Introduction

Turgenev’s reputation as a serious writer was established with the publication of the Sportsman’s Sketches (1852) which had started appearing individually in 1847. Up to this point he had been considered a poet - principally as the author of Parasha a long poem in a Pushkinian mould. The poetic qualities of the Sportsman’s Sketches themselves are very much in evidence. Particularly striking are Turgenev’s lyrical evocations of the Russian countryside. Nevertheless, for his contemporaries the work’s chief impact was its social and political relevance. It touched a raw nerve – the lot of the vast majority of the Russian population, who in the 1850s were still bonded serfs. Its sympathetic portrayal of the peasants struck a new humanistic note reminding those in power that the ‘souls’ who were the source of their own wealth were not mere chattels but human beings with real feelings, genuine virtues and a sense of their own dignity. Their masters, on the other hand, were often presented as unfeeling and barbaric. The social significance of the work was such that it is considered to have been one of the factors leading to the eventual emancipation of the serfs in 1861.¹

At the same time the Sportsman’s Sketches contain themes that Turgenev would develop in his later writing: natural description; the question of the ‘people’ and the problem of nationality; the dispute between Slavophiles and Westernisers; the nobleman on his estate; the ‘superfluous man’; and the torments of love.²

The strength of the passages of natural description in the Sportsman’s Sketches is to be seen in their poetry, their power to create mood. They evoke the nature of the Russian countryside, much as his portraits of peasants evoke the nature of the Russian ‘people’. Yet the symbolic role of nature does not go much beyond a certain implied parallelism between the two. It is there in the opening of the first sketch,‘Khor’ and Kalinych’, where Turgenev contrasts the nature (poroda) of the peasants of the Orel province with the nature of the peasants of the Kaluga province, then contrasts the natural features of the two provinces themselves. Yet the only conclusions he appears to draw are those of a sportsman (‘It is better for the sportsman in the Kaluga province’ [4, 7].³

If the opening introduces the twin themes of the ‘nature’ of the Russian peasant and nature in the Russian countryside, the final sketch ‘Forest and Steppe’ is pure description, celebrating the beauties of the natural setting itself, the contrast of forest and steppe at various seasons of the year, but with fleeting appearances of peasants. At the same time, there is also a personal, more psychological element. Walking along the edge of the forest in Autumn the author is assailed by memories: ‘With a quick ease all one’s life is unfurled like a scroll, and a man is master of all his past, of all his feelings, his powers, his entire soul’ [4, 386]. One may also remark a certain degree of humanisation of the natural world: In high summer ‘Stately aspens prattle away on high above you…a powerful oak tree stands, like a warrior, near a beautiful lime tree, [4, 385], and in Autumn the aspen grove appears to be happy to stand bare [4, 386], whereas in misty days in summer a tree one passes is motionless - wrapt in pleasure (ono nezhitsia) [4, 387]. Such embryonic personification of trees will be further developed and assume significant symbolic charge in the later novels.

Trees are important too for the landowners. At the opening of ‘My Neighbour Radilov’ Turgenev describes what he calls ‘the nests of gentry’ (dvorianskie gnezda) of landowner forefathers, which have disappeared from the landscape, and whose presence is only recorded in the lime trees they planted: ‘They speak, to our giddy race, of "fathers and brothers who have passed away in former times". A beautiful tree – an old lime such as this…’[4, 53].⁴

One of the most evocative of Turgenev’s natural descriptions is to be found in ‘Bezhin Meadow’, and here we see that the peasants’ appreciation of nature is linked to superstition. For the peasant boys in the story animals are representatives of something else. When a white dove flies into the light of the bonfire and out again, we sense an anticipation of the myth told in Rudin of the flight of a little bird from darkness into light and back again into darkness [6, 270], and one of the children, Kostia, even suggests a similar allegorical interpretation: could it be the soul of a just person flying to heaven? There is also a dark, ominous side of nature for these peasant lads. The cry of a heron might be that of a wood spirit, and in the late evening a pond where a man was drowned by robbers emits groaning sounds. It is a setting not unlike the Avdiukhin pond in Rudin, and the boys wonder whether the groans are those of the dead man’s soul or merely the call of frogs [4, 108]. For the author himself, nature evokes a more philosophical turn of mind. The gentle flow of stars towards the Milky Way reminds him of the ‘headlong, ceaseless flight of the earth’ [4, 107].

Peasants are capable of expressing their finer feelings through symbolic tokens of nature. When in the first sketch Kalinych brings a bunch of wild strawberries for his friend Khor’, the author comments: ‘I looked at Kalinych in amazement: I confess, I did not expect such "tenderness" [nezhnosti] from a peasant’ [4, 14]. In the story ‘The Meeting’, Akul’ka has been gathering herbs and flowers, and as a token of love, she offers Viktor a bunch of cornflowers tied with grass, which he abandons in favour of his dandyfied eyeglass [4, 265-6]. Such gestures do more than words to explain their relationship, but they also affect the author himself – he retrieves the discarded bouquet, and his mood is reflected in the world around him: ‘I grew sad; it seemed as though through the forlorn, but fresh smile of fading nature, there crept the mournful fear of a not too distant winter’ [4, 269]. It is mid September, and the autumnal mood, with its dark trees, is reinforced by the flight of a solitary crow, turning its head to look at the author and croaking.

The peasant’s attitude to nature is not that of their masters. Both Kas’ian in ‘Kas’ian from Krasivaia Mech’’ and Luker’ia in ‘Living Relics’⁵ reprove the author for killing birds. It is in the sketch ‘Kas’ian from Krasivaia Mech’’ that we have one of Turgenev’s most magical descriptions of nature: ‘It is a wonderfully pleasant occupation to lie on one’s back in the forest and look up above! It seems as though you are looking into a bottomless sea, and that it spreads itself in a broad expanse below you, that the trees do not raise themselves from the ground, but descend like the roots of huge plants, and fall vertically into those clear, glassy waves’ [4, 124]. The scene is ‘magical’, in that it echoes a famous set-piece in Gogol’s tale ‘A Terrible Vengeance’ where nature is inverted through its reflection in water.⁶ Yet Gogol’s description is ‘magical’ in a more direct sense: Turgenev’s passage lacks its suggestive symbolism and allegory – it is innocent: ‘You look, and that deep, pure azure awakens on your lips a smile, as innocent as itself, as the clouds in the sky, and it is as though, along with it, happy memories pass through your soul in slow procession’ [4, 124]. Nature, which here evokes happy memories, must be set against the most sustained piece of natural description in the work, ‘Forest and Steppe’, which concludes the collection. There, contemplation of nature triggers a ‘strange anxiety’ of memories [4, 386].

There is an obvious link between a ‘Sportsman’s Sketches’ and the later novels. Writing in 1881 Edmond de Goncourt spoke of all Turgenev’s books as ‘subtle, penetrating studies of the human soul, framed by landscapes, freshly written by a sportsman’.⁷ Richard Freeborn comments that ‘The Meeting’, as well as ‘Bezhin Meadow’ and Kas’ian from Krasivaia Mech’’, illustrate ‘a device of which Turgenev is to make considerable use in his novels: the use of the natural scene to highlight the emotions of the figures in the foreground’.⁸ Yet there is a fundamental difference between Turgenev’s use of natural description in the Sportsman’s Sketches and the later novels – nature here is not merely a frame: it has an integral function in the main picture itself. This was something which Fet detected even in the short story Asia (1858). He was worried by what he saw as Turgenev’s distortion of the natural picture by attempts to load its images with meaning:

Natural description in Turgenev’s later novels for all its appearance of a placid surface is not all it seems. In it lurk symbolic elements that to the steady gaze do indeed rise into view. Fet’s metaphor of the pond with its weeping willows (a recurrent topos in Turgenev) is very much to the point. Yet, in seeking to assert that what lies hidden in the pond’s depths should remain so, he seems unaware of the symbolic load suggested by his own image of the ‘weeping’ willows, and indeed of the irony in using meaning-charged imagery himself to deny its legitimacy. In a later letter Turgenev would point out the illogicality of Fet’s position: ‘Just as fear of phrase-making has driven Tolstoy into the most desperate of phrases, so revulsion against mind in art has lead you to the most recherché cleverness and deprived you of precisely that naïve feeling, with which you are so concerned.[…] You ostracise intelligence, and in works of art merely see the unconscious babble of the sleeper’ [L.4, 330].

It is significant that Fet sees the ‘pond’ of Turgenev’s art as fringed with trees; for trees, above all in his later novels, assume symbolic and ideological importance. The motif of the apple tree occurs both in Turgenev’s first novel – Rudin, and in his last -Virgin Soil. In both novels it symbolises the frustrated potential of the hero, but it is interesting to note that in a letter to Pisarev Turgenev uses the apple tree to describe his own genius: ‘Although, on one hand, I very well know that each talent, like each tree, yields only the fruit which befits it, however, on the other hand I give myself no illusions about my talent - my tree, and see in it a very ordinary, barely grafted, Russian apple tree’. [L.6, 255].

Fet was even more displeased with what he saw as the tendentiousness of Fathers and Children. He objected to the ‘parallelism’ of the novel’s characters, but in rejecting this charge, Turgenev sought to suggest that, on the contrary, his presentation of character had all the innocence of straight-forward natural description: ‘I will tell you one thing. I drew all these characters as I would have drawn mushrooms, leaves, trees. They plagued me with their presence and I set about drawing them’ [L.4, 371] – a statement, which for all its attempt to reassure Fet on the subject of ‘parallelism’, nevertheless, suggests another more intriguing parallelism: that between his characters and the phenomena of the natural world.

There is, however, a dichotomy in Turgenev’s presentation of nature. On the one hand, human values are projected on to natural phenomena, yet, at the same time, nature itself preserves an implacable indifference to human fate. The clearest expression of this is to be seen in the short story Trip to Poles’ia (1857) which was not included in the Sportsman’s Sketches. Almost at the very opening we are made aware of this other view of nature: ‘From the depths of age-old forests, from the immortal bosom of water, there arises the same voice: "I have no concern for you", nature says to man, "I rule, and just you busy yourself with how to avoid dying"’ [7, 51]. There is a strong sense of death in nature itself, a feeling which comes on the author as he sits in the forest: ‘At that moment, in this place I smelled the breath (veianie) of death, I felt it. Its relentless nearness was almost palpable’ [7, 59]. Here are motifs which also resurface in Turgenev’s later writing. The indifference of nature is stressed in the death of Bazarov.

The acclaim which greeted the Sportsman’s Sketches was largely due to its sympathetic portrayal of the Russian peasant. Its sub-text, obvious to his contemporaries, was the evil of serfdom. Almost all the sketches were written abroad, and Turgenev himself gave the following explanation (and justification): ‘It was absolutely necessary for me to get away from my enemy, in order from my very distance to attack it more strongly. This enemy in my eyes had a definite form, bore a well-known name; this enemy was the institution of serfdom’ [14, 9].¹⁰ The matter, however, appears to go further than this. Writing to an Italian correspondent in 1877 he suggested that the experience of serfdom had conditioned the whole of his writing career: ‘I think that the direction of my path in literature was defined by that milieu of serfdom, in which I spent all my youth, and which roused the strongest hatred in me’.¹¹ Nevertheless, if we compare the sympathetic portraits of serfs in the Sportsman’s Sketches with the dissolute and rapacious peasants portrayed at the end of his career in Virgin Soil, it is obvious that Turgenev’s attitude has undergone a distinct change.

The peasants depicted in the Sportsman’s Sketches are serfs still in bondage; his later portraits reflect the realities of the ‘liberated’ peasantry. Turgenev, like his own Nikolai Petrovich in Fathers and Sons had anticipated the reforms of 1861, and had shared out his land with his peasants in 1859. The experience, in both cases, was not as positive as they might have hoped. In a letter to I.S Aksakov in October of that year, Turgenev complains: ‘The peasants before parting with their "masters", become, as we say, cossacks – and they drag everything from the masters that they can; grain, woodland, cattle etc.. I fully understand this, but in this first period in our areas the forests, which they are frenziedly selling, will disappear’ [L.3, 357-8]. In the same letter he casts doubts on the peasants’ enthusiasm for an institution, supposedly dear to their hearts - the village commune (known under the names of both mir and obshchina): ‘I am almost convinced that it will be necessary to impose it on the peasants in the form of an administrative and financial measure: by themselves they will not agree to it; that is - they value the mir only from a judicial point of view, as self-justice, if one can use the expression, but not at all in any other way’ [L.3, 358].¹²

The question of the peasantry was not just a social issue, important though this was, it had become closely associated with the problem of national identity. The very word narod, commonly applied to the peasants, in its wider sense also meant ‘nation’. The intelligentsia, cut off from the peasants by the institution of serfdom, and even further alienated from their Russian roots by the foreign values of their education, upbringing and general intellectual orientation towards the West, instinctively felt that the peasants represented the real Russian nation in a way that the Gallicised aristocracy and Western-looking intelligentsia could never do. The Slavophiles, in particular, saw in the peasant mir values of cooperation and anti-individualism unique to Russia: values which needed to be preserved against the inroads of the materialistic West. Turgenev’s scepticism about the peasant commune is echoed in his novels – notably in Bazarov’s mockery of the institution in Fathers and Children, and statements in Virgin Soil.

Ivan Aksakov, the recipient of Turgenev’s letter casting doubt on the peasants’ own attitude to the mir, was a member of the most prominent Slavophile family (though he himself, at this stage in his life, had reservations about aspects of Slavophile doctrine). The most radical Slavophile ideas were held by Ivan’s brother Konstantin, and Turgenev included a polemical portrait of him in the figure of Liubozvonov in ‘The Homesteader Ovsianikov’ (Sportsman’s Sketches) [4, 70-71].¹³ Turgenev still retained his friendship with the Aksakov family, and in a revealing letter to his father, S.T. Aksakov (1856/7) he writes from Paris: ‘Let Konstantin Sergeevich write me a letter. I will reply to him without delay, and in spring how we shall argue! I very much like to argue with him, because, in spite of our shouting and passion, a friendly smile does not leave our innermost being [dusha] and is sensed in every word’ [L.3, 68].

For all his rebuttal of Slavophile views on the peasants, the Aksakovs were capable of influencing his writing. He excised a ‘naturalistic’ passage from Rudin (Pigasov’s account of the death of the nephew of his neighbour, Chepuzova) after criticism from Sergei Aksakov, and it has also been suggested that the Nest of Gentlefolk may owe something to his contacts with the Aksakov family.¹⁴

The Slavophiles were not alone in idealising the Russian peasant and his institutions. Left-wing intellectuals, following the lead of Herzen, saw a basic socialist principle of cooperation in the peasant commune. Turgenev, who had first met Herzen in Moscow in 1844, and later visited him in exile in London, maintained a vigorous polemic with this advocate of peasant socialism – a polemic reflected on the pages of his novels. In correspondence Turgenev accused him of bowing down to the peasant sheepskin coat. Herzen had been bitterly disillusioned in the hopes he once had for the saving values of the West, and Turgenev attacks these frustrated hopes now redirected and placed on the Russian peasant: ‘All your idols have been smashed, and you cannot live without an idol, so let’s raise an altar to this new, unknown god, since almost nothing is known of him, and once again one can pray and believe and expect’ [L.5, 67]. Turgenev, as a Westerniser, saw the duty of the intelligentsia to lie, not in accepting values from the peasants, but in bringing Western values to them: ‘The role of the educated class in Russia is to be the transmitter of civilisation to the people, in order that they themselves can decide, what to reject and what to accept’ [L.5, 51].

For all that this may suggest a propagandist role, Turgenev, nevertheless, flirted all his life with revolution. The Sportsman’s Sketches in its apparent championship of the peasants and implied denigration of their masters was viewed as a subversive work. Indeed the censor who passed the collection for publication was dismissed, and in 1852 Turgenev was exiled to his estate, ostensibly for writing an obituary on Gogol, though Turgenev himself had no doubt that it was punishment for the Sportsman’s Sketches. Turgenev claimed that there was only one man he hated, and that was Nicholas I [L.9, 133; 508]. The heroes of his novels, Rudin, Insarov, Bazarov, and a fortiori the characters of Virgin Soil all wear the mantle of revolutionaries. Fidelity to the principles of revolution figures in his polemic with Herzen: ‘You hit at everything that ought to be dear to every European, and therefore to us – at civilisation, at legality, at revolution itself in the end’. He tells Herzen that he must choose either to serve revolution and European ideals, as before, or face up to the fact that he has been wrong [L.5, 68].

Nevertheless, it was for his association with Herzen and his London circle that Turgenev fell foul of the authorities. In 1863 he was summoned back from Paris to face a Senatorial Commission, and give an account of his activities and his relations with the revolutionaries abroad. He rebutted charges of complicity and minimized his contacts with Herzen. In so doing he earned the latter’s scathing comment that he was a ‘white-haired Magdalen of the male sex, who could not sleep at night for thinking that the Emperor might not have heard of her repentance’.¹⁵ At the same time Turgenev did associate with figures of the extreme radical left. He had a friendly correspondence with Pisarev, one of the few in the radical camp to praise the portrait of Bazarov. He also corresponded with the radical leader Lavrov and gave small subsidies to his journal Vpered.¹⁶

Nevertheless, when in 1879 he was accused of sucking up to radical youth by B.Markevich in Katkov’s right-wing paper, Moscow Gazette (Moskovskie vedomosti), he responded with a letter to the European Herald (Vestnik Evropy), claiming that he opposed revolution in principle. He was, he said, a ‘gradualist’, an old-fashioned liberal in what he called ‘the English dynastic sense’, a man expecting revolution only from above.¹⁷

There is another theme in the Sportsman’s Sketches. ‘The Hamlet of the Schigri Province’ is in a different key from the other sketches in the collection. It deals with the problems of the rootless Russian intellectual, brought up on the German idealistic philosophy of the ‘circles’ of the 1830s, in particular that of Stankevich. It is a portrait of the so-called ‘superfluous man’ (and Turgenev himself gave this phrase currency through the title of another story written in 1850 – The Diary of A Superfluous Man). The title of the story in the Sportsman’s Sketches is also significant, in that it suggests this figure as a Hamlet – an identification which will recur in portrayals of the Russian intelligent in his later novels.

For all the apparent softness and conciliatory nature of Turgenev’s ‘liberalism’, it is a remarkable fact that he, more than any other Russian writer of his time, managed to have the most spectacular quarrels with his contemporaries. Both Tolstoy and Goncharov challenged him to a duel; the sons of Pushkin were, allegedly, bent on beating him up; he had a dramatic quarrel with Dostoevsky; his long-standing friendship with Fet ended in acrimony. He quarreled with Herzen, Nekrasov, Dobroliubov, Chernyshevsky and others, both on the left and the right of the political spectrum. Although he boasted to Pisarev that he was proud to put ‘civilisation’ on his standard, [L.6, 261] many of his contemporaries suggested something uncivilised about his behaviour. Tolstoy, in a letter to Fet, called him an ‘unpleasant sort of trouble-maker’ (kakoi-to zadira nepriiatnyi),¹⁸ and Fet himself, in a letter breaking off relations, said that Turgenev’s own uncle pointed to his ‘extremely spoilt nature and unbridled egoism’ (krainiaia izbalovannost’ i neobuzdannyi egoizm). In his letter, Fet gives examples of his boorish behaviour in society (to which Turgenev, himself, would later refer in his novel Virgin Soil as evidence of the treachery of friends), and adds further salt to the wound by suggesting that Turgenev’s life-long love, Pauline Viardot, secretly thought him uncivilised: ‘Mme Viardot in my presence more than once called you un sauvage. There is a profound truth concealed in her friendly joke’.¹⁹

The theme of ‘impossible’ love is already there in the Sportsman’s Sketches.²⁰ It is a dominant theme in his novels, in which more often than not it is the man who is found wanting. A typical female figure here is also the type of the femme fatale, and it is difficult to escape the conclusion that Turgenev’s own relationship with Pauline Viardot lies behind such portraits. In December 1871 Turgenev replied to a letter from the art critic V. V. Stasov, in which he had spoken out at length against marriage and its unsuitability for the life of a creative artist.²¹ Turgenev, in appearing to agree with him, takes the argument further:

Love in Turgenev is never straightforward. Its torments are not only present in episodes in the Sportsman’s Sketches, it is a theme, too, of the earlier stories: Faust, Asia, First Love. The Trip to Poles’ia even suggests that love may be linked to the theme of implacable nature. At the end of this story, contemplation of a damsel fly leads the author into deep philosophical speculation. He feels he has found nature’s secret of life; it is based on restraint of feelings and energy - the balance of health: ‘Everything that leaves this level, whether it moves above or below, is all the same thrown out by her as unsuitable. Many insects die, as soon as they know the joys of love, destroying the balance of life’ [7, 70]. Love, therefore, is not a benign force, it destroys the balance of frail creatures, and nature itself is unrelenting.

It is customary to see two lines of development in Russian literature: that initiated by Gogol, which lead to the Natural School and to writers like Dostoevsky; and the line stemming from Pushkin which was further developed by Tolstoy and even by Turgenev himself. Yet Turgenev has a claim to be considered an initiator in his own right. His subtle presentation of mood and psychology clearly looks forward to Chekhov and Bunin. Chekhov obviously owes a great debt to the Sportsman’s Sketches, as well as to many aspects of Turgenev’s novels. Like Chekhov, Turgenev bears witness to the decay of the gentry class At the same time he is also the chronicler of the various phases of the Russian intelligentsia of his times, and in so doing he had set an agenda which might not only have influenced his great rival Dostoevsky, but, even more surprisingly, the Soviet writer Leonid Leonov, who bravely tried to carry on a similar task in far more adverse circumstances.²²

Turgenev’s influence went well beyond his own culture. In Paris, as a member of the ‘five’ (Flaubert, Turgenev, Zola, Daudet and Edmond de Goncourt) he was accepted almost as a French writer. Love of art and nature linked him with de Goncourt; he was particularly close to Flaubert, and he championed the works of Zola in Russia.²³ Guy de Maupassant called himself his pupil, and the impact of Turgenev’s work can be detected in his writing.²⁴ As Maupassant, in his turn, exercised a strong influence on Chekhov, it may be said that, via France, Turgenev’s legacy also came back full circle to a new generation in Russia.

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Notes

¹ See: D.S. Mirsky, A History of Russian Literature (ed. and abridged F.J. Whitfield), New York, 1960, p.185.

² The Slavophiles, principally represented by the Aksakov family, I. Kireevskii, and A.S. Khomiakov asserted the virtues of Russian traditional culture and institutions, particularly Russian Orthodoxy and the social institution of the peasant village commune – the mir or obshchina. The Westernisers, of which Turgenev himself was one, stressed the need for western influence on Russian life. It is a dispute which has not entirely lost its force even today. The so called ‘Superfluous Man’ (lishnii chelovek) is principally associated with the rootless gentry heroes of Pushkin and Lermontov (Onegin and Pechorin) who could find no place in Russian society of their time, but the type may be observed, in modified form, in literature throughout the 19^th century.

³ Numerals in square brackets in the text refer to volume and pages of I.S. Turgenev, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem v dvadsati vos’mi tomakh, Moscow-Leningrad, 1961-68, but as the last thirteen (some of them double) volumes devoted to Turgenev’s letters are numbered independently (1-13) references to these volumes will be preceded by the letter L. A new and updated edition of the complete works was launched in 1978 but encountered difficulties in publication. See: N.N. Mostovskaia, ‘Informatsiia o vtorom akademicheskom izdanii Polnogo sobraniia sochinenii i pisem Turgeneva’, I.S Turgeneva: zhizn’, tvorchestvo, traditsii (Doklady mezhdunarodnoi konferentsii, posveshchennoi 175-letiiu s dnia rozhdenii I. S. Turgeneva 26-28 avgusta 1993g., Budapesht), Budapest, 1994, pp. 241-3 and the preface to: N.S. Nikitina (compiler) Letopis’ zhizni i tvorchestva I.S. Turgeneva (1818-1858), St Petersburg, 1995, pp. 9-10.

⁴ Lime trees figure as a symbol of the nobleman’s estate at the opening of Pomialovskii’s novel, Meshchanskoe shchast’e (‘Bourgeois Happiness’). See: N.G. Pomialovskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, (ed. and commentary I. Iampol’skii ), 2 vols, Moscow-Leningrad, 1935, vol. 1, p. 57.

⁵ ‘Zhivye moshchi’ (‘Living Relics’), however, is a later story, first published in 1874.

⁶ See: R. Peace, The Enigma of Gogol: An Examination of the Writings of N.V. Gogol and Their Place in the Russian Literary Tradition, Cambridge, 1981, p.21, and ‘The Mirror World of Gogol’s Early Stories’, Nikolay Gogol: Text and Context (eds. Jane Grayson, Faith Wigzell), Basingstoke and London, 1989, pp19-33.

⁷ Perepiska I.S. Turgeneva v dvukh tomakh, (eds. V.E. Vatsuro et al.) Moscow, 1986, vol.2, p.338.

⁸ R. Freeborn, Turgenev:The Novelist’s Novelist, A Study, Oxford, 1963, p.31.

⁹ Perepiska, vol. 1, p.411.

¹⁰ In Vmesto vstupleniia. The phrase ‘from my very distance’ (iz samoi moei dali) echoes a well-known phrase from the final chapter of Gogol’s Dead Souls, and his claim (ibid.) that he had taken a ‘Hannibal oath’ to fight serfdom, recalls a similar oath taken by Herzen and Ogarev in 1820 [14, 423].

¹¹ Perepiska, vol. 2, p.420.

¹² References to Turgenev’s difficulties with his peasants can be found in other letters [L.4, 28-9; 254-5, 566].

¹³ His brother Ivan objected to this portrait. See note [4, 548-9]. See also: Perepiska, Vol.1, pp.131-2. There are oblique references to the Slavophiles in ‘Khor’ and Kalinych’ and ‘The Hamlet of the Shchigri Province’.

¹⁴ Perepiska, Vol. 1, pp.336-7 and 297.

¹⁵ See: Isaiah Berlin, Russian Thinkers, (eds. H. Hardy, A. Kelly) London, 1978, p.291.

¹⁶ See: Leonard Schapiro, Turgenev His Life and Times, Oxford, 1978, p.103.

¹⁷ Berlin, p.291. Markevich’s article ‘S beregov Nevy’ appeared in Moskovskie Vedomosti, 9^th Dec. 1879. See: Perepiska, Vol. 2, p.149. Turgenev would later pillory Markevich in the figure of Ladislas in Virgin Soil.

¹⁸ Perepiska, Vol.2, p.145.

¹⁹ Perepiska, Vol.1, pp.460-62.

²⁰ E.g. in ‘The Provincial Doctor’ (Uezdnyi lekar’) and ‘The Meeting’ (Svidanie). The death-bed confession of love in ‘The Provincial Doctor’ may be seen as an anticipated reversal of the scene between Bazarov and Odintsova in Fathers and Children.

²¹ Perepiska, Vol.2, pp.314-15.

²² Dostoevsky’s later novels (The Devils, The RawYouth, The Brothers Karamazov) take up the ‘fathers and children’ theme, and in The Devils, a novel in which Turgenev himself is parodied, Dostoevsky provides his own assessment of the stages of Russian intellectual development. Leonov, in whom critics see the influence of Dostoevsky, reflected the stages of the development of Soviet society in such novels as: The Badgers (Barsuki), The Thief (Vor), The River (Sot’), The Russian Forest (Russkii les).

²³ Perepiska, Vol.2, pp.396-7.

²⁴ Ibid. p.410.