Fathers and Sons
Ivan Turgenev
FATHERS AND SONS
IVAN SERGEYEVICH TURGENEV was born in 1818 in the province of Oryol, and suffered during childhood from his tyrannical mother. After the family had moved to Moscow in 1827 he entered St Petersburg University, where he studied philosophy. When he was nineteen he published his first poems and, convinced that Europe contained the source of real knowledge, went to the University of Berlin. After two years he returned to Russia and took his degree at the University of Moscow. In 1843 he fell in love with Pauline Garcia-Viardot, a young Spanish singer, who was to influence the rest of his life. He followed her on singing tours in Europe and spent long periods in the French house of herself and her husband, both of whom accepted him as a family friend. He sent his daughter by a sempstress to be brought up among the Viardot children. After 1856 he lived mostly abroad, and became the first Russian writer to gain a wide literary reputation in Europe; he was a well-known figure in Parisian literary circles, where his friends included Flaubert and the Goncourt brothers, and an honorary degree was conferred on him at Oxford. His series of six novels, which reflects a period of Russian life from the 1830s to the 1870s, are Rudin (1856), Home of the Gentry (1859), On the Eve (1860), Fathers and Sons (1862), Smoke (1867) and Virgin Soil (1877); and he wrote a further novel, Spring Torrents (1872). He also wrote plays, including the comedy A Month in the Country, short stories and Sketches from a Hunter’s Album (1852), as well as literary essays and memoirs. He died in Paris in 1883 after being ill for a year and was buried in Russia.
PETER CARSON learnt Russian during National Service in the Navy at the Joint Services School for Linguists, Crail and London, and at home – his mother’s family left Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution. His working life has been spent on the editorial side of London publishing. He has translated Chekhov’s plays for Penguin Classics.
ROSAMUND BARTLETT has a doctorate from Oxford University. She is the author and editor of many books, among them Wagner and Russia, Shostakovich in Context and Chekhov: Scenes from a Life. Her Penguin Classics anthology, Chekhov: A Life in Letters, is the first uncensored edition of the writer’s correspondence in any language.
TATYANA TOLSTAYA was born in Leningrad in 1951 to an aristocratic family that includes the writers Leo and Aleksey Tolstoy. She has published, among other books, a novel, The Slynx, and White Walls: Collected Short Stories.
IVAN TURGENEV
Fathers and Sons
Translated by PETER CARSON
with an Introduction by ROSAMUND BARTLETT
and an Afterword by TATYANA TOLSTAYA
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN CLASSICS
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First published 1862
This translation first published in Penguin Classics 2009
Translation, Chronology, Further Reading and Notes copyright © Peter Carson, 2009
Introduction copyright © Rosamund Bartlett, 2009
Afterword copyright © Tatyana Tolstaya, 2009
Translation of Afterword copyright © Ronald Wilkes, 2009
All rights reserved
The moral right of the translator and editors has been asserted
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 978-0-14-193465-5
Contents
Chronology
Introduction
Further Reading
Translator’s Note
Fathers and Sons
Notes
Afterword
Chronology
(Unattributed works are Turgenev’s own.)
1818 28 October (O.S.) Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev born in Oryol, the second son of Colonel Sergey Nikolayevich Turgenev and Varvara Petrovna Lutovinova
1825 Alexander I dies and is succeeded as Tsar by his younger brother as Nicholas I; 14 December (O.S.): Decembrist uprising
1825–31 Publication of Pushkin’s verse novel Eugene Onegin
1834ff. At Universities of Moscow and St Petersburg
1836 Sovremennik (The Contemporary) journal founded by Pushkin
1837 Death of Pushkin
1838 At University of Berlin, where he studies philosophy; friendships with many Russian radical intellectuals, notably Bakunin
1839–41 Travels in Europe
1842 Birth of illegitimate daughter Pelageya (Paulinette) by a serf girl
Gogol’s Dead Souls (Part I)
1843 Meets the singer Pauline Garcia-Viardot (1821–1910), the central relationship of his life; friendship with the critic Belinsky
1843–5 Brief career as a civil servant in the Ministry of the Interior
1847–50 Abroad, mainly in France, often with the Viardots, to whom he entrusts his daughter’s education; friendship with Herzen
1850 His best-known play, A Month in the Country, completed; death of autocratic mother; inherits family estate of Spasskoye
1852 Sketches from a Hunter’s Album and obituary of Gogol lead to a short prison sentence and exile to Spasskoye for almost two years
1852–6 Tolstoy’s autobiographical novels Childhood, Boyhood and Youth.
1853–6 Crimean War between Russia and an alliance of Great Britain, France, Sardinia and the Ottoman Empire
1855 Nicholas I dies and is succeeded by his son, Alexander II
1856 Rudin
Flaubert’s Madame Bovary
1856–61 Travels in Germany, England, France, Italy, Austria
1857–67 Herzen’s journal Kolokol (The Bell) published from London
1859 Home of the Gentry
Goncharov’s Oblomov; Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde.
1860 On the Eve; the novella First Love; maps out characters of Fathers and Sons while staying on the Isle of Wight George Eliot’s Mill on the Floss
1860–61 Dickens’s Great Expectations
1861 Quarrel between Turgenev and Tolstoy Emancipation of the Serfs
1861–5 American Civil War
1862 Fathers and Sons
Dostoyevsky’s The House of the Dead; Verdi’s La Forza del
Destino launched in St Petersburg
1863 Viardots settle in Baden-Baden; Turgenev follows them and eventually builds a house there (1868)
Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done?
1865 Leskov’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk
1867 Smoke; quarrel with Dostoyevsky Zola’s Thérèse Raquin
1868 Saltykov-Shchedrin’s Golovlyov Famil
y
1869 Tolstoy’s War and Peace
1870–71 Franco-Prussian War; the Viardots and Turgenev leave Baden-Baden for London
1871–83 The Viardots and Turgenev return to France, living in Paris and Bougival; friendships with Flaubert, George Sand, Zola
1877 Virgin Soil
1878 Reconciliation with Tolstoy
1879 Oxford honorary degree, the first ever conferred on a novelist; passionate friendship with the actress Maria Savina Tchaikovsky’s opera Eugene Onegin
1880 Dostoyevsky’s famous speech in Turgenev’s presence about the universality of Pushkin’s poetry reconciles him with Turgenev
1881 Last visit to Russia and Spasskoye
1883 3 September: dies aged sixty-five from cancer, at Bougival, near Paris, and later buried in the Volkovo cemetery, St Petersburg
Introduction
‘Never was a writer so profoundly, so whole-souledly national’
Joseph Conrad
Turgenev was forty-four years old when he published Fathers and Sons. He had already penned three slim novels and would write two more over the next two decades, but from the moment Fathers and Sons appeared in 1862, this was the work with which his name was primarily and irrevocably associated. The sensation it caused was unprecedented in the history of Russian letters, both in terms of the intensity of the reactions it provoked and the longevity of the ensuing arguments. Certainly no other Russian novel in the nineteenth century was surrounded by greater controversy. All this is somewhat ironic given how shy and retiring Turgenev was in his private life, as recorded in numerous affectionate memoirs written by contemporaries such as Guy de Maupassant, for whom the writer’s imposing physical stature was utterly at odds with his gentle nature. But however self-effacing Turgenev was, he was also a brave man who did not shrink from setting his fiction in present-day Russia and creating characters who responded to and reflected its rapidly changing social and political reality. What is more, Turgenev had the courage to acknowledge that his own generation was essentially a spent force. In a country whose rulers had invested so much for so long in preserving a barbaric social system which depended on the connivance of the gentry, sympathizing intellectually with those members of Russia’s younger generation whose very existence posed a threat to the survival of his own unfairly privileged class was a noble – and foolhardy – undertaking. Combining an interest in the contemporary political scene with an essentially poetic vision almost guaranteed that Turgenev’s work would be criticized and misunderstood. His unshakeable artistic integrity obliged him to obey laws of nature on the creative level and thus remain open to unpredictable narrative outcomes – but it also produced fiction of the highest order. Fathers and Sons contains a remarkably balanced treatment of topical themes, but it is first and foremost a work of art. Turgenev’s unshakeable artistic integrity obliged him to obey laws of nature and thus remain open to unpredictable narrative outcomes, producing fiction of the highest order.
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 zapis
ki). 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.
