Download Ivan Turgenev 1818-1883

Ivan Turgenev
1818-1883
Иван Тургенев
Early Years
• Son of rich landowning family.
• Grew up on estate Spasskoe in Oryol province:
the Russian heartland.
• educated at home, learned French, German,
passable English
Spasskoe…
…and its surroundings.
Student years
• Studied at Moscow University, then St
Petersburg (1834-37).
• Went to Berlin in 1838 - 1841 to study
philosophy with Hegel.
• Berlin and the philosophical school very great
influence on young Russians of his generation.
• Turgenev a Westernizer, not a Slavophile.
A Fateful Meeting
• 1843-1845 appointment as civil servant in St
Petersburg.
• 1843 Pauline Viardot comes for the season to
St Petersburg.
• Turgenev falls in love, becomes attached to the
Viardots for the rest of his life.
• Hunts with Louis, collaborates on French
translations of Russian literature.
First a poet…
• First tries his hand at a long poem in the style
of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin.
• Then turns to hunting sketches in prose, first
published in The Contemporary
(Современник) 1847-1851.
The new Realism …
• First seen in Sportsman’s Sketches (Записки
охотника)
• art turns its back on mythological themes,
romantic scenes, important personages.
• Emphasis on detail – reflection of the
invention of photography.
• Social conscience, depiction of scenes of
country life: in France gives rise to the
Barbizon school, J.-F. Millet.
Jean-Francois Millet
The Gleaners / Les Glaneuses 1857
The novels by le géant russe…
• Turgenev later turns to novels, the best known
is Fathers and Sons (1862).
• His theme is Moscow and the Russian
countryside rather than St Petersburg.
• Moscow: the oldfashioned centre of Russian
life
• St Petersburg: The fantastic creation of Peter
with its extremes of pomp and poverty
The novels by le géant russe…
• Turgenev later turns to novels, the best known
is Fathers and Sons (1862).
• Becomes a fixture in Paris, friend of Flaubert,
Henry James, the Goncourts.
• Builds a villa next to the home of the Viardots
at Bougival.
• Dies of cancer at Bougival in 1883.
Turgenev in 1872
(Vasily Perov)
From Romanticism…
- symbolic representation
- multiple meanings
- focus on the formal aspects of the text (e.g.,
vocabulary, rhyme).
- predominance of metaphors
- fantastic occurrences
- poetry as dominant genre
- exotic themes
… to Realism
- direct, unambiguous representation
- focus on the events described
- predominance of metonymy – i.e. detail that
gives a description
- believable occurrences
- prose as dominant genre
- themes of everyday reality
Alexei Savrasov
Storm over the Kremlin
Vasily Polenov
A Moscow Yard
“First Love” (1860)
• Psychological realism
• Frame tale: introduction
• First-person narrative as opposed to the
omniscient third-person narrative
• Tale structured around the young man’s
growing realization of the truth
• Careful, poetic structuring into short chapters
with a final, telling sentence.