Turgenev first made his name with
A Sportsman's Sketches (
Записки охотника), also known as
Sketches From a Hunter's Album or
Notes of a Hunter. Based on the author's own observations while 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
Saint 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 to his estate for nearly two years.
In the 1840s and early 50s during the rule of Tsar
Nicholas I, the political climate in Russia was stifling for many writers. This is evident in the despair and subsequent death of Nikolai Gogol, the notorious oppression, and the persecution and arrests of artists, scientists, and writers, including Dostoevsky. During this time, thousands of Russian intellectuals (
Russian intelligents) emigrated to Europe. Among them were
Alexander Herzen and Turgenev himself. In the early 1850s Turgenev wrote several short novels (
povesti in Russian):
The Diary of a Superfluous Man (dramatized as
The Journey of the Fifth Horse),
Faust,
The Lull. In them Turgenev expressed the anxieties and hopes of Russians of his generation. In 1854 he settled in Europe and during the next year produced his first post-Russian important work: the novel "Rudin", the story of a man in his late twenties, torn between his much loved but barbaric homeland and a comfortable but unsatisfactory life in Europe. "Rudin" is also a story of nostalgia for the 1840s. In 1858 he wrote the novel
A Nest of Nobles (
Дворянское гнездо, published 1859), also a story of the nostalgia for the beauty of the lost, which contains one of his most memorable female characters, Elena.
In 1855
Alexander II became the Russian tsar, and the political climate in Russia became more relaxed. Inspired by the positive social changes, in 1859 Turgenev wrote the novel
On the Eve (
Накануне), in which he portrayed the Bulgarian revolutionary Dmitri. In 1862
Fathers and Sons (
Отцы и дети), his most enduring work, was published. Its lead character, Basarov, is heralded as a representative of the
new people character of the 1860s Russian novel.
Critics of the day did not take
Fathers and Sons seriously and after the relative critical failure of his masterpiece, Turgenev was disillusioned and started to write less. His next novel,
Smoke (
Дым), was published in 1867 and was again received less than enthusiastically in his native country. His last work of any length,
Virgin Soil (
Новь), was published in 1877. Shorter stories, such as
Torrents of Spring (
Вешние воды),
First Love, and
Asya were also written around this time. 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. Turgenev has often been compared to his Russian contemporaries,
Leo Tolstoy and
Feodor Dostoevsky, who wrote around the same time and on similar issues.
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