Russia’s great emancipator. Ivan Turgenov helped bring freedom to the serfs by an ingeniously devastating method: showing them what their lives were like…
“Almost everything I saw aroused in me a feeling of embarrassment, indignation, and disgust…In my eyes the enemy had a clarly defined form and bore a familiar name: serfdom. In this name was concentrated everything I had made up my mind to fight- everything I swore never to become reconciled to. That was my Hannibal’s oath.”
—Ivan Turgenev hunting (1879) by Nikolai Dmitriev-Orenburgsky (private collection)
Read more: http://www.answers.com/topic/ivan-turgenev#ixzz2HwtGRfFC—
The words are those of Ivan Turgenev, the first Russian writer to be popular in the West. His book A Sportsman’s Sketches did for the freeing of Russia’s serfs what Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin did for the emancipation of America’s slaves.
The raw material for his book lay around Turgenev at his birth on October 28,1818 in the city of Orel, some two hundred miles southwest of Moscow. His mother, Vavara Petrovna, egocentric, tightfisted, imperious, was the epitome of thousands of pomeshchiks, the landed nobles who owned the millions of “souls”, the “baptised property” who labored across the broad face of Russia. At her estate of Spasskoye and on her surrounding properties, she possessed some 30,000 acres and more than 15,000 serfs.
—As he grew older, Turgenev continued to write both poetry and novels although with less frequency. He became a popular writer in the West, where his novels sold well. He became friends with the French writer Flaubert and became a favourite of writers like Henry James and Joseph Conrad.
Turgenev died in 1883 in Bougival, near Paris.
Fathers and Sons…
Turgenev’s novel, which first appeared in 1862, was the first Russian novel widely read outside or Russia and one of the most important works of the century.
While it can be taken on face value as the portrait of the discordant relationship of a father and a son, the novel is also clearly a political novel, using the family dynamic as a metaphor for the division of the old Russian social order from the new nihilistic, political radical movements that dominated the political landscape of mid-century Russia. —click image for source…
“Over my subjects, I rule as I like and i an not answerable for them to nyone,m” Turgenev’s mother regularly declared, and in the Russia of the first half of the nineteenth century she wss right. Her estates were run as though they were an independent principality, and the vast wooden mansion of Spasskoye as though it were the czar’s palace. Her house and serfs were rigidly divided into ranks in imitation of the imperial court. Her butler was the “court chamberlain,” her pst boy the “postmaster general,” her personal maids “ladies in waiting.” And, as at the Winter Palace and Tsarskoe Selo, none of the ladies in waiting was permitted to marry. ( to be continued)…
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