IVAN S. TURGÉNIEF.
IVAN TURGÉNIEF.
I.
Ivan Turgénief was born at Orel on the 28th of October, 1818. This date, given by Turgénief himself in a letter to the Russian journalist Suvarin, corresponds to the 9th of November in our calendar.
His father, Sergéi Nikolayevitch, and his mother, Várvara Petrovna, died early.[25] He was brought up by his grandmother, a Russian lady of the old school, haughty by nature and of despotic disposition. The portrait of this “severe and choleric” baruina is found sketched in vigorous outlines in the little story “Punin and Baburin.” This story, says Turgénief in the letter which I have just mentioned, “contains much biography.”
Turgénief’s grandmother lived in the country, on an estate a short distance from the city of Orel. Here the child became passionately fond of nature. From the age of twelve he entered into intimate relationship with trees and flowers; and he felt, when in contact with them, impressions whose vividness remains after more than forty years in the deeply stirred remembrances of the mature man.
“The garden belonging to my grandmother’s property was a large park of ancient date. On one side it sloped towards a pond of running water, wherein lived not only gudgeon and tench, but also salvelines, the famous salvelines, those little eels which are found scarcely anywhere nowadays. At the head of this pond grew a dense rose-bed; higher up, on both sides of the ravine, stretched a thicket of vigorous bushes,—hazel, elder, honeysuckle, black-thorn, in the lower part encroached upon by tall grass and lovage. Amid the clumps of trees, but only here and there, appeared very small bits of emerald-green lawn of fine and silken grass, prettily mottled with the dainty pink, yellow, lilac caps of those mushrooms called russules; and there the golden balls of the great celandine hung in luminous patches. There in springtime were heard the songs of nightingales, the whistling of blackbirds, and the cuckoos’ call. It was always cool there, even during the warmest days of summer; and I loved to bury myself in those depths where I had my favorite hiding-places, mysterious, known to myself alone—or at least so I imagined.”
Prepared by this beneficent influence of colors, perfumes, and the sounds of rustic life, the child’s moral education was directed, without anybody’s knowledge, and influenced for all time, by the presence of two outlandish servants, flitting members of the high-born lady’s household. One of them was a “philanthropic and philosophical plebeian,” destined to die in Siberia; the other, a sort of innocent enthusiast, a great reader of Russian epics then out of fashion. The former sowed in the young Turgénief’s soul the seeds of a liberalism which will bear fruit in the most manly resolves; the latter kindled in the lad’s lively imagination a poetic flame whose heat and glory will shine out in a score of masterpieces.
Towards the age of thirteen, the young Ivan was removed from these influences. He was given two tutors, one French and the other German. Having obtained his diploma as candidate in philology, he went to Berlin to finish, or rather begin anew, his studies in the humanities; and he brought them to a close by plunging into the current of the Hegelian philosophy. He came back to Russia converted to that “occidentalism” which we shall define later when we study Turgéniefs political theories.
He made his début as a writer in 1843, with a little poem, “Parasha.”[26] The critic Biélinsky gave it such praise that it covered the author with confusion. Towards the end of his life, Turgénief criticised his poetry with a severity that was absolutely sincere. Even at this period, he set as little value on his verses as though he had already shown his ability in a prose masterpiece. The masterpiece appeared three years later, in 1846. The first story in “The Annals of a Sportsman,”[27] “Khor and Kalinuitch,” was published in the Sovremennik (“Contemporary”); and at a single stroke Turgénief’s fame reached a height which will never be surpassed by any of his great works.[28]