Ivan Turgenev

Iván Sergeievich Turgenev, also written Turgenev (Russian: Иван Сергеевич Тургенев) (Oryol, Russian Empire; October 28 ^July/ November 9, 1818^greg. - Bougival, France; August 22^July/ September 3, 1883^greg.) was a writer, novelist and playwright, considered the most European of the Russian narrators of the century XIX. He was a corresponding member of the Imperial Academy of Sciences in the category of Russian language and literature (1860), an honorary doctor of the University of Oxford (1879), and an honorary member of the Imperial Moscow University (1880).

The artistic system he created influenced the poetics not only of the Russian novel, but also of Western Europe in the second half of the century XIX. Ivan Turgenev was the first in Russian literature to study the personality of the "new man": the sixties, his moral qualities and his psychological characteristics, thanks to him the term "nihilist" was widely used in Russian. Lawyer of the Russian literature and drama in the West.

The study of Turgenev's works is a mandatory part of the comprehensive school curriculum in Russia. The most famous works: the series of stories Memories of a Hunter, Fathers and Children, Nest of Nobles, Mumú or First love.

Biography

Turgenev was born into a rich landowning family in the Russian city of Oryol. His father, Sergei Nikolaevich Turgenev, a colonel in the imperial cavalry, died when Ivan was sixteen, leaving him and his brother Nikolai in the care of his abusive mother, Varvara Petrovna Lutovinova:

"A tacit child must have been Turguénev, a child perplexed by the contradiction between the role of the mother in the home and the motherly archetype of the society in which they lived. Her authoritarianism and almost manly behavior of absolute owner would clash with the father's passive indifference."

Juan Eduardo Zúñiga

That childhood so marked by the dictatorial presence of the mother and the physical and emotional absence of the father—who shortly before dying had had a lover—would explain, according to Juan Eduardo Zúñiga, the problems that Turgenev had in his adult life to having a stable relationship with a woman, and the pessimism that permeates most of his works. The Spanish writer Javier Marías also subscribes to this thesis, who in his Written Lives, begins the chapter dedicated to the Russian writer like this:

The pessimism of the novels and stories of Ivan Turguéniev, which some of his colleagues came to reproach him, must have been the least and least damaging tribute of how many he could pay for an ominous family environment, not to say resolutely evil. His wealthy and famous mother... was of cruelty, pettyness and barbarism only surpassed by those of his own mother, the grandmother of Ivan..."

After completing elementary school, Turgenev studied for a year at the University of Moscow and then at the University of Saint Petersburg, specializing in the classics, Russian literature and philology.

In 1838, he was sent to the University of Berlin to study philosophy, particularly Hegel, and history. Turgenev was impressed with Germany's Central European society and became Westernized, thinking that Russia could progress by imitating Europe, in opposition to the Slavophile trend of the time in his country. Like many of his well-educated contemporaries, he was especially opposed to the serf system.

When Turgenev was a child, a servant read him the verses from Rossiáda by Mikhail Jerashkov, celebrated poet of the century XVIII. Turgenev's early literary attempts, including poems and sketches, showed his genius and received favorable comments from Belinsky, then Russia's leading literary critic.

At the end of his life, Turgenev lived little in Russia, preferring Baden-Baden or Paris, since he met the Spanish singer Paulina García de Viardot or Pauline García-Viardot at the Mariinsky Theater in Saint Petersburg, for whom he would leave Russia to settle in France and for whose love he was imprisoned until the end of his days.

Turgenev never married, although he had a daughter with one of his family's servants. Tall and robust, his character was noted for his shyness, introspection and soft speech. His closest literary friend was Gustave Flaubert. His relations with Lev Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky were often tense, considering their pro-Slavic tendencies.

His complicated friendship with Tolstoy reached such animosity that in 1861 he challenged him to a duel. Although he later apologized, they did not speak for seventeen years. Dostoyevsky in turn parodied Turgenev in his novel The Demons (1872), through the character of the novelist Karmazínov. In 1880, Dostoyevsky's famous speech at the inauguration of the Pushkin monument was about his reconciliation with Turgenev.

He occasionally visited England, and in 1879 Oxford University awarded him an honorary degree. He died in Bougival, near Paris, due to bone marrow cancer. On his deathbed he exclaimed, referring to Tolstoy: "Friend, he is returning to literature." With such inspiration, Tolstoy wrote works such as The Death of Ivan Ilych and The Kreutzer Sonata. At Turgenev's express wish, his body was transferred to Saint Petersburg and buried in the Volkovo cemetery.

In 1883, Turgenev's brain was weighed, verifying its unusual weight of 2,021 grams.

Career

Turgenev's first literary success was Diary of a Hunter (Записки охотника), also known as Memoirs of a Hunter or Tales of a hunter. Based on the author's own observations while hunting birds or hares in his mother's native region of Spasskoye, the work appeared in the form of a collection of short stories in 1852. Its fame is indicated by the fact that the future Tsar Alexander II was said to have was greatly influenced by the book in his decision about the emancipation of the serfs and that its influence has been noted as equivalent to that of Uncle Tom's Cabin in the United States. In that same year, between the Diary... and his first major novel, Turgenev wrote a notable obituary for his idol Gogol in the St. Petersburg Gazeta.;

...Gógol is dead!...what Russian heart is not shocked by these three words?... He has gone, the man who now has the right, the bitter right that gives us death, to be called great....

Ivan Turguénev (1852)

The St. Petersburg censor did not approve of this idolatry, but Turgenev convinced him to publish it. Such a dark strategy earned the young writer a month in prison, and exile to his region of origin for nearly two years.

In the 1840s and early 1850s, during the reign of Tsar Nicholas I, the political climate in Russia was oppressive for many writers. This circumstance became evident with the disappearance and subsequent death of Gogol, the notorious oppression, persecution and arrest of artists, scientists and writers, including Dostoyevsky. At this time, thousands of Russian intellectuals emigrated to Europe, among them Aleksandr Herzen and Turgenev himself.

From this period there are several póvesti (short novels) such as Diary of a Superfluous Man, Voyage of the Fifth Horse, Faust or The Truce. In all of them Turgenev expresses the anxieties and hopes of his generation. In 1858, he wrote his novel Nido de hidalgos (or Nido de nobles, Дворянское гнездо, published in 1859), a story of nostalgia for what Lost, which contains one of its most memorable female characters, Lisa.

In 1855, Alexander II became tsar, and the political climate became more relaxed. In 1859, Turgenev wrote his novel On the Eve (Накануне), a portrait of the Bulgarian revolutionary Dmitri Insarov.

In 1862, Fathers and Children (Отцы и дети), his most recognized work, was published. The main character, Bazarov, became an archetype of the fictional characters of the Russian novel of the time.

Critics at the time did not take the novel seriously, and—disillusioned—Turgenev began to produce less. His next work, Smoke (Дым ), was published in 1867 and—again—the reception in his own country was lukewarm. During this time he also wrote other short novels such as "Spring Waters", "First Love" and "Ásya / Ánushka", which were later collected in three volumes. The first of them is headed by an old Russian proverb that speaks of the transience of life, another of the author's constant themes:

Days that were happy,

Last nice years,
How fast have you run,

Which spring waters!"

Her last works were Poetry and prose and Clara Mílich, published in the Messenger of Europe (Вестник Европы, Véstnik Evropy).

Turgenev is considered one of the great novelists of the Victorian era, along with Thackeray, Hawthorne, and Henry James, although his style was very different from these American and British writers. He has also been compared to his compatriots Lev Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, who wrote about similar circumstances and themes.

Works

He wrote short novels such as First Love and Smoke, and the short story collection Memories of a Hunter, which realistically reflects the life of the field and servants. In his novels with a rural setting the dominant themes are life frustration, failed loves, criticism of Russian life or new ideologies. The titles Rudin, Nest of Nobles and Fathers and Children stand out. The latter is possibly his best novel, and in it it raises the difference between two generations due to nihilistic thinking, very popular at the time it was written. Although its reputation has suffered some setbacks over the last century, the novel Fathers and Sons is recognized as one of the most important works of fiction of the century XIX.

Novels

• 1856 - Rudin
• 1859 - Nest of nobles
• 1860 - On the eve
• 1862 - Parents and children
• 1867 - Smoke
• 1877 - Virgin earth

Short narrative (selection)

• 1850 - Diary of a superfluous man
• 1852 - Three meetings
• 1852 - Memories of a hunter
• 1854 - Two friends
• 1854 - Rest of peace
• 1854 - Mumú
• 1855 - Yákov Pásinkov
• 1856 - Fausto. Report in nine letters
• 1858 - Asia
• 1860 - First love
• 1869 - A waste
• 1870 - King Lear of the steppe
• 1872 - Spring water
• 1881 - Singing of triumphant love
• 1883 - Mysterious tales

Dramas

• 1843 - Неостороность (Neostorozhnost, Don't worry.)
• 1847 - Где тонко, там и рвется (Gdie tonko, tam i rviotsya)
• 1849/1856 - Závtrak u Predvodítelia
• 1850/1851 - Razgovor na Bolshói Dorogue (Conversation on the route)
• 1846/1852 - Bezdénezhe (The fortune of the idiot)
• 1857/1862 - Najlébnik (Charge of family)
• 1855/1872 - Mésiats v derevne (A month in the field)
• 1882 - Vécher v Sorrento (Dawn in Sorrento)

Film adaptations

• Films based on his works
• A movie about your life

Spanish translations

As was the case with so many other books written in Russian (such as Life and Destiny, by Vasily Grossman) and in other languages not belonging to the Spanish language environment, indirect translations have not been rare. into Spanish of Turgenev's works, almost always through French versions. Only in recent decades have direct versions of the Russian originals been made.

About Turguénev

• Marías, Javier (2012). Written lives. Alphaguara. ISBN 978-84-204-0344-1.
• Zúñiga, Juan Eduardo (2010). From the snow forests: memory of Russian writers. Gütenberg Galaxy. ISBN 978-84-8109-870-9.
• Mori, Moses (1997). Russian prints. KRK.
• Zúñiga, Juan Eduardo (1996). The uncertain passions of Ivan Turguéniev. Alphaguara. ISBN 978-84-204-8185-2.
• Waddington, Patrick (1980). Turgenev and England. Macmillan. ISBN 0-333-22072-2.
• Maurois, André, seud. (1947). Turgénev. Buenos Aires: Espasa Calpe Argentina.