Easton Press Ivan Turgenev books
The Torrents of Spring - 1961Franklin Library Ivan Turgenev books
First Love and Other Tales - Collected Stories of the World's Greatest Writers - 1978 Fathers and Sons - World's Best Loved Books - 1983
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Ivan Turgenev biography
Turgenev was born into a wealthy landed family in Oryol, Russia, on 28 October 1818. His father, Sergei Nikolaevich Turgenev, a colonel in the Imperial Russian cavalry, was a chronic philanderer. Ivan's mother, Varvara Petrovna Lutovinova, was a wealthy heiress, who had had an unhappy childhood and suffered in her marriage. Ivan's father died when Ivan was sixteen, leaving him and his brother Nicholas to be brought up by their abusive mother. After the standard schooling for a son of a gentleman, Turgenev studied for one year at the University of Moscow and then moved to the University of Saint Petersburg, focusing on Classics, Russian literature, and philology. He was sent in 1838 to the University of Berlin to study philosophy, particularly Hegel, and history. Turgenev was impressed with German society and returned home believing that Russia could best improve itself by incorporating ideas from the Age of Enlightenment. Like many of his educated contemporaries, he was particularly opposed to serfdom.
When Turgenev was a child, a family serf had read to him verses from the Rossiad of Mikhail Kheraskov, a celebrated poet of the 18th century. Turgenev's early attempts in literature, poems, and sketches gave indications of genius and were favorably spoken of by Vissarion Belinsky, then the leading Russian literary critic. During the latter part of his life, Turgenev did not reside much in Russia: he lived either at Baden-Baden or Paris, often in proximity to the family of the celebrated singer Pauline Viardot, with whom he had a lifelong affair.
Turgenev never married, although he had a daughter with one of his family's serfs. He was tall and broad-shouldered, but was timid, restrained, and soft-spoken. His closest literary friend was Gustave Flaubert. His relations with Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky were often strained, as the two were, for various reasons, dismayed by Turgenev's seeming preference for Western Europe. His rocky friendship with Tolstoy in 1861 wrought such animosity that Tolstoy challenged Turgenev to a duel, afterwards apologizing. The two did not speak for 17 years. Dostoyevsky parodies Turgenev in his novel The Devils (1872) through the character of the vain novelist Karmazinov, who is anxious to ingratiate himself with the radical youth. However, in 1880, Dostoyevsky's speech at the unveiling of the Pushkin monument brought about a reconciliation of sorts with Turgenev, who, like many in the audience, was moved to tears by his rival's eloquent tribute to the Russian spirit.
Turgenev occasionally visited England, and in 1879 the honorary degree of Doctor of Civil Law was conferred upon him by the University of Oxford.
Writing
Turgenev made his name with A Sportsman's Sketches, also known as Sketches From a Hunter's Album or Notes of a Hunter. Based on the author's own observations while sport hunting birds and hares in his mother's estate of Spasskoye, the work appeared in a collected form in 1852. In 1852, between Turgenev's Sketches and his first important novels, he wrote his now notorious obituary to his idol Gogol in the St. Petersburg Gazette. The key passage reads: "Gogol is dead!...what Russian heart is not shaken by those three words?...He is gone, that man whom we now have the right, the bitter right given to us by death, to call great." The censor of St. Petersburg did not approve of this idolatry and banned its publication, but Turgenev managed to fool the Moscow censor into printing it. These underhanded tactics landed the young writer in prison for a month, and he was forced into exile at his estate for nearly two years.His next work was A Nest of Nobles in 1859, and was followed the next year by On the Eve, a tale which contains one of his most beautiful female characters, Helen. On the Eve (of reform), with Turgenev's portrayal of Bulgarian revolutionary Dmitri, would have been very exciting politically to many contemporaneous readers. In 1862 Fathers and Sons was published, an admirably-structured novel in which the author famously described the revolutionary doctrines then beginning to spread in Russia. His lead character Basarov is heralded by many as one of the finest characters of the 19th century novel. 19th century Russian critics did not take to Fathers and Sons. The stinging criticism, especially from younger radicals, disappointed Turgenev and he wrote very little in the years following Fathers and Sons.
Turgenev's later novels, with their antiquated language and stilted situations, are considered inferior to his earlier efforts. Smoke was published in 1867 and his last work of any length, Virgin Soil, was published in 1877. Aside from his longer stories, many shorter ones were produced, some of great beauty and full of subtle psychological analysis, such as Torrents of Spring, First Love, Asya and others. These were later collected into three volumes. His last works were Poetry in Prose and Clara Milich, which appeared in the European Messenger. Turgenev is considered one of the great Victorian novelists, ranked with Thackeray, Hawthorne, and Henry James, though his style was much different from these American and British writers. Tergenev has often been compared to his Russian contemporaries, Leo Tolstoy and Feodor Dostoevsky, who wrote novels about some of the same issues. A melancholy tone pervades his writings, a morbid self-analysis.
Death
Turgenev died at Bougival, near Paris, on 4 September 1883. On his death bed he pleaded with Tolstoy: "My friend, return to literature!" After this Tolstoy wrote such works as The Death of Ivan Ilyich and The Kreutzer Sonata.Ivan Turgenev books in order
Rudin - 1856Home of the Gentry - 1859
On the Eve - 1860
Fathers and Sons - 1862
Smoke - 1867
Torrents of Spring - 1872
Virgin Soil - 1877
Short stories and novellas
The Diary of a Superfluous Man (Dnevnik lishnevo cheloveka - novella) - 1850A Sportsman's Sketches, The Hunter's Sketches, A Sportsman's Notebook (Zapiski okhotnika - collection of stories) - 1852
Mumu (Муму - short story) - 1854
Yakov Pasynkov (novella) - 1855
Faust (novella) - 1856
Asya (novella) - 1858
First Love (Pervaya lyubov - novella) - 1860
King Lear of the Steppes (Stepnoy korol Lir - novella) - 1870
The Song of Triumphant Love (Pesn torzhestvuyushchey lyubvi - novella) - 1881
Klara Milich - 1883
Plays
A Rash Thing to Do - 1843It Tears Where It Is Thin - 1847
Breakfast at the Chief's - 1849/1856
A Conversation on the Highway - 1850/1851
Lack of Money - 1846/1852
A Provincial Lady - 1851
Fortune's Fool - 1857/1862
A Month in the Country - 1855/1872
An Evening in Sorrento - 1882