Happy birthday, Ivan Turgenev
Born: November 9, 1818, Oryol, Russia
Died: September 3, 1883 (age 64 years), Bougival, France
Ivan Turgenev's
A Sportsman's Sketches portrayed the cruelty and abuses of serfdom. Turgenev's later work,
Fathers and Sons, explored the dynamic of European Enlightenment ideals (along with industrialization) entering Russia and conflicting with the entrenched Feudalism and power of the Orthodox Church. The character Vasilievich Bazarov rejected the traditional values of the older generation, and popularized the term "nihilist," which came to refer to the segment of the younger generation who rejected traditional beliefs.
New Yorker
By Keith Gessen
August 29, 2022
Excerpt:
Turgenev’s mother, Varvara, was an even more insistent presence in his life. She came from a family of vicious landlords, and she more than kept up the tradition; she flogged and humiliated her peasants with alarming regularity. “I acquired my early loathing of slavery and serfdom by observing the shameful environment in which I lived,” Turgenev wrote. As he grew up and sought independence from his mother, including by living in Europe, she cut off his allowance; near the end of her life, she tried, unsuccessfully, to have her manager sell off and even ruin parts of the estate so as to devalue the prospective inheritance.
Turgenev’s first sustained effort in prose, “A Hunter’s Notebook,” usually translated as “
A Sportsman’s Sketches,” begun in 1846 and published as a book in 1852, showed the imprint of Belinsky’s ideas as filtered through the mind of a born aesthete. It recorded the stories Turgenev had witnessed or heard as he tramped about the countryside near his family estate, shooting birds. A number of the stories are about the relations between serfs and their masters. Without ever saying so outright, Turgenev makes it plain that most of the masters are self-satisfied and ignorant brutes, while the serfs are ordinary people trying to go about the business of life.
The book created a sensation when it was published. Though the stories were relatively light and seemingly harmless when read on their own, taken all together they conveyed just how barbaric and disfiguring an institution serfdom was. The censor who approved the collection for publication was removed from his post. The future Alexander II, at the time the grand duke, later said that the sketches had convinced him of the evils of Russia’s peculiar institution. A decade later, he signed the declaration that emancipated all the serfs.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/...enevs-fathers-and-children-slater-translation