Turgenev had been in the public eye ever since making his literary debut with the self-financed publication of a narrative
poem called
Parasha
in 1843. As the populist critic Nikolay Mikhailovsky (1828–1905) was later to comment, the ‘unforgettable’ decade of the
1840s was a dark and difficult time in which to begin a literary career in Russia.
1
Born in 1818, Turgenev grew up during the oppressive, militaristic regime of Nicholas I, which was characterized by police
surveillance, censorship, a vast centralized bureaucracy and a policy of nationalism predicated on the glorification of Russian
autocracy, personified by the Tsar himself. Having had to contend with the Decembrist uprising immediately upon assuming the
throne in 1825, Nicholas was determined to stamp out all forms of subversive activity, and his repressive measures only intensified
as a wave of revolutions spread across Europe in 1848. It was just at this time that Turgenev began publicly to nail his political
colours to the mast, having published the previous year ‘Khor and Kalinych’, which would later become the first of twenty-five
Sketches from a Hunter’s Album
(as the pithy title
Zapiski okhotnika
(‘Notes of a Hunter’) is often translated into English). His transition from poetry to prose indicates the shift taking place
at this time in Russian literature from Romanticism to realism, but for all the verisimilitude of his descriptions, this did
not mean his writing became any less poetic. It was these richly detailed, and often intensely lyrical, sketches of Russian
rural life which made Turgenev’s reputation.
Turgenev himself was an avid huntsman (of mostly woodcock, quail and partridge, but occasionally bears) and was fortunate
enough to come from a wealthy noble background which enabled him to indulge in such pursuits. His position also gave him the
opportunity to travel. He spent his early childhood on his family’s
spacious country estate, located several hundred miles southwest of Moscow, near the town of Mtsensk, but he had lived for
six months in Paris even before he was five years old and for the rest of his life he was something of a nomad. First he moved
with his family to Moscow for his education; then he took a degree at the University of St Petersburg, after which he spent
three years studying at the University of Berlin. In 1856, he decided to base himself in Western Europe, not least because
he wanted to be near Pauline Viardot, the celebrated but married opera singer with whom he had fallen hopelessly in love in
1843. From now on his habit was to come back regularly to Russia in the summer months. He would probably have moved abroad
earlier but for the fact he was exiled to his estate for a year and a half in 1852 – nominally for his obituary of Gogol,
but in reality for the implicit social criticism contained in his
Sketches from a Hunter’s Album
, first published in book form just at that time.
A key role in Turgenev’s intellectual evolution at this stage in his career was played by Vissarion Belinsky (1811–48), who
was Russia’s first professional critic and his close friend. Belinsky was the guiding spirit behind
Sketches from a Hunter’s Album
, and Turgenev’s dedication of
Fathers and Sons
to his friend’s memory says a lot about his importance to the novel’s conception. It was an unlikely friendship, as the urbane,
cosmopolitan and aristocratic Turgenev and the plebeian, radical and ascetic Belinsky had vastly different backgrounds and
temperaments, but, as committed ‘Westernizers’, they were united by their opposition to the Slavophile thinkers whose rejection
of the Europeanist reforms of Peter the Great had steadily been gaining currency in certain intelligentsia circles of Moscow
and St Petersburg. And their friendship certainly ran more smoothly than Turgenev’s close but fraught relationship with his
neighbour and literary rival Count Tolstoy, which almost degenerated into a duel during the writing of
Fathers and Sons
. Belinsky was more than just a literary critic to his contemporaries, most of whom revered him regardless of their political
views. In Isaiah Berlin’s words he was one of the ‘greatest of heroes of the heroic 1840s, when the organised struggle for
full social as well as political freedom, economic as well as civic equality, was held to have begun in the
Russian Empire’.
2
Perhaps in another age Belinsky would have been less uncompromising, but, as he saw it, as long as the horror of serfdom
existed in Russia, the first duty of writers was to expose it. Thus he had little time for art which was not politically engaged
– and none at all for art that was politically engaged in the wrong direction. Turgenev never abandoned the pursuit of artistic
goals in his writing, as is particularly apparent in the short stories and novellas he continued to write, but he was also
a writer with a strong social conscience and love of his country, who devoted himself to finding ways in his longer fictional
works to express and understand the turbulent times in which he lived.
Fathers and Sons
, his best novel, represents the culmination of a journey he embarked on some twenty years earlier under the tutelage of Belinsky,
who had clearly endorsed it.
Turgenev came into Belinsky’s orbit in 1843 (the momentous year of Pauline Viardot’s debut on the Petersburg stage, and his
own literary debut), when the latter published several of his poems and an early drama as chief critic of the influential
journal
Notes of the Fatherland
(
Otechestvennye zapiski
). Belinsky then joined the staff of
The Contemporary
(
Sovremennik
) under the new editorship of Nikolay Nekrasov, and it was on the pages of this journal, which immediately became Russia’s
leading progressive periodical, that Turgenev’s ‘Khor and Kalinych’ appeared in 1847. In his survey of Russian literature
for that year, Belinsky praised Turgenev for having approached the people in a way no one had ever approached them. Turgenev,
indeed, for the first time in Russian literature had provided realistic portraits of peasants, about whose lives next to nothing
was really known (Nicholas I was so squeamish about Russian society being placed under the microscope that he even censored
statistical research). Perhaps more importantly, Turgenev also treated the peasants in his fiction as dignified human beings,
equal to their masters. Turgenev’s hatred of serfdom had originated with his tyrannical mother, whose despotic treatment of
her serfs instilled in him a deep hatred of violence and social injustice. He justified living abroad, where he wrote most
of his sketches and much of his subsequent fiction, by reasoning that he could attack his great ‘enemy’ (the institution of
serfdom) more effectively at a distance.
By the time he came of age, the ‘landowning and serf-owning stratum of society’ to which he belonged by birth aroused in him
feelings of such ‘embarrassment and indignation, and finally disgust’ that he simply could no longer ‘breathe the same air’
as those who stood for the things he hated so much, as he later explained in the preface to his memoirs (by the end of Nicholas
I’s reign in 1855 the atmosphere in Russia was so suffocating that barely anyone could breathe).
3
Since he was abroad, Turgenev was one of the first to be able to read the incendiary letter Belinsky addressed to Gogol in
the last months of his life, castigating him for his reactionary views in defence of serfdom and the autocracy. Written in
1847 in Germany, where Belinsky had gone in a futile atttempt to improve his failing health (he was dying of tuberculosis),
the letter circulated widely in
samizdat
in Russia via handwritten copies, but there was no question of the censor passing it for publication. Belinsky’s untimely
death a few months later was a huge blow to Turgenev, and also a setback to the Russian government, who had been hoping to
arrest him. The Tsarist authorities were more successful with Turgenev a few years later, using the publication of his obituary
of Gogol as a convenient pretext to arrest him in March 1852. It was no coincidence, however, that
Sketches from a Hunter’s Album
had just been approved for publication in book form by the censor (who was subsequently sacked). Turgenev was released from
exile on his estate at the end of 1853 through the intercession of Crown Prince Alexander, upon whom
Sketches from a Hunter’s Album
had made a deep impression. That Alexander’s resolve to abolish serfdom was hardened after reading these stories was a matter
of great pride to Turgenev, and it is telling that it was soon after Nicholas I died that he began his first novel,
Rudin
. He now began to cast his gaze more widely over contemporary Russian society. Alexander II’s accession, and the end of the
Crimean War, were greeted with relief and a feeling of optimism about the future. The immediate liberalization of Russian
society was reflected in the relaxation in censorship and the arrival in St Petersburg of Johann Strauss, Jr, whose waltzes
brought some much-needed
joie de vivre
to Russian life. Dostoyevsky was finally allowed to return from exile (having
been arrested and almost executed in 1849 for reading an illicit copy of Belinsky’s letter to Gogol), and the Tsar’s liberal-minded
younger brother, Grand Duke Konstantin, was now able to send a group of young writers on a remarkable expedition down the
Volga to study the lives of those involved in its navigation. A direct result was Ostrovsky’s play
The Storm
, first performed in 1859 and perceived by radical critics to be a thrilling allegory of social protest that could never have
been allowed under Nicholas I. It was also in 1859 that Turgenev began work on his third novel, the title of which,
On the Eve
, is emblematic of the state of anticipation Russia found itself in before Alexander II launched the ‘Great Reforms’ of the
1860s. But it was his fourth novel,
Fathers and Sons
, begun in the months leading up to the Emancipation of the Serfs and completed in its immediate aftermath, that caught the
Zeitgeist
more than any other artistic work of the period.
Turgenev began
Fathers and Sons
in a spell of bad weather during a stay in Ventnor on the Isle of Wight in August 1860. He did not find it an easy novel
to write and was apparently evicted by his first landlady for smoking too much. Nevertheless, perhaps with the help of the
sea view from his new lodgings on the Esplanade, he made progress. When he left three weeks later, he had made notes on his
central protagonists, including physical characteristics and precise ages, and resolved that the action would take place in
1859. This was how his novels always began in his creative imagination: character before plot. Back in Paris that autumn,
he sketched out the complete storyline. Then began the task of fleshing it out, which took place in fits and starts, between
games of chess at the Café de la Regence. It is understandable why Turgenev should have only completed the first half before
he left for Russia in April 1861. All that spring Turgenev and other liberals among the expatriates had been anxiously awaiting
the long-expected Emancipation of the Serfs to be made official, and in his distracted state it must have been hard sometimes
to concentrate on fiction. As soon as the Manifesto was published, Turgenev and others organized a service of thanksgiving
in the Embassy church in Paris, and he wrote to friends that he had been reduced to tears by the ‘very clever and
moving’ address given by the priest.
4
Once back at his estate in Russia in May, Turgenev was able to focus again, and the first draft of
Fathers and Sons
was complete by the end of the summer. Next came the process of making revisions to the manuscript, on the recommendations
of close friends like Pavel Annenkov and, more controversially, the editor of the journal where it would first appear – which
was not
The Contemporary
.
The Russian literary scene had changed significantly since Alexander II had become Tsar. As a result of the general loosening
up of Russian intellectual life, Nekrasov had been able to appoint the radical critic Nikolay Chernyshevsky (1828–89) to the
editorial board of
The Contemporary
. Both he and Alexander Dobrolyubov (1836–61), who joined the journal the following year, came from the same stock as Belinsky:
they were
raznochintsy
, that is to say, educated members of the intelligentsia who came from non-noble stock, often being children of clergy (as
in their case) or, like Belinsky, of doctors, who also occupied a low position in Russian society. They were much more extreme
and dogmatic about the need for art to serve a political purpose, however. As ‘men of the sixties’ (‘
shestidesyatniki
’), as they came to be referred to, they were people who had come into the public arena with an expectation of being able
to act. Thus they came from a new and very different generation from that of the liberal Turgenev and his contemporaries,
whom they associated with the stagnant 1840s and aristocratic values, and dismissed as ineffectual idealists. The clash between
these two generations is essentially the theme of
Fathers and Sons
and is most graphically represented in the relationship between Pavel Kirsanov and Bazarov. As a result of Nekrasov’s support
of his radical younger colleagues, the left-wing political agenda of
The Contemporary
was now placed to the fore, at the expense of artistic criteria, and in 1858 the journal lost writers such as Turgenev, Tolstoy,
Goncharov and Ostrovsky to the Moscow-based and still mildly liberal
Russian Messenger
(
Russky vestnik
). It was thus to its editor Mikhail Katkov that Turgenev submitted
Fathers and Sons
for its first publication in journal form, as he had already done with his most recent novel,
On the Eve
. When
Fathers and Sons
was finally published in early 1862 it filled pages 473 to
663 – Russian literary periodicals were not called ‘fat journals’ for nothing – of the February issue of
Russian Messenger
. Criticism from those who espoused the ideology of
The Contemporary
was an inevitability, but Turgenev had no idea quite how vicious it would be.