Ivan Turgenev

From Philosopedia

Turgenev, Ivan (9 November 1818 - 3 September 1883)

Turgenev was born in Oryol, in the Ukraine, Russia, to an old and wealthy family. His mother reportedly never spared the whip with Ivan nor with their 5,000 serfs. Ivan was educated at the universities of Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Berlin. He published poetry and short stories, then Papers of a Sportsman (1852), whose empathetic rendering of the plight of serfs reportedly influenced the czar to liberate them.

Turgenev spent a month in detention for writing Letter on Gogol, then was exiled to his estates for 18 months.

He and Tolstoy had a tense but long-term acquaintanceship, with rationalist Turgenev spurning Tolstoy's "charlatanism," convinced that Russia's salvation lay in its industry, not its mysticism.

Turgenev's stories and novellas increasingly employed realism. The hostile reaction to his novel Fathers and Sons sent Turgenev into exile. The work depicts the differences between generations. One character, Bazarov, is an unforgettable nihilist, philosophizing that everything is so bad the only way to bring about progress is to destroy all that is, then rebuild.

The novel of nihilism was so severely criticized by the Establishment that Turgenev remained outside Russia, continuing a passionate, lifelong love affair with Pauline Viardot-Garcia, a French singer.

After living in Germany and London, he spent the rest of his life in Paris. Turgenev coined the word nihilist: "A nihilist is a man who does not bow to any authorities, does not take any principles on trust, no matter with what respect that principle is surrounded."

Rationalism pervaded his works. According to Pavlovsky's Souvenirs sur Tourgenief (1887),

• [Turgenev] was a Freethinker and detested the apparatus of religion very heartily. In Fathers and Sons, he wrote, "Whatever a man prays for, he prays for a miracle. Every prayer reduces itself to this: Great God, grant that twice two be not four."

Philosopher Corliss Lamnt wrote that the Tsarist Russian's writings “showed distinct Humanist leanings.” Hugh McLean wrote that Turgenev is “the typical unbeliever of modern times, much influenced in his philosophical thinking by Arthur Schopenhauer.” J. M. Robertson termed Turgenev “the Sophocles of the modern novel.”

{BDF; CE; CL; EU, Hugh McLean; FFRF; JM; JMR; RAT; RE; TRI; TYD}