoy also joined this circle. For some time Tolstoy lived in Turgenev's apartment. After Tolstoy's marriage to S. A. Bers, Turgenev found a close relative in Tolstoy, but even before the wedding, in May 1861, when both prose writers were visiting A. A. Fet at the Stepanovo estate, there was a serious quarrel between them, almost ended in a duel and ruined relations between writers for a long 17 years. For some time, the writer developed complex relationships with Fet himself, as well as with some other contemporaries - F. M. Dostoevsky, I. A. Goncharov.

In 1862, good relations with former friends of Turgenev's youth, A.I. Herzen and M.A. Bakunin, began to deteriorate. From July 1, 1862 to February 15, 1863, Herzen's Bell published a series of articles, Ends and Beginnings, consisting of eight letters. Without naming the addressee of Turgenev's letters, Herzen defended his understanding of the historical development of Russia, which, in his opinion, should move along the path of peasant socialism. Herzen contrasted peasant Russia with bourgeois Western Europe, whose revolutionary potential he considered already exhausted. Turgenev objected to Herzen in private letters, insisting on the commonality of historical development for different states and peoples.

At the end of 1862, Turgenev was involved in the process of the 32nd in the case of "persons accused of having relations with London propagandists." After the authorities ordered him to immediately appear in the Senate, Turgenev decided to write a letter to the sovereign, trying to convince him of the loyalty of his convictions, "quite independent, but conscientious." He asked interrogation points to be sent to him in Paris. In the end, he was forced to leave for Russia in 1864 for a Senate interrogation, where he managed to avert all suspicions from himself. The Senate found him not guilty. Turgenev's appeal to Emperor Alexander II personally caused Herzen's bilious reaction in Kolokol. Much later, this moment in the relationship between the two writers was used by V. I. Lenin to illustrate the difference between the liberal hesitations of Turgenev and Herzen: “When the liberal Turgenev wrote a private letter to Alexander II with assurance of his loyal feelings and donated two gold pieces to the soldiers wounded during the pacification of the Polish uprising , “The Bell” wrote about “the gray-haired Magdalene (male), who wrote to the sovereign that she did not know sleep, tormented that the sovereign did not know about the repentance that had befallen her.” And Turgenev immediately recognized himself. But Turgenev's vacillation between tsarism and revolutionary democracy manifested itself in another way.

In 1863 Turgenev settled in Baden-Baden. The writer actively participated in the cultural life of Western Europe, establishing contacts with the greatest writers of Germany, France and England, promoting Russian literature abroad and acquainting Russian readers with the best works of contemporary Western authors. Among his acquaintances or correspondents were Friedrich Bodenstedt, William Thackeray, Charles Dickens, Henry James, Georges Sand, Victor Hugo, Charles Saint-Beuve, Hippolyte Taine, Prosper Mérimée, Ernest Renan, Théophile Gautier, Edmond Goncourt, Emile Zola, Anatole France , Guy de Maupassant, Alphonse Daudet, Gustave Flaubert. Since 1874, the famous bachelor's "dinners of five" - ​​Flaubert, Edmond Goncourt, Daudet, Zola and Turgenev - have been held in the Parisian restaurants of Risch or Pellet. The idea belonged to Flaubert, but Turgenev played the main role in them. Lunches were held once a month. They raised various topics - about the features of literature, about the structure of the French language, told stories and simply enjoyed delicious food. Lunches were held not only at the Parisian restaurateurs, but also at the writers' houses.

I. S. Turgenev acted as a consultant and editor of foreign translators of Russian writers, wrote prefaces and notes to translations of Russian writers into European languages, as well as to Russian translations of works by famous European writers. He translated Western writers into Russian and Russian writers and poets into French and German. This is how translations of Flaubert's works Herodias and The Tale of St. Julian the Merciful" for Russian readers and Pushkin's works for French readers. For a while, Turgenev became the most famous and most widely read Russian author in Europe, where critics ranked him among the first writers of the century. In 1878, at the international literary congress in Paris, the writer was elected vice-president. On June 18, 1879, he was awarded an honorary doctorate from Oxford University, despite the fact that the university had not given such an honor to any novelist before him.

Despite living abroad, all Turgenev's thoughts were still connected with Russia. He wrote the novel "Smoke" (1867), which caused a lot of controversy in Russian society. According to the author, everyone scolded the novel: "both red and white, and from above, and from below, and from the side - especially from the side."

In 1868, Turgenev became a permanent contributor to the liberal journal Vestnik Evropy and severed ties with M. N. Katkov. The gap did not go easily - the writer began to be persecuted in the Russky Vestnik and Moskovskie Vedomosti. The attacks were especially toughened in the late 1870s, when, regarding the applause that fell to Turgenev's lot, the Katkov newspaper assured that the writer was "tumbling" in front of progressive youth.

1870s

The fruit of the writer's reflections in the 1870s was the largest of his novels, Nov (1877), which was also criticized. So, for example, M.E. Saltykov-Shchedrin regarded this novel as a service to the autocracy.

Turgenev was friends with the Minister of Education A. V. Golovnin, with the Milyutin brothers (comrade of the Minister of Internal Affairs and Minister of War), N. I. Turgenev, and was closely acquainted with the Minister of Finance M. Kh. Reitern. In the late 1870s, Turgenev became closer to the leaders of the revolutionary emigration from Russia, his circle of acquaintances included P. L. Lavrov, Kropotkin, G. A. Lopatin and many others. Among other revolutionaries, he placed German Lopatin above all, bowing before his mind, courage and moral strength.

In April 1878, Leo Tolstoy invited Turgenev to forget all the misunderstandings between them, to which Turgenev happily agreed. Friendship and correspondence resumed. Turgenev explained the meaning of modern Russian literature, including Tolstoy's work, to the Western reader. In general, Ivan Turgenev played a big role in promoting Russian literature abroad.

However, Dostoevsky in the novel "Demons" portrayed Turgenev in the form of "the great writer Karmazinov" - a noisy, petty, scribbled and practically mediocre writer who considers himself a genius and sits out abroad. A similar attitude towards Turgenev by the ever-needy Dostoevsky was caused, among other things, by Turgenev’s secure position in his noble life and by the highest literary fees at that time: “To Turgenev for his“ Noble Nest ”(I finally read it. Extremely well) I ask for 100 rubles per sheet) gave 4,000 rubles, that is, 400 rubles per sheet. My friend! I know very well that I write worse than Turgenev, but not too worse, and finally, I hope to write not worse at all. Why am I, with my needs, taking only 100 rubles, and Turgenev, who has 2,000 souls, 400 each?

Turgenev, not hiding his dislike for Dostoevsky, in a letter to M.E. Saltykov-Shchedrin in 1882 (after Dostoevsky's death) also did not spare his opponent, calling him "the Russian Marquis de Sade."

In 1880, the writer took part in the Pushkin celebrations dedicated to the opening of the first monument to the poet in Moscow, organized by the Society of Lovers of Russian Literature.

Last years

The last years of Turgenev's life became for him the pinnacle of fame both in Russia, where the writer again became a universal favorite, and in Europe, where the best critics of that time (I. Ten, E. Renan, G. Brandes, etc.) ranked him among the first writers of the century. His visits to Russia in 1878-1881 were real triumphs. All the more disturbing in 1882 were the reports of a severe exacerbation of his usual gouty pains. In the spring of 1882, the first signs of the disease appeared, which soon turned out to be fatal for Turgenev. With temporary relief of pain, he continued to work and a few months before his death he published the first part of "Poems in Prose" - a cycle of lyrical miniatures, which became his kind of farewell to life, homeland and art. The book was opened by the poem in prose "Village", and completed by "Russian language" - a lyrical hymn in which the author put his faith in the great destiny of his country:

Parisian doctors Charcot and Jacquet diagnosed the writer with angina pectoris; soon she was joined by intercostal neuralgia. The last time Turgenev was in Spasskoye-Lutovinovo was in the summer of 1881. The sick writer spent the winters in Paris, and for the summer he was transported to Bougival, on the estate of Viardot.

By January 1883, the pains had intensified so much that he could not sleep without morphine. He underwent an operation to remove a neuroma in the lower part of the abdominal cavity, but the operation did not help much, since it did not alleviate the pain in the thoracic region of the spine. The disease developed, in March and April the writer was so tormented that those around him began to notice momentary clouding of reason, caused in part by morphine. The writer was fully aware of his imminent death and resigned himself to the consequences of the disease, which made it impossible for him to walk or just stand.

Death and funeral

The confrontation between an unimaginably painful illness and an unimaginably strong organism"(P. V. Annenkov) ended on August 22 (September 3), 1883 in Bougival near Paris. Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev died of myxosarcoma (Muho Sarcoma) (a cancerous lesion of the bones of the spine). Doctor S.P. Botkin testified that the true cause of death was clarified only after an autopsy, during which physiologists also weighed his brain. As it turned out, among those whose brains were weighed, Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev had the largest brain (2012 grams, which is almost 600 grams more than the average weight).

Turgenev's death was a great shock to his admirers, expressed in a very impressive funeral. The funeral was preceded by mourning celebrations in Paris, at which more than four hundred people took part. Among them were at least a hundred Frenchmen: Edmond Abu, Jules Simon, Emile Ogier, Emile Zola, Alphonse Daudet, Juliette Adam, artist Alfred Diedone, composer Jules Massenet. Ernest Renan addressed the mourners with a heartfelt speech. In accordance with the will of the deceased, on September 27, his body was brought to St. Petersburg.

Even from the border station Verzhbolovo, funeral services were served at stops. On the platform of the St. Petersburg Varshavsky railway station, a solemn meeting of the coffin with the body of the writer took place. Senator A.F. Koni recalled the funeral at the Volkovsky cemetery:

The reception of the coffin in St. Petersburg and its passage to the Volkovo cemetery presented unusual spectacles in their beauty, majestic character and complete, voluntary and unanimous observance of order. An uninterrupted chain of 176 deputations from literature, from newspapers and magazines, scientists, educational and educational institutions, from zemstvos, Siberians, Poles and Bulgarians occupied a space of several miles, attracting the sympathetic and often moved attention of a huge audience that blocked the sidewalks - carried by deputations graceful, magnificent wreaths and banners with meaningful inscriptions. So, there was a wreath “To the Author of Mumu” ​​from the Society for the Protection of Animals ... a wreath with the inscription “Love is stronger than death” from pedagogical women's courses ... - A. F. Koni, "Turgenev's Funeral", Collected Works in eight volumes. T. 6. M., Legal Literature, 1968. Pp. 385-386.

There were no misunderstandings either. The day after the funeral of Turgenev's body in the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral on the Rue Daru in Paris, on September 19, the famous emigrant populist P.L. Lavrov published a letter in the Parisian newspaper Justice, edited by the future socialist Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau, in which he reported that I. S. Turgenev, on his own initiative, transferred to Lavrov annually for three years 500 francs each to assist in the publication of the revolutionary émigré newspaper Vperyod.

Russian liberals were outraged by this news, considering it a provocation. The conservative press in the person of M. N. Katkov, on the contrary, took advantage of Lavrov’s message for the posthumous persecution of Turgenev in the Russky Vestnik and Moskovskie Vedomosti in order to prevent the deceased writer from being honored in Russia, whose body “without any publicity, with special care” should was to arrive in the capital from Paris for burial. The following of the ashes of Turgenev was very worried about the Minister of the Interior D. A. Tolstoy, who was afraid of spontaneous rallies. According to the editor of Vestnik Evropy, M. M. Stasyulevich, who accompanied the body of Turgenev, the precautions taken by the officials were as inappropriate as if he had accompanied the Nightingale the Robber, and not the body of the great writer.

Personal life

The first romantic passion of young Turgenev was falling in love with the daughter of Princess Shakhovskaya - Catherine (1815-1836), a young poetess. The estates of their parents in the suburbs bordered, they often exchanged visits. He was 15, she was 19. In letters to her son, Varvara Turgeneva called Ekaterina Shakhovskaya a “poet” and a “villain”, since Sergei Nikolayevich himself, the father of Ivan Turgenev, could not resist the charms of the young princess, to whom the girl reciprocated, which broke the heart of the future writer . The episode much later, in 1860, was reflected in the story "First Love", in which the writer endowed some features of Katya Shakhovskaya with the heroine of the story, Zinaida Zasekina.

Henri Troyat, Ivan Turgenev

Turgenev's story at a dinner with G. Flaubert

“My whole life is permeated with the feminine principle. Neither a book nor anything else can replace a woman for me ... How can I explain this? I believe that only love causes such a flowering of the whole being, which nothing else can give. And what do you think? Listen, in my youth I had a mistress - a miller from the outskirts of St. Petersburg. I met her when I went hunting. She was very pretty - a blonde with radiant eyes, which are quite common with us. She didn't want to take anything from me. And once she said: “You must give me a present!” - "What do you want?" - "Bring me soap!" I brought her soap. She took it and disappeared. She returned flushed and said, holding out her fragrant hands to me: “Kiss my hands the way you kiss them to ladies in St. Petersburg drawing rooms!” I threw myself on my knees in front of her ... There is no moment in my life that could compare with this!

In 1841, during his return to Lutovinovo, Ivan became interested in the seamstress Dunyasha (Avdotya Ermolaevna Ivanova). An affair began between the young, which ended in the girl's pregnancy. Ivan Sergeevich immediately expressed a desire to marry her. However, his mother made a serious scandal about this, after which he went to St. Petersburg. Turgenev's mother, having learned about Avdotya's pregnancy, hastily sent her to Moscow to her parents, where Pelageya was born on April 26, 1842. Dunyasha was given in marriage, the daughter was left in an ambiguous position. Turgenev officially recognized the child only in 1857.

Soon after the episode with Avdotya Ivanova, Turgenev met Tatyana Bakunina (1815-1871), the sister of the future revolutionary emigrant M. A. Bakunin. Returning to Moscow after his stay in Spasskoye, he stopped by the Bakunin estate Premukhino. The winter of 1841-1842 passed in close contact with the circle of Bakunin brothers and sisters. All of Turgenev's friends - N.V. Stankevich, V.G. Belinsky and V.P. Botkin - were in love with Mikhail Bakunin's sisters, Lyubov, Varvara and Alexandra.

Tatyana was three years older than Ivan. Like all young Bakunins, she was fascinated by German philosophy and perceived her relationships with others through the prism of Fichte's idealistic concept. She wrote letters to Turgenev in German, full of lengthy reasoning and introspection, despite the fact that young people lived in the same house, and she also expected Turgenev to analyze the motives of her own actions and reciprocal feelings. “The ‘philosophical’ novel,” according to G. A. Byaly, “in the vicissitudes of which the entire younger generation of the Premukhin’s nest took a lively part, lasted several months.” Tatyana was truly in love. Ivan Sergeevich did not remain completely indifferent to the love awakened by him. He wrote several poems (the poem "Parasha" was also inspired by communication with Bakunina) and a story dedicated to this sublimely ideal, mostly literary and epistolary passion. But he could not answer with a serious feeling.

Among other fleeting hobbies of the writer, there were two more that played a certain role in his work. In the 1850s, a fleeting affair broke out with a distant cousin, eighteen-year-old Olga Alexandrovna Turgeneva. The love was mutual, and in 1854 the writer was thinking about marriage, the prospect of which at the same time frightened him. Olga later served as a prototype for the image of Tatiana in the novel "Smoke". Also indecisive was Turgenev with Maria Nikolaevna Tolstaya. Ivan Sergeevich wrote about Leo Tolstoy's sister P. V. Annenkov: “His sister is one of the most attractive creatures that I have ever been able to meet. Sweet, smart, simple - I would not take my eyes off. In my old age (I turned 36 on the fourth day) - I almost fell in love. For the sake of Turgenev, twenty-four-year-old M. N. Tolstaya had already left her husband, she took the writer's attention to herself for true love. But Turgenev, this time too, limited himself to a Platonic hobby, and Maria Nikolaevna served him as a prototype for Verochka from the story Faust.

In the autumn of 1843, Turgenev first saw Pauline Viardot on the stage of the opera house, when the great singer came on tour to St. Petersburg. Turgenev was 25 years old, Viardot - 22 years old. Then, while hunting, he met Pauline's husband, the director of the Italian Theater in Paris, a well-known critic and art critic, Louis Viardot, and on November 1, 1843, he was introduced to Pauline herself. Among the mass of fans, she did not particularly single out Turgenev, known more as an avid hunter, and not a writer. And when her tour ended, Turgenev, together with the Viardot family, left for Paris against the will of his mother, still unknown to Europe and without money. And this despite the fact that everyone considered him a rich man. But this time, his extremely cramped financial situation was explained precisely by his disagreement with his mother, one of the richest women in Russia and the owner of a huge agricultural and industrial empire.

For attachment to damn gypsy» His mother didn't give him money for three years. During these years, his lifestyle did not bear much resemblance to the stereotype of the life of a “rich Russian” that had developed about him. In November 1845, he returned to Russia, and in January 1847, having learned about Viardot's tour in Germany, he left the country again: he went to Berlin, then to London, Paris, a tour of France and again to St. Petersburg. Without an official marriage, Turgenev lived in the Viardot family " on the edge of someone else's nest", as he himself said. Pauline Viardot raised Turgenev's illegitimate daughter. In the early 1860s, the Viardot family settled in Baden-Baden, and with them Turgenev ("Villa Tourgueneff"). Thanks to the Viardot family and Ivan Turgenev, their villa has become an interesting musical and artistic center. The war of 1870 forced the Viardot family to leave Germany and move to Paris, where the writer also moved.

The last love of the writer was the actress of the Alexandrinsky Theater Maria Savina. Their meeting took place in 1879, when the young actress was 25 years old, and Turgenev was 61 years old. The actress at that time played the role of Verochka in Turgenev's play A Month in the Country. The role was so vividly played that the writer himself was amazed. After this performance, he went to the actress backstage with a large bouquet of roses and exclaimed: “ Did I write this Verochka?!". Ivan Turgenev fell in love with her, which he openly admitted. The rarity of their meetings was made up for by regular correspondence, which lasted four years. Despite Turgenev's sincere relationship, for Maria he was rather a good friend. She was going to marry another, but the marriage never took place. The marriage of Savina with Turgenev was also not destined to come true - the writer died in the circle of the Viardot family.

"Turgenev girls"

Turgenev's personal life was not entirely successful. Having lived for 38 years in close contact with the Viardot family, the writer felt deeply alone. Under these conditions, Turgenev's image of love was formed, but love is not quite characteristic of his melancholy creative manner. There is almost no happy ending in his works, and the last chord is more often sad. But nevertheless, almost none of the Russian writers paid so much attention to the depiction of love, no one idealized a woman to such an extent as Ivan Turgenev.

The characters of the female characters in his works of the 1850s - 1880s - the images of whole, pure, selfless, morally strong heroines in total formed a literary phenomenon " Turgenev girl"- a typical heroine of his works. Such are Lisa in the story "The Diary of a Superfluous Man", Natalya Lasunskaya in the novel "Rudin", Asya in the story of the same name, Vera in the story "Faust", Elizaveta Kalitina in the novel "The Noble Nest", Elena Stakhova in the novel "On the Eve", Marianna Sinetskaya in novel "Nov" and others.

L. N. Tolstoy, noting the merits of the writer, said that Turgenev painted amazing portraits of women, and that Tolstoy himself later observed Turgenev's women in life.

Family

Turgenev never got his own family. The writer's daughter from the seamstress Avdotya Ermolaevna Ivanova, Pelageya Ivanovna Turgeneva, in the marriage of Brewer (1842-1919), from the age of eight she was brought up in the family of Pauline Viardot in France, where Turgenev changed her name from Pelageya to Polinet, which was more pleasing to his literary ear - Polinet Turgeneva . Ivan Sergeevich arrived in France only six years later, when his daughter was already fourteen. Polinet almost forgot Russian and spoke only French, which touched her father. At the same time, he was upset that the girl had a difficult relationship with Viardot herself. The girl did not love her father's beloved, and soon this led to the fact that the girl was sent to a private boarding school. When Turgenev next came to France, he took his daughter from the boarding house, and they settled together, and for Polinet a governess from England, Innis, was invited.

At the age of seventeen, Polinet met a young businessman Gaston Brewer, who made a good impression on Ivan Turgenev, and he agreed to marry his daughter. As a dowry, the father gave a considerable amount for those times - 150 thousand francs. The girl married Brewer, who soon went bankrupt, after which Polinet, with the assistance of her father, hid from her husband in Switzerland. Since Turgenev's heiress was Pauline Viardot, his daughter found herself in a difficult financial situation after his death. She died in 1919 at the age of 76 from cancer. The children of Polinet - Georges-Albert and Jeanne had no descendants. Georges Albert died in 1924. Jeanne Brewer-Turgeneva never married; She lived by tutoring for a living, as she was fluent in five languages. She even dabbled in poetry, writing poetry in French. She died in 1952 at the age of 80, and with her the family branch of the Turgenevs along the line of Ivan Sergeevich broke off.

Passion for hunting

I. S. Turgenev was at one time one of the most famous hunters in Russia. The love of hunting was instilled in the future writer by his uncle Nikolai Turgenev, a recognized connoisseur of horses and hunting dogs in the district, who raised the boy during his summer holidays in Spasskoye. He also taught hunting to the future writer AI Kupfershmidt, whom Turgenev considered his first teacher. Thanks to him, Turgenev, already in his youth, could call himself a gun hunter. Even Ivan's mother, who previously looked at the hunters as idlers, was imbued with her son's passion. Over the years, the hobby has grown into a passion. It happened that for whole seasons he did not let go of his gun, went thousands of miles across many provinces of the central strip of Russia. Turgenev said that hunting is generally characteristic of a Russian person, and that Russian people have loved hunting since time immemorial.

In 1837, Turgenev met Afanasy Alifanov, a peasant hunter, who later became his frequent hunting companion. The writer bought it for a thousand rubles; he settled in the forest, five miles from Spassky. Athanasius was an excellent storyteller, and Turgenev often came to him to sit over a cup of tea and listen to hunting stories. The story "About Nightingales" (1854) was recorded by the writer from the words of Alifanov. It was Athanasius who became the prototype of Yermolai from the Hunter's Notes. He was also known for his talent as a hunter among the writer's friends - A. A. Fet, I. P. Borisov. When Athanasius died in 1872, Turgenev was very sorry for his old hunting companion and asked his manager to provide possible assistance to his daughter Anna.

In 1839, the writer's mother, describing the tragic consequences of the fire that occurred in Spasskoye, does not forget to say: your gun is intact, and the dog is crazy". The resulting fire hastened the arrival of Ivan Turgenev in Spasskoye. In the summer of 1839, he first went hunting in the Teleginsky swamps (on the border of the Bolkhovsky and Oryol counties), visited the Lebedyanskaya fair, which was reflected in the story "Lebedyan" (1847). Varvara Petrovna purchased five packs of greyhounds, nine bowhounds and horses with saddles especially for him.

In the summer of 1843, Ivan Sergeevich lived in a dacha in Pavlovsk and also hunted a lot. This year he met Pauline Viardot. The writer was introduced to her with the words: This is a young Russian landowner. Glorious hunter and bad poet". The husband of the actress Louis was, like Turgenev, a passionate hunter. Ivan Sergeevich invited him more than once to hunt in the vicinity of St. Petersburg. They repeatedly went hunting with friends to the Novgorod province and to Finland. And Pauline Viardot gave Turgenev a beautiful and expensive game bag.

In the late 1840s, the writer lived abroad and worked on the "Notes of a Hunter". The writer spent 1852-1853 in Spasskoye under police supervision. But this exile did not oppress him, since the hunt was again waiting in the village, and quite successful. And the next year he went on hunting expeditions 150 miles from Spassky, where, together with I.F. Yurasov, he hunted on the banks of the Desna. This expedition served as material for Turgenev to work on the story "A Trip to Polissya" (1857).

In August 1854, Turgenev, together with N. A. Nekrasov, went hunting to the estate of the titular adviser I. I. Maslov Osmino, after which both continued to hunt in Spassky. In the mid-1850s, Turgenev met the Tolstoy family. The elder brother of Leo Tolstoy, Nikolai, also turned out to be an avid hunter and, together with Turgenev, made several hunting trips around Spassky and Nikolsko-Vyazemsky. Sometimes they were accompanied by the husband of M. N. Tolstoy - Valerian Petrovich; some traits of his character were reflected in the image of Priimkov in the story "Faust" (1855). In the summer of 1855, Turgenev did not hunt because of the cholera epidemic, but in subsequent seasons he tried to make up for lost time. Together with N. N. Tolstoy, the writer visited Pirogovo, the estate of S. N. Tolstoy, who preferred to hunt with greyhounds and had excellent horses and dogs. Turgenev, on the other hand, preferred to hunt with a gun and a setter dog, and mainly for game birds.

Turgenev kept a kennel of seventy hounds and sixty greyhounds. Together with N. N. Tolstoy, A. A. Fet and A. T. Alifanov, he made a number of hunting expeditions in the central Russian provinces. In the years 1860-1870, Turgenev mainly lived abroad. He also tried to recreate the rituals and atmosphere of Russian hunting abroad, but from all this only a distant resemblance was obtained even when he, together with Louis Viardot, managed to rent quite decent hunting grounds. In the spring of 1880, having visited Spasskoe, Turgenev specially drove to Yasnaya Polyana in order to persuade Leo Tolstoy to take part in the Pushkin celebrations. Tolstoy declined the invitation because he considered formal dinners and liberal toasts in front of the starving Russian peasantry inappropriate. Nevertheless, Turgenev fulfilled his old dream - he hunted with Leo Tolstoy. A whole hunting circle even formed around Turgenev - N. A. Nekrasov, A. A. Fet, A. N. Ostrovsky, N. N. and L. N. Tolsty, artist P. P. Sokolov (illustrator of the "Notes of a Hunter") . In addition, he happened to hunt with the German writer Karl Muller, as well as with representatives of the royal houses of Russia and Germany - Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich and Prince of Hesse.

Ivan Turgenev went with a gun over his shoulders Oryol, Tula, Tambov, Kursk, Kaluga provinces. He was well acquainted with the best hunting grounds in England, France and Germany. He wrote three specialized works devoted to hunting: “On the Notes of the Orenburg Province Rifle Hunter S. T. Aksakov”, “Notes of the Orenburg Province Rifle Hunter” and “Fifty Shortcomings of a Rifle Hunter or Fifty Shortcomings of a Pointing Dog”.

Character traits and writer's life

Biographers of Turgenev noted the unique features of his writing life. From his youth, he combined intelligence, education, artistic talent with passivity, a penchant for introspection, and indecision. All together, in a bizarre way, combined with the habits of a barchonka, who for a long time was dependent on an imperious, despotic mother. Turgenev recalled that at the University of Berlin, while studying Hegel, he could drop out of school when he needed to train his dog or set it on rats. T. N. Granovsky, who came to his apartment, found the student-philosopher playing with a serf servant (Porfiry Kudryashov) in card soldiers. Childishness smoothed over the years, but the internal split and immaturity of views made themselves felt for a long time: according to A. Ya. Panaeva, young Ivan wanted to be accepted both in the literary society and in secular living rooms, while in secular society Turgenev was ashamed to admit about his literary earnings, which spoke of his false and frivolous attitude to literature and to the title of a writer at that time.

The cowardice of the writer in his youth is evidenced by an episode of 1838 in Germany, when a fire broke out during a trip on a ship, and the passengers miraculously managed to escape. Fearing for his life, Turgenev asked one of the sailors to save him and promised him a reward from his rich mother if he could fulfill his request. Other passengers testified that the young man exclaimed plaintively: Die so young!”, while pushing women and children near the lifeboats. Fortunately, the beach was not far. Once on the shore, the young man was ashamed of his cowardice. Rumors of his cowardice infiltrated society and became the subject of ridicule. The event played a certain negative role in the subsequent life of the author and was described by Turgenev himself in the short story "Fire at Sea".

Researchers note another trait of Turgenev's character, which brought him and those around him a lot of trouble - his optionality, "all-Russian negligence" or "Oblomovism", as E. A. Solovyov writes. Ivan Sergeevich could invite guests to his place and soon forget about it, having gone somewhere on his own business; he could promise a story to N. A. Nekrasov for the next issue of Sovremennik, or even take an advance payment from A. A. Kraevsky and not deliver the promised manuscript on time. Ivan Sergeevich himself subsequently warned the younger generation against such annoying trifles. The Polish-Russian revolutionary Artur Benny once became a victim of this optionality, and he was slanderously accused in Russia of being an agent of Section III. This accusation could only be dispelled by A. I. Herzen, to whom Benny wrote a letter and asked to send it with an opportunity to I. S. Turgenev in London. Turgenev forgot about the letter, which had lain unsent with him for more than two months. During this time, rumors of Benny's betrayal reached catastrophic proportions. The letter, which reached Herzen very late, could not change anything in Benny's reputation.

The reverse side of these flaws was softness of soul, the breadth of nature, a certain generosity, gentleness, but his kindness had its limits. When, during his last visit to Spasskoye, he saw that the mother, who did not know how to please her beloved son, lined up all the serfs along the alley to greet the barchuk " loud and happy”, Ivan was angry with his mother, immediately turned around and left back to St. Petersburg. They did not see each other again until her death, and even lack of money could not shake his decision. Ludwig Peach singled out his modesty among Turgenev's character traits. Abroad, where his work was still poorly known, Turgenev never boasted to those around him that in Russia he was already considered a famous writer. Having become an independent owner of the maternal inheritance, Turgenev did not show any concern for his bread and crops. Unlike Leo Tolstoy, he had no mastery in him.

He calls himself " the most careless of Russian landowners". The writer did not delve into the management of his estate, entrusting it either to his uncle, or to the poet N. S. Tyutchev, or even to random people. Turgenev was very wealthy, he had at least 20 thousand rubles of income per year from the land, but at the same time he always needed money, spending it very imprudently. The habits of a wide Russian master made themselves felt. Turgenev's literary fees were also very significant. He was one of the highest paid writers in Russia. Each edition of the Hunter's Notes brought him 2,500 rubles of net income. The right to publish his works cost 20-25 thousand rubles.

The value and appreciation of creativity

Extra people in the image of Turgenev

Despite the fact that the tradition of depicting “superfluous people” arose before Turgenev (Chatsky A. S. Griboyedova, Evgeny Onegin A. S. Pushkin, Pechorin M. Yu. Lermontov, Beltov A. I. Herzen, Aduev Jr. in “Ordinary History” I. A. Goncharova), Turgenev has priority in determining this type of literary characters. The name "Extra Man" was fixed after the publication in 1850 of Turgenev's story "The Diary of an Extra Man". "Superfluous people" were distinguished, as a rule, by common features of intellectual superiority over others and at the same time passivity, mental discord, skepticism in relation to the realities of the outside world, and a discrepancy between word and deed. Turgenev created a whole gallery of similar images: Chulkaturin (“The Diary of a Superfluous Man”, 1850), Rudin (“Rudin”, 1856), Lavretsky (“The Noble Nest”, 1859), Nezhdanov (“Nov”, 1877). Turgenev's short stories "Asya", "Yakov Pasynkov", "Correspondence" and others are also devoted to the problem of the "superfluous person".

The protagonist of the "Diary of a Superfluous Man" is marked by the desire to analyze all his emotions, to fix the slightest shades of the state of his own soul. Like Shakespeare's Hamlet, the hero notices the unnaturalness and tension of his thoughts, the lack of will: I disassembled myself to the last thread, compared myself with others, remembered the slightest glances, smiles, words of people ... Whole days passed in this painful, fruitless work". Soul-corroding introspection gives the hero an unnatural pleasure: Only after my expulsion from the Ozhogins' house did I painfully learn how much pleasure a person can draw from the contemplation of his own misfortune.". The failure of apathetic and reflective characters was even more set off by the images of solid and strong Turgenev's heroines.

The result of Turgenev's reflections on the heroes of the Rudin and Chulkaturin types was the article "Hamlet and Don Quixote" (1859). The least "Hamletic" of all Turgenev's "superfluous people" is the hero of the "Noble Nest" Lavretsky. "Russian Hamlet" is named in the novel "Nov" one of its main characters, Alexei Dmitrievich Nezhdanov.

Simultaneously with Turgenev, I. A. Goncharov continued to develop the phenomenon of “an extra person” in the novel “Oblomov” (1859), N. A. Nekrasov - Agarin (“Sasha”, 1856), A. F. Pisemsky and many others. But, unlike Goncharov's character, Turgenev's characters have undergone more typification. According to the Soviet literary critic A. Lavretsky (I. M. Frenkel), “If we had all the sources to study the 40s. there is only one “Rudin” or one “Noble Nest”, then it would still be possible to establish the character of the era in its specific features. According to Oblomov, we are not able to do this.

Later, the tradition of depicting Turgenev's "superfluous people" was ironically played up by A.P. Chekhov. The character of his story "Duel" Laevsky is a reduced and parodic version of Turgenev's superfluous person. He says to his friend von Koren: I'm a loser, an extra person". Von Koren agrees that Laevsky is " a chip from Rudin". At the same time, he speaks of Laevsky’s claim to be “an extra person” in a mocking tone: “ Understand this, they say, that it’s not his fault that state-owned packages lie unopened for weeks and that he himself drinks and gets others drunk, but Onegin, Pechorin and Turgenev, who invented a loser and an extra person, are to blame for this". Later, critics brought the character of Rudin closer to the character of Turgenev himself.

Turgenev on stage

By the mid-1850s, Turgenev had become disillusioned with his calling as a playwright. Critics declared his plays unstaged. The author seemed to agree with the opinion of critics and stopped writing for the Russian stage, but in 1868-1869 he wrote four French operetta librettos for Pauline Viardot, intended for production in the Baden-Baden theater. L.P. Grossman noted the validity of many critics' reproaches against Turgenev's plays for the lack of movement in them and the predominance of the conversational element. Nevertheless, he pointed to the paradoxical persistence of Turgenev's productions on stage. Plays by Ivan Sergeevich have not left the repertoire of European and Russian theaters for more than one hundred and sixty years. Famous Russian performers played in them: P. A. Karatygin, V. V. Samoilov, V. V. Samoilova (Samoilova 2nd), A. E. Martynov, V. I. Zhivokini, M. P. Sadovsky, S V. Shumsky, V. N. Davydov, K. A. Varlamov, M. G. Savina, G. N. Fedotova, V. F. Komissarzhevskaya, K. S. Stanislavsky, V. I. Kachalov, M. N Ermolova and others.

Turgenev the playwright was widely recognized in Europe. His plays were successful on the stages of the Antoine Theater in Paris, the Burgtheater in Vienna, the Chamber Theater in Munich, Berlin, Koenigsberg and other German theaters. Turgenev's dramaturgy was in the selected repertoire of outstanding Italian tragedians: Ermete Novelli, Tommaso Salvini, Ernesto Rossi, Ermete Zacconi, Austrian, German and French actors Adolf von Sonnenthal, Andre Antoine, Charlotte Voltaire and Franziska Elmenreich.

Of all his plays, "A Month in the Country" had the greatest success. The debut of the performance took place in 1872. At the beginning of the 20th century, the play was staged at the Moscow Art Theater by K. S. Stanislavsky and I. M. Moskvin. The stage designer of the production and the author of sketches for the costumes of the characters was the world artist M. V. Dobuzhinsky. This play has not left the stage of Russian theaters to this day. Even during the author's lifetime, theaters began to stage his novels and stories with varying degrees of success: "The Noble Nest", "The Steppe King Lear", "Spring Waters". This tradition is continued by modern theaters.

XIX century. Turgenev in the assessments of contemporaries

Contemporaries gave Turgenev's work a very high assessment. Critics V. G. Belinsky, N. A. Dobrolyubov, D. I. Pisarev, A. V. Druzhinin, P. V. Annenkov, Apollon Grigoriev, V. P. Botkin, N. N. Strakhov, W. P. Burenin, K. S. Aksakov, I. S. Aksakov, N. K. Mikhailovsky, K. N. Leontiev, A. S. Suvorin, P. L. Lavrov, S. S. Dudyshkin, P. N. Tkachev, N. I. Solovyov, M. A. Antonovich, M. N. Longinov, M. F. De Poulet, N. V. Shelgunov, N. G. Chernyshevsky and many others.

So, V. G. Belinsky noted the writer's extraordinary skill in depicting Russian nature. According to N.V. Gogol, in the Russian literature of that time, Turgenev had the most talent. N. A. Dobrolyubov wrote that as soon as Turgenev raised any issue or a new side of social relations in his story, these problems also rose in the minds of an educated society, appearing before everyone’s eyes. M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin stated that Turgenev's literary activity had a value for society equal to that of Nekrasov, Belinsky and Dobrolyubov. According to the Russian literary critic of the late 19th and early 20th centuries S. A. Vengerov, the writer managed to write so realistically that it was difficult to catch the line between literary fiction and real life. His novels were not only read out - his heroes were imitated in life. In each of his major works there is a character in whose mouth the subtle and apt wit of the writer himself is put.

Turgenev was well known in contemporary Western Europe as well. His works were translated into German as early as the 1850s, and in the 1870s and 1880s he became the most beloved and most read Russian writer in Germany, and German critics rated him as one of the most significant modern novelists. Turgenev's first translators were August Wiedert, August Bolz and Paul Fuchs. The translator of many of Turgenev's works into German, the German writer F. Bodenstedt, in the introduction to "Russian Fragments" (1861), argued that Turgenev's works are equal to the works of the best modern novelists in England, Germany and France. The chancellor of the German Empire Chlodwig Hohenlohe (1894-1900), who called Ivan Turgenev the best candidate for the post of prime minister of Russia, spoke about the writer as follows: “ Today I spoke with the smartest man in Russia».

Turgenev's Notes of a Hunter were popular in France. Guy de Maupassant called the writer " great man" And " brilliant novelist", and George Sand wrote to Turgenev:" Teacher! We all have to go through your school". His work was also well known in English literary circles - the Hunter's Notes, the Noble Nest, the Eve and Nov were translated in England. The Western reader was subdued by moral purity in the depiction of love, the image of a Russian woman (Elena Stakhova); struck by the figure of the militant democrat Bazarov. The writer managed to show true Russia to European society, he introduced foreign readers to the Russian peasant, Russian raznochintsy and revolutionaries, to the Russian intelligentsia and revealed the image of a Russian woman. Foreign readers, thanks to the work of Turgenev, assimilated the great traditions of the Russian realistic school.

Leo Tolstoy gave the following description to the writer in a letter to A. N. Pypin (January 1884): “Turgenev is a wonderful person (not very deep, very weak, but a kind, good person), who always says the very thing that he thinks and feels."

Turgenev in the encyclopedic dictionary of Brockhaus and Efron

According to the encyclopedia of Brockhaus and Efron, "The Hunter's Notes", in addition to the usual reader success, played a certain historical role. The book made a strong impression even on the heir to the throne, Alexander II, who a few years later carried out a series of reforms to abolish serfdom in Russia. Many representatives of the ruling classes were also impressed by the Notes. The book carried a social protest, denouncing serfdom, but serfdom itself was directly touched upon in the "Notes of a Hunter" with restraint and caution. The content of the book was not fictional, it convinced readers that people should not be deprived of the most elementary human rights. But, in addition to protest, the stories also had artistic value, carrying a soft and poetic flavor. According to the literary critic S. A. Vengerov, the landscape painting of the "Hunter's Notes" became one of the best in Russian literature of that time. All the best qualities of Turgenev's talent were vividly expressed in the essays. " Great, powerful, truthful and free Russian language”, to which the last of his “Poems in Prose” (1878-1882) is dedicated, received in the “Notes” its most noble and elegant expression.

In the novel "Rudin" the author managed to successfully portray the generation of the 1840s. To some extent, Rudin himself is the image of the famous Hegelian agitator M. A. Bakunin, whom Belinsky spoke of as a man " with a blush on the cheeks and no blood in the heart. Rudin appeared in an era when society dreamed of a "deed". The author's version of the novel was not passed by the censors due to the episode of Rudin's death at the June barricades, so it was understood by critics in a very one-sided way. According to the author's idea, Rudin was a richly gifted person with noble intentions, but at the same time he was completely at a loss in front of reality; he knew how to passionately appeal and captivate others, but at the same time he himself was completely devoid of passion and temperament. The hero of the novel has become a household name for those people whose word does not agree with the deed. The writer generally did not particularly spare his favorite heroes, even the best representatives of the Russian nobility of the middle of the 19th century. He often emphasized the passivity and lethargy in their characters, as well as the traits of moral helplessness. This manifested the realism of the writer, depicting life as it is.

But if in "Rudin" Turgenev spoke only against the idle chattering people of the generation of the forties, then in "The Nest of Nobles" his criticism already fell upon his entire generation; he favored the younger forces without the slightest bitterness. In the face of the heroine of this novel, a simple Russian girl Liza, a collective image of many women of that time is shown, when the meaning of a woman’s whole life was reduced to love, failing in which, a woman was deprived of any purpose of existence. Turgenev foresaw the emergence of a new type of Russian woman, which he placed at the center of his next novel. The Russian society of that time lived on the eve of radical social and state changes. And the heroine of Turgenev's novel "On the Eve" Elena became the personification of the indefinite desire for something good and new, characteristic of the first years of the reform era, without a clear idea of ​​\u200b\u200bthis new and good. It is no coincidence that the novel was called “On the Eve” - in it Shubin ends his elegy with the question: “ When will our time come? When will we have people?” To which his interlocutor expresses hope for the best: “ Give me time, - answered Uvar Ivanovich, - they will". On the pages of Sovremennik, the novel received an enthusiastic assessment in Dobrolyubov's article "When the real day comes."

In the next novel, Fathers and Sons, one of the most characteristic features of Russian literature of that time, the closest connection between literature and the real currents of social moods, most fully achieved expression. Turgenev succeeded better than other writers in capturing the moment of unanimity of public consciousness, which in the second half of the 1850s buried the old Nikolaev era with its lifeless reactionary isolation, and the turning point of the era: the subsequent confusion of innovators who singled out from their midst moderate representatives of the older generation with their indefinite hopes for a better future - "fathers", and thirsting for radical changes in the social structure of the younger generation - "children". The Russian Word magazine, represented by D. I. Pisarev, even recognized the hero of the novel, the radical Bazarov, as his ideal. At the same time, if we look at the image of Bazarov from a historical point of view, as a type that reflects the mood of the sixties of the XIX century, then he is rather not fully disclosed, since socio-political radicalism, quite strong at that time, is almost never seen in the novel. was affected.

While living abroad, in Paris, the writer became close to many emigrants and foreign youth. He again had a desire to write on the topic of the day - about the revolutionary "going to the people", as a result of which his largest novel, Nov, appeared. But, despite his efforts, Turgenev failed to capture the most characteristic features of the Russian revolutionary movement. His mistake was that he made the center of the novel one of the weak-willed people typical of his works, who could be characteristic of the generation of the 1840s, but not the 1870s. The novel was not well received by critics. Of the later works of the writer, the Song of Triumphant Love and Poems in Prose attracted the most attention.

XIX-XX century

At the end of the 19th - beginning of the 20th century, critics and literary critics S. A. Vengerov, Yu. I. Aikhenvald, D. S. Merezhkovsky, D. N. Ovsyaniko-Kulikovskiy, A. I. Nezelenov, Yu. Cheshihin-Vetrinsky, A. F. Koni, A. G. Gornfeld, F. D. Batyushkov, V. V. Stasov, G. V. Plekhanov, K. D. Balmont, P. P. Pertsov, M. O. Gershenzon, P. A. Kropotkin, R. V. Ivanov-Razumnik and others.

According to the literary critic and theater critic Yu. I. Aikhenvald, who gave his assessment of the writer at the beginning of the century, Turgenev was not a deep writer, he wrote superficially and in light colors. According to the critic, the writer took life lightly. Knowing all the passions, possibilities and depths of human consciousness, the writer, however, did not have true seriousness: “ The tourist of life, he visits everything, looks everywhere, does not stop anywhere for a long time, and at the end of his road he complains that the journey is over, that there is nowhere to go further. Rich, meaningful, varied, it does not, however, have pathos and genuine seriousness. His softness is his weakness. He showed reality, but first took out of it its tragic core.". According to Aikhenwald, Turgenev is easy to read, easy to live with, but he does not want to worry himself and does not want his readers to worry. The critic also reproached the writer for the monotony in the use of artistic techniques. But at the same time he called Turgenev " patriot of Russian nature for his illustrious landscapes of his native land.

The author of an article about I. S. Turgenev in the six-volume History of Russian Literature of the 19th Century, edited by Professor D. N. Ovsyaniko-Kulikovskii (1911), A. E. Gruzinsky, explains the claims of critics to Turgenev as follows. In his opinion, in the work of Turgenev, most of all, they sought answers to the living questions of our time, the setting of new social tasks. " This element of his novels and stories alone, in fact, was taken into account seriously and attentively by the guiding criticism of the 50s and 60s; he was considered, as it were, obligatory in Turgenev's work". Having not received answers to their questions in new works, criticism was dissatisfied and reprimanded the author " for failure to fulfill their public duties". As a result, the author was declared scribbled and exchanging his talent. Gruzinsky calls this approach to Turgenev's work one-sided and erroneous. Turgenev was not a writer-prophet, a writer-citizen, although he connected all his major works with important and burning themes of his turbulent era, but most of all he was an artist-poet, and his interest in public life had, rather, the character of careful analysis. .

The critic E. A. Solovyov joins this conclusion. He also draws attention to the mission of Turgenev as a translator of Russian literature for European readers. Thanks to him, soon almost all the best works of Pushkin, Gogol, Lermontov, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy were translated into foreign languages. " No one, we note, was better adapted to this lofty and difficult task than Turgenev. By the very essence of his talent, he was not only a Russian, but also a European, world writer.”, - writes E. A. Solovyov. Stopping on the way of depicting the love of Turgenev's girls, he makes the following observation: Turgenev's heroines fall in love immediately and love only once, and this is for life. They are obviously from the tribe of the poor Asdras, for whom love and death were equivalent. Love and death, love and death are his inseparable artistic associations.". In the character of Turgenev, the critic also finds much of what the writer depicted in his hero Rudin: “ Undoubted chivalry and not particularly high vanity, idealism and a tendency to melancholy, a huge mind and a broken will».

The representative of decadent criticism in Russia, Dmitry Merezhkovsky, treated Turgenev's work ambiguously. He did not appreciate Turgenev's novels, preferring "small prose" to them, in particular the so-called "mysterious stories and novels" of the writer. According to Merezhkovsky, Ivan Turgenev is the first impressionist artist, the forerunner of the later symbolists: “ The value of Turgenev as an artist for the literature of the future is in the creation of an impressionistic style, which is an art education that is not related to the work of this writer as a whole.».

A.P. Chekhov had the same contradictory attitude towards Turgenev. In 1902, in a letter to O. L. Knipper-Chekhova, he wrote: “ Reading Turgenev. This writer will be left with one eighth or one tenth of what he has written. Everything else will go to the archive in 25-35 years". However, the very next year he told her: I have never been so drawn to Turgenev as I am now.».

The symbolist poet and critic Maximilian Voloshin wrote that Turgenev, thanks to his artistic sophistication, which he studied with French writers, occupies a special place in Russian literature. But unlike French literature, with its fragrant and fresh sensuality, the feeling of living and loving flesh, Turgenev bashfully and dreamily idealized a woman. In Voloshin's contemporary literature, he saw a connection between Ivan Bunin's prose and Turgenev's landscape sketches.

Subsequently, the theme of Bunin's superiority over Turgenev in landscape prose will be repeatedly raised by literary critics. Even L. N. Tolstoy, according to the memoirs of pianist A. B. Goldenweiser, said about the description of nature in Bunin’s story: “It’s raining, and it’s written that Turgenev would not have written like that, and there’s nothing to say about me.” Both Turgenev and Bunin were united by the fact that both were writers-poets, writers-hunters, writers-nobles and authors of "noble" stories. Nevertheless, the singer of the "sad poetry of the ruined noble nests" Bunin, according to the literary critic Fyodor Stepun, "as an artist is much more sensual than Turgenev." “The nature of Bunin, for all the realistic accuracy of his writing, is still completely different from that of our two greatest realists, Tolstoy and Turgenev. Bunin's nature is more unsteady, more musical, more psychic and, perhaps, even more mystical than the nature of Tolstoy and Turgenev. Nature in the image of Turgenev is more static than that of Bunin, - says F. A. Stepun, - despite the fact that Turgenev has more purely external picturesqueness and picturesqueness.

In Soviet Union

Russian language

From "Poems in Prose"

In days of doubt, in days of painful reflections on the fate of my homeland, you alone are my support and support, O great, powerful, truthful and free Russian language! Without you - how not to fall into despair at the sight of everything that happens at home? But one cannot believe that such a language was not given to a great people!

June, 1882

In the Soviet Union, Turgenev's work was paid attention not only by critics and literary critics, but also by the leaders and leaders of the Soviet state: V. I. Lenin, M. I. Kalinin, A. V. Lunacharsky. Scientific literary criticism largely depended on the ideological attitudes of the "party" literary criticism. Among those who contributed to Turgen studies are G. N. Pospelov, N. L. Brodsky, B. L. Modzalevsky, V. E. Evgeniev-Maksimov, M. B. Khrapchenko, G. A. Byaly, S. M. Petrov, A. I. Batyuto, G. B. Kurlyandskaya, N. I. Prutskov, Yu. I. Kuleshov, V. M. Markovich, V. G. Fridlyand, K. I. Chukovsky, B. V. Tomashevsky, B. M. Eikhenbaum, V. B. Shklovsky, Yu. G. Oksman A. S. Bushmin, M. P. Alekseev and so on.

Turgenev was repeatedly quoted by V. I. Lenin, who especially highly appreciated him “ great and mighty» language.M. I. Kalinin said that Turgenev's work had not only artistic, but also socio-political significance, which gave artistic brilliance to his works, and that the writer showed in a serf a man who, like all people, deserves to have human rights . A. V. Lunacharsky, in his lecture on the work of Ivan Turgenev, called him one of the founders of Russian literature. According to A. M. Gorky, Turgenev left an "excellent legacy" to Russian literature.

According to the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, the artistic system created by the writer influenced the poetics of not only Russian, but also Western European novels in the second half of the 19th century. It largely served as the basis for the "intellectual" novel by L. N. Tolstoy and F. M. Dostoevsky, in which the fate of the central characters depends on their solution of an important philosophical issue of universal significance. The literary principles laid down by the writer were developed in the work of many Soviet writers - A. N. Tolstoy, K. G. Paustovsky and others. His plays have become an integral part of the repertoire of Soviet theaters. Many of Turgenev's works were filmed. Soviet literary critics paid great attention to the creative heritage of Turgenev - many works were published on the life and work of the writer, the study of his role in the Russian and world literary process. Scientific studies of his texts were carried out, commented collected works were published. Museums of Turgenev were opened in the city of Orel and the former estate of his mother, Spassky-Lutovinovo.

According to the academic History of Russian Literature, Turgenev was the first in Russian literature who succeeded in expressing in his work through pictures of everyday village life and various images of ordinary peasants the idea that the enslaved people are the root, the living soul of the nation. And the literary critic Professor V. M. Markovich said that Turgenev was one of the first to try to portray the inconsistency of the national character without embellishment, and he also showed the same people worthy of admiration, admiration and love for the first time.

The Soviet literary critic G. N. Pospelov wrote that Turgenev’s literary style can be called, despite its emotional and romantic elation, realistic. Turgenev saw the social weakness of the advanced people from the nobility and was looking for a different force capable of leading the Russian liberation movement; he later saw such strength in the Russian democrats of 1860-1870.

Foreign criticism

Of the émigré writers and literary critics, V. V. Nabokov, B. K. Zaitsev, and D. P. Svyatopolk-Mirsky turned to Turgenev’s work. Many foreign writers and critics also left their comments on Turgenev's work: Friedrich Bodenstedt, Emile Oman, Ernest Renan, Melchior Vogüe, Saint-Beuve, Gustave Flaubert, Guy de Maupassant, Edmond Goncourt, Emile Zola, Henry James, John Galsworthy, George Sand , Virginia Woolf, Anatole France, James Joyce, William Rolston, Alphonse Daudet, Theodor Storm, Hippolyte Taine, Georg Brandes, Thomas Carlyle and so on.

English prose writer and Nobel Prize winner in literature John Galsworthy considered Turgenev's novels the greatest example of the art of prose and noted that Turgenev helped " bring the proportions of the novel to perfection". For him, Turgenev was " the most refined poet who ever wrote novels”, and the Turgenev tradition was important for Galsworthy.

Another British writer, literary critic and representative of modernist literature of the first half of the 20th century, Virginia Woolf, noted that Turgenev’s books not only touch with their poetry, but also seem to belong to today, so they have not lost the perfection of form. She wrote that Ivan Turgenev has a rare quality: a sense of symmetry, balance, which give a generalized and harmonious picture of the world. At the same time, she stipulated that this symmetry triumphs not at all because he is such a great storyteller. On the contrary, Woolf believed that some of his stories were rather badly told, as they contained loops and digressions, confusing obscure information about great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers (as in The Noble Nest). But she pointed out that Turgenev's books are not a sequence of episodes, but a sequence of emotions emanating from the central character, and not objects are connected in them, but feelings, and when you finish reading the book, you experience aesthetic satisfaction. Another well-known representative of modernism, the Russian and American writer and literary critic V. V. Nabokov, in his Lectures on Russian Literature, spoke of Turgenev not as a great writer, but called him “ cute". Nabokov noted that Turgenev's landscapes are good, "Turgenev's girls" are charming, he also spoke approvingly of the musicality of Turgenev's prose. And the novel "Fathers and Sons" called one of the most brilliant works of the XIX century. But he also pointed out the shortcomings of the writer, saying that he " bogged down in disgusting sweetness". According to Nabokov, Turgenev was often too straightforward and did not trust the reader's intuition, trying to dot the "i" himself. Another modernist, the Irish writer James Joyce, singled out from the entire work of the Russian writer “Notes of a Hunter”, which, in his opinion, “ penetrate deeper into life than his novels". Joyce believed that it was from them that Turgenev developed as a great international writer.

According to researcher D. Peterson, the American reader in Turgenev's work was struck by " manner of narration ... far from both Anglo-Saxon moralizing and French frivolity". According to the critic, the model of realism created by Turgenev had a great influence on the formation of realistic principles in the work of American writers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

XXI Century

In Russia, much is devoted to the study and memory of Turgenev's work in the 21st century. Every five years, the State Literary Museum of I. S. Turgenev in Orel, together with the Oryol State University and the Institute of Russian Literature (Pushkin House) of the Russian Academy of Sciences, hold major scientific conferences that have international status. As part of the Turgenev Autumn project, the museum annually hosts Turgenev readings, in which researchers from Russia and abroad take part in the writer's work. Turgenev anniversaries are also celebrated in other Russian cities. In addition, his memory is honored abroad. So, in the Museum of Ivan Turgenev in Bougival, which opened on the day of the 100th anniversary of the death of the writer on September 3, 1983, the so-called music salons are held annually, where the music of the composers of the times of Ivan Turgenev and Pauline Viardot is played.

Bibliography

Novels

• Rudin (1855)
• Noble Nest (1858)
• The Eve (1860)
• Fathers and Sons (1862)
• Smoke (1867)
• Nov (1877)

Novels and stories

• Andrei Kolosov (1844)
• Three portraits (1845)
• Gide (1846)
• Breter (1847)
• Petushkov (1848)
• Diary of a Superfluous Man (1849)
• Mumu (1852)
• Inn (1852)
• Notes of a hunter (collection of stories) (1852)
• Yakov Pasynkov (1855)
• Faust (1855)
• Calm (1856)
• Trip to Polissya (1857)
• Asya (1858)
• First Love (1860)
• Ghosts (1864)
• Brigadier (1866)
• Unfortunate (1868)
• Strange Story (1870)
• Steppe King Lear (1870)
• Dog (1870)
• Knock...knock...knock!.. (1871)
• Spring Waters (1872)
• Punin and Baburin (1874)
• Clock (1876)
• Sleep (1877)
• The story of Father Alexei (1877)
• Song of Triumphant Love (1881)
• Own master's office (1881)

Plays

• Where it is thin, it breaks there (1848)
• Freeloader (1848)
• Breakfast at the Leader's (1849)
• Bachelor (1849)
• Month in the Country (1850)
• Provincial (1851)

Turgenev in illustrations

Over the years, the works of I. S. Turgenev were illustrated by illustrators and graphic artists P. M. Boklevsky, N. D. Dmitriev-Orenburgsky, A. A. Kharlamov, V. V. Pukirev, P. P. Sokolov, V. M. Vasnetsov, D. N. Kardovsky, V. A. Taburin, K. I. Rudakov, V. A. Sveshnikov, P. F. Stroev, N. A. Benois, B. M. Kustodiev, K. V. Lebedev and others. The imposing figure of Turgenev is depicted in the sculptures of A. N. Belyaev, M. M. Antokolsky, Zh. I. N. Kramskoy, Adolf Menzel, Pauline Viardot, Ludwig Pich, M. M. Antokolsky, K. Shamro, in the cartoons of N. A. Stepanov, A. I. Lebedev, V. I. Porfiriev, A. M. Volkov , on the engraving by Yu. S. Baranovsky, on the portraits of E. Lamy, A. P. Nikitin, V. G. Perov, I. E. Repin, Ya. P. Polonsky, V. V. Vereshchagin, V. V. Mate , E. K. Lipgart, A. A. Kharlamova, V. A. Bobrov. The works of many painters “based on Turgenev” are known: Ya. P. Polonsky (plots of Spassky-Lutovinov), S. Yu. on his son's grave). Ivan Sergeevich himself drew well and was an auto-illustrator of his own works.

Screen adaptations

Based on the works of Ivan Turgenev, many films and television films have been shot. His works formed the basis of paintings created in different countries of the world. The first film adaptations appeared at the beginning of the 20th century (the era of silent films). The film The Freeloader was filmed twice in Italy (1913 and 1924). In 1915, the films The Nest of Nobles, After Death (based on the story Clara Milic) and Song of Triumphant Love (with the participation of V. V. Kholodnaya and V. A. Polonsky) were filmed in the Russian Empire. The story "Spring Waters" was filmed 8 times in different countries. Based on the novel "The Nest of Nobles", 4 films were made; based on stories from the "Hunter's Notes" - 4 films; based on the comedy "A Month in the Country" - 10 television films; based on the story "Mumu" - 2 feature films and a cartoon; based on the play "Freeloader" - 5 paintings. The novel "Fathers and Sons" served as the basis for 4 films and a television series, the story "First Love" formed the basis for nine feature films and television films.

The image of Turgenev in the cinema was used by director Vladimir Khotinenko. In the television series "Dostoevsky" in 2011, the role of the writer was played by actor Vladimir Simonov. In the film "Belinsky" by Grigory Kozintsev (1951), the role of Turgenev was played by the actor Igor Litovkin, and in the film "Tchaikovsky" directed by Igor Talankin (1969), the actor Bruno Freindlich played the writer.

Addresses

In Moscow

Biographers in Moscow count over fifty addresses and memorable places associated with Turgenev.

• 1824 - the house of state councilor A. V. Kopteva on B. Nikitskaya (not preserved);
• 1827 - city estate, Valuev's property - Sadovaya-Samotechnaya street, 12/2 (not preserved - rebuilt);
• 1829 - pension Krause, Armenian Institute - Armenian lane, 2;
• 1830 - Shteingel's house - Gagarinsky lane, house 15/7;
• 1830s - House of General N. F. Alekseeva - Sivtsev Vrazhek (corner of Kaloshin lane), house 24/2;
• 1830s - House of M. A. Smirnov (not preserved, now - a building built in 1903) - Verkhnyaya Kislovka;
• 1830s - House of M. N. Bulgakova - in Maly Uspensky Lane;
• 1830s - House on Malaya Bronnaya Street (not preserved);
• 1839-1850 - Ostozhenka, 37 (corner of the 2nd Ushakovsky lane, now Khilkov lane). It is generally accepted that the house where I. S. Turgenev visited Moscow belonged to his mother, but N. M. Chernov, a researcher of Turgenev’s life and work, indicates that the house was rented from mine surveyor N. V. Loshakovsky;
• 1850s - the house of brother Nikolai Sergeevich Turgenev - Prechistenka, 26 (not preserved)
• 1860s - The house where I. S. Turgenev repeatedly visited the apartment of his friend, the manager of the Moscow appanage office, I. I. Maslov - Prechistensky Boulevard, 10;

In St. Petersburg

Memory

Named after Turgenev:

Toponymy

• Streets and squares of Turgenev in many cities of Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Latvia.
• Moscow metro station "Turgenevskaya"

Public institutions

• Orel State Academic Theatre.
• Library-reading room named after I. S. Turgenev in Moscow.
• Turgenev School of Russian Language and Russian Culture (Turin, Italy).
• Russian Public Library named after I. S. Turgenev (Paris, France).

Museums

• Museum of I. S. Turgenev (“ Mumu's house”) - (Moscow, Ostozhenka st., 37).
• State Literary Museum named after I. S. Turgenev (Oryol).
• Spasskoye-Lutovinovo Museum-Reserve, the estate of I. S. Turgenev (Oryol region).
• Street and museum "Turgenev's Dacha" in Bougival, France.

monuments

In honor of I. S. Turgenev, monuments were erected in the cities:

• Moscow (in Bobrov lane).
• St. Petersburg (on Italianskaya street).
• Eagle:
• Monument in Orel;
• Bust of Turgenev at the Noble Nest.

Other objects

The name of Turgenev is carried by the branded train of Russian Railways Moscow - Simferopol - Moscow (No. 029/030) and Moscow - Oryol - Moscow (No. 33/34)

TURGENEV Ivan Sergeevich(1818 - 1883), Russian writer, corresponding member of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences (1860). In the cycle of stories "Notes of a Hunter" (1847-52) he showed the 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), the stories "Asya" (1858), "Spring Waters" (1872 ) created images of the outgoing 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) he depicted the life of Russians abroad, the populist movement in Russia. On the slope of his life he created the lyric-philosophical "Poems in Prose" (1882). A master of language and psychological analysis, Turgenev had a significant impact on the development of Russian and world literature.

Turgenev Ivan Sergeevich, Russian writer.

According to his father, Turgenev belonged to an old noble family, his mother, nee Lutovinova, was a wealthy landowner; in her estate Spasskoe-Lutovinovo (Mtsensk district, Oryol province), the childhood years of the future writer, who early learned to feel nature subtly and hate serfdom, passed. In 1827 the family moved to Moscow; At first, Turgenev studied in private boarding schools and with good home teachers, then, in 1833, he entered the verbal department of Moscow University, and in 1834 he transferred to the Faculty of History and Philology of St. Petersburg University. One of the strongest impressions of early youth (1833), falling in love with Princess E. L. Shakhovskaya, who at that time was having an affair with Turgenev's father, was reflected in the story First Love (1860).

In 1836, Turgenev showed his poetic experiments in a romantic spirit to the writer of the Pushkin circle, university professor P. A. Pletnev; he invites the student to a literary evening (at the door Turgenev ran into A. S. Pushkin), and in 1838 he published Turgenev’s poems “Evening” and “To the Venus of Medicine” in Sovremennik (at this point, Turgenev had written about a hundred poems, mostly not preserved, and the dramatic poem "The Wall").

In May 1838, Turgenev went to Germany (the desire to complete his education was combined with the rejection of the Russian way of life based on serfdom). The catastrophe of the steamer "Nikolai I", on which Turgenev sailed, will be described by him in the essay "Fire at Sea" (1883; in French). Until August 1839, Turgenev lives in Berlin, listens to lectures at the university, studies classical languages, writes poetry, communicates with T. N. Granovsky, N. V. Stankevich. After a short stay in Russia in January 1840 he went to Italy, but from May 1840 to May 1841 he was again in Berlin, where he met M. A. Bakunin. Arriving in Russia, he visits the Bakunin estate Premukhino, converges with this family: soon an affair with T. A. Bakunina begins, which does not interfere with communication with the seamstress A. E. Ivanova (in 1842 she will give birth to Turgenev's daughter Pelageya). In January 1843 Turgenev entered the service of the Ministry of the Interior.

In 1843, a poem based on modern material, Parasha, appeared, which was highly appreciated by V. G. Belinsky. Acquaintance with the critic, which turned into friendship (in 1846 Turgenev became his son's godfather), rapprochement with his entourage (in particular, with N. A. Nekrasov) change his literary orientation: from romanticism, he turns to an ironic moral descriptive poem ("The Landowner" , "Andrey", both 1845) and prose, close to the principles of the "natural school" and not alien to the influence of M. Yu. Lermontov ("Andrey Kolosov", 1844; "Three Portraits", 1846; "Breter", 1847).

November 1, 1843 Turgenev meets the singer Pauline Viardot (Viardot Garcia), love for which will largely 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): he took care of the sick Belinsky during his travels; closely communicates with P. V. Annenkov, A. I. Herzen, gets acquainted with J. Sand, P. Merimet, A. de Musset, F. Chopin, C. Gounod; writes the novels "Petushkov" (1848), "The Diary of a Superfluous Man" (1850), the comedy "The Bachelor" (1849), "Where it is thin, there it breaks", "Provincial Woman" (both 1851), the psychological drama "A Month in the Country" (1855).

The main work of this period is “Notes of a Hunter”, a cycle of lyrical essays and stories that began with the story “Khor and Kalinich” (1847; the subtitle “From the Notes of a Hunter” was invented by I. I. Panaev for publication in the “Mixture” section of the Sovremennik magazine ); a separate two-volume edition of the cycle was published in 1852, later the stories "The End of Chertop-hanov" (1872), "Living Powers", "Knocks" (1874) were added. The fundamental diversity of human types, first singled out from a previously unnoticed or idealized mass of the people, testified to the infinite value of any unique and free human personality; the serf order appeared as an ominous and dead force, alien to natural harmony (detailed specificity of heterogeneous landscapes), hostile to man, but unable to destroy the soul, love, creative gift. Having discovered Russia and the Russian people, laying the foundation for the “peasant theme” in Russian literature, the “Hunter’s Notes” became the semantic foundation of all Turgenev’s further work: threads stretch from here to the study of the phenomenon of the “extra person” (a problem outlined in “Hamlet of the Shchigrovsky district”) , and to the comprehension of the mysterious ("Bezhin meadow"), and to the problem of the artist's conflict with the everyday life that suffocates him ("Singers").

In April 1852, for his response to the death of N.V. Gogol, banned in St. Petersburg and published in Moscow, Turgenev, by royal command, was put on the congress (the story "Mumu" was written there). In May he was exiled to Spasskoye, where he lived until December 1853 (work on an unfinished novel, the story "Two Friends", acquaintance with A. A. Fet, active correspondence with S. T. Aksakov and writers from the Sovremennik circle); A. K. Tolstoy played an important role in the efforts to free Turgenev.

Until July 1856, Turgenev lives in Russia: in the winter, mainly in St. Petersburg, in the summer in Spassky. His immediate environment is the editorial office of Sovremennik; acquaintances with I. A. Goncharov, L. N. Tolstoy and A. N. Ostrovsky took place; Turgenev takes part in the publication of "Poems" by F. I. Tyutchev (1854) and supplies him with a preface. Mutual cooling off with a distant Viardot leads to a brief, but almost ending in marriage romance with a distant relative O. A. Turgeneva. The novels "Calm" (1854), "Yakov Pasynkov" (1855), "Correspondence", "Faust" (both 1856) are published.

"Rudin" (1856) opens a series of Turgenev's novels, compact in volume, unfolding around the hero-ideologist, accurately fixing the current socio-political issues in a journalistic way and, ultimately, putting "modernity" in the face of the unchanging and mysterious forces of love, art, nature . Inflaming the audience, but incapable of an act, "an extra person" Rudin; in vain dreaming of happiness and coming to humble selflessness and hope for happiness for the people of modern times, Lavretsky (“The Nest of Nobles”, 1859; events take place in an atmosphere of the approaching “great reform”); the “iron” Bulgarian revolutionary Insarov, who becomes the chosen one of the heroine (that is, Russia), but is “alien” and doomed to death (“On the Eve”, 1860); the “new man” Bazarov, who hides a romantic rebellion behind nihilism (“Fathers and Sons”, 1862; post-reform Russia is not freed from eternal problems, and “new” people remain people: “dozens” will live, and those captured by passion or idea will perish); sandwiched between "reactionary" and "revolutionary" vulgarity, the characters of "Smoke" (1867); the Narodnik revolutionary 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 minor characters (with individual dissimilarity, differences in moral and political orientations and spiritual experience, varying degrees of closeness to the author), are closely related, combining in different proportions the features of the two eternal psychological types of the heroic enthusiast, Don Quixote, and the absorbed a reflector, Hamlet (cf. program article "Hamlet and Don Quixote", 1860).

Having served abroad in July 1856, Turgenev finds himself in a painful whirlpool of ambiguous relations with Viardot and his daughter, who was brought up in Paris. After the difficult Parisian winter of 1856-57 (the gloomy Journey to Polissya was completed), he went to England, then to Germany, where he wrote Asya, one of the most poetic stories, which, however, lends itself to interpretation in a public way (article by N. G . Chernyshevsky "Russian man on rendez-vous", 1858), and spends autumn and winter in Italy. By the summer of 1858 he was in Spasskoye; in the future, the year of Turgenev will often be divided into "European, winter" and "Russian, summer" seasons.

After “The Eve” and the article by N. A. Dobrolyubov devoted to the novel “When will the real day come?” (1860) there is a break between Turgenev and the radicalized Sovremennik (in particular, with N. A. Nekrasov; their mutual hostility persisted to the end). The conflict with the “young generation” was aggravated by the novel “Fathers and Sons” (pamphlet article by M. A. Antonovich “Asmodeus of Our Time” in Sovremennik, 1862; the so-called “schism in the nihilists” largely motivated the positive assessment of the novel in the article by D. I. Pisarev "Bazarov", 1862). In the summer of 1861 there was a quarrel with Leo Tolstoy, which almost turned into a duel (reconciliation in 1878). In the story "Ghosts" (1864), Turgenev thickens the mystical motives outlined in "Notes of a Hunter" and "Faust"; this line will be developed in The Dog (1865), The Story of Lieutenant Yergunov (1868), Dream, The Story of Father Alexei (both 1877), Songs of Triumphant Love (1881), After Death (Klara Milic )" (1883). The theme of the weakness of a person who turns out to be a toy of unknown forces and doomed to non-existence, to a greater or lesser extent, colors all of Turgenev's late prose; it is most directly expressed in the lyrical story "Enough!" (1865), perceived by contemporaries as evidence (sincere or coquettishly hypocritical) of Turgenev's situationally conditioned crisis (cf. F. M. Dostoevsky's parody in the novel "Demons", 1871).

In 1863 there is a new rapprochement between Turgenev and Pauline Viardot; until 1871 they live in Baden, then (at the end of the Franco-Prussian war) in Paris. Turgenev closely converges with G. Flaubert and through him with E. and J. Goncourt, A. Daudet, E. Zola, G. de Maupassant; he assumes the function of an intermediary between Russian and Western literatures. His all-European fame is growing: in 1878, at the international literary congress in Paris, the writer was elected vice president; in 1879 he received an honorary doctorate from Oxford University. Turgenev maintains contacts with Russian revolutionaries (P. L. Lavrov, G. A. Lopatin) and provides material support to emigrants. In 1880, Turgenev took part in the celebrations in honor of the opening of a monument to Pushkin in Moscow. In 1879-81, the old writer experienced a stormy passion for the actress M. G. Savina, which colored his last visits to his homeland.

Along with stories about the past (“King of the Steppe Lear”, 1870; “Punin and Baburin”, 1874) and the “mysterious” stories mentioned above, in the last years of his life, Turgenev turned to memoirs (“Literary and everyday memories”, 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 impending death. Death was preceded by more than a year and a half of a painful illness (cancer of the spinal cord).

Biography of I.S. Turgenev

The film “The Great Singer of Great Russia. I.S. Turgenev»