Study Guide to Fathers and Sons and Other Works by Ivan Turgenev

Intelligent Education

• Publisher: Influence Publishers
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781645425175
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Guías de estudio
• Subtopic: Guías de estudio

A comprehensive study guide offering in-depth explanation, essay, and test prep for selected works by Ivan Turgenev, renown Russian writer. Titles in this study guide include Fathers and Sons, Rudin, On the Eve, A Nest of Gentlefolk, and A Sportsman's Sketches.

As an author of the realism literary movement, his novel, Fathers and Sons, is considered one of the most significant works of nineteenth-century fiction. Moreover, he translated and publicized Russian literature in the West. This Bright Notes Study Guide explores the context and history of Ivan Turgenev's classic work, helping students to thoroughly explore the reasons they have stood the literary test of time. Each Bright Notes Study Guide contains:

- Introductions to the Author and the Work

- Character Summaries

- Plot Guides

- Section and Chapter Overviews

- Test Essay and Study Q&As

The Bright Notes Study Guide series offers an in-depth tour of more than 275 classic works of literature, exploring characters, critical commentary, historical background, plots, and themes. This set of study guides encourages readers to dig deeper in their understanding by including essay questions and answers as well as topics for further research.

INTRODUCTION TO IVAN TURGENEV

FAMILY BACKGROUND

In this post-Freudian age, the story of Ivan Turgenev’s childhood and adolescence sounds like a contrived textbook case demonstrating intolerable psychological stress and disorder. Turgenev’s mother, Varvara Petrovna Lutovinova, was an extremely rich, extremely ugly and extremely disturbed woman. As a child she had been beaten and attacked by a drunken stepfather, spurned by a harsh and sadistic mother, and rigorously disciplined by a guardian uncle who sought to disinherit her.

At 26, Varvara Petrovna found herself mistress of several estates and several thousand serfs. These she ruled with an unquenchable brutality-deporting at whim, flogging on pretext, raging for pleasure. Three years after she entered into her inheritance, Varvara Petrovna met by chance a young neighbor, a cavalry officer named Sergey Turgenev. The officer’s family was in “reduced circumstances” and, although he was 6 years younger than the ugly, rich spinster and loathed the sight of her, when Varvara let it be known that she was interested in marriage, Sergey Turgenev’s father begged his son to marry her and save their estate. Obediently, but reluctantly, he did marry her on January 14, 1816. But Sergey Turgenev was never able to conceal his intense dislike for the brutal woman. She completely usurped the management of the estates, and he devoted himself to a string of mistresses (at least one of whom bore him an illegitimate child). Sergey Turgenev, a cold and unapproachable man, occasionally turned on a warm charm, only to turn it off without warning.

INFANCY

Late in 1816, Varvara Petrovna bore a son, Nicholas. Then, on October 28, 1818, Ivan Sergeyevitch was born on his mother’s estate in Oryol. Four years later a third son, Sergey (who was to die before he reached manhood) was born.

Varvara Petrovna was as capricious and brutal with her children as she was with her servants. And since Sergey Turgenev was all but a stranger in the household, the children were victimized by their mother with no interference.

In 1822, when Ivan was 4, the entire family, with a vast retinue of servants, made a tour of Europe. In Berne, the young Ivan was just barely saved from falling into a bear pit, and for several days afterward he was dangerously, almost fatally, ill.

When the family returned to Russia the systematic brutalizing of children and servants by the power-mad Varvara continued unabated. Turgenev once told a friend: “There is nothing I can remember childhood by. I have not a single happy memory of it.”

EDUCATION

Ivan’s early education was conducted according to the aristocratic tradition by a string of German and French tutors, whose constant comings and goings made proper education impossible. In 1827, when Ivan was 9, the family moved to Moscow and the boys were placed in a prep school. Ivan, already afflicted with hypochondriac tendencies which were to plague him all his life, was mercilessly tormented by the other boys for his physical fears. Prep school lasted only a year and a half, and then, after trying other schools, intense private tutoring began as Ivan prepared for the Moscow University exams.

UNIVERSITY

In 1833, at the age of 15, Turgenev entered the university. But he lasted only one term there, falling ill with some undiagnosed disease. His father, who suffered extremely from gall stones, was also ill, and died the next year when Ivan was 16. In the fall of 1834, Ivan entered St. Petersburg University, a student in the “philological faculty.”

Between 1834 and 1837, when he graduated from Petersburg, Turgenev spent his winters immersed in his studies and in the literary life of Petersburg. (He was already writing poetry and poetic narratives.) During the summers he went with his family to Spasskoye (his mother’s favorite estate), and managed to maintain a not wholly miserable relationship with his tempestuous mother.

BERLIN

In the spring of 1837, Turgenev left for Berlin to complete his studies. The boat trip from Petersburg to Berlin was eventful. As the steamer neared the coast of Germany, it suddenly caught fire. According to all accounts, Turgenev lost his head, and some witnesses claimed he dashed about crying: “Save me, save me, I am my mother’s only son.” Forty-five years after the fire, Turgenev wrote a “reminiscence” called “A Fire at Sea” in which he admits to having been “perturbed” during the panic, but denies the withering accusations of his utter cowardice (the incident had been revived by his enemies).

Once safely in Berlin, Turgenev threw himself into the active intellectual life of the German “Hegelian idealists.” But the “word” continued to emanate from his mother at Spasskoye, and in October, 1839, he was ordered to come home. He stayed at Spasskoye until January 1840, and then left for Italy.

IMPORTANT FRIENDSHIPS

In Rome, he re-met, and became intimate friends with, the gentle and brilliant philosopher Stankevich. Stankevich “breathed fire and strength into us” Turgenev was later to write. But by June of 1840, at 27, Stankevich was dead of consumption.

In July of the same year, Turgenev met the irrepressible future anarchist Mikhail Bakunin. Under Bakunin’s tutelage, Turgenev became a rabid Hegelian romantic idealist, and the two young men became constant companions. Turgenev, back in Berlin, spent most of his time reading and studying and, as his biographer David Magarshack says: “It was there that he laid the foundation of that great accumulation of knowledge which made him the greatest European of his time.”

RETURN TO RUSSIA

In 1841, Turgenev returned to Spasskoye, but finding life with his mother increasingly intolerable, he moved in the spring of 1842 to St. Petersburg where he studied for his M.A. He completed parts of it with distinction, but then abandoned the idea of obtaining his degree. His life was in a turmoil. First, one of his mother’s seamstresses bore him a daughter (when Varvara Petrovna learned of the girl’s pregnancy she drove her away and Turgenev settled her in a flat in Moscow). Second, Turgenev had become involved with Bakunin’s sister, Tatyana, and the friendship was ending with great disenchantment. The bitterness over this relationship brought Turgenev’s romantic Hegelian phase to a rapid end. He entered the civil service and prepared to work for the gradual emancipation of the peasants.

But at the same time he was writing poetry. One poem, Parasha, attracted the attention of the great literary critic Belinsky, who in 1843 lavishly praised the poem in print.

For the next few years Turgenev wrote prolifically. He resigned his post at the civil service, and, since his mother would not support a “pen pusher,” he suddenly found himself humiliatingly poor.

PAULINE VIARDOT

In the winter of 1843, something happened to Turgenev which he described “as having had a most powerful influence on the whole of my life.” He met a celebrated opera singer named Pauline Viardot. “From the very first moment I saw her I was entirely hers.” Turgenev became this exotic woman’s devoted and humiliated “slave.” (Her husband, Louis Viardot, tolerated Turgenev’s constant presence in his household and the three of them comprised an intermittent menage a trois until, 40 years later, Turgenev died in Pauline’s house.) From what evidence there is, Pauline never returned Turgenev’s passion and frequently treated him with icy indifference and hauteur, interspersed with periods of tenderness and submission.

In 1845, Turgenev traveled to France to be with Pauline, and on his return devoted himself solely to literature. He became friendly with all the important literary figures-Dostoevsky, Goncharov, Herzen, Grigorovich and others. And he began his series of “Sportsman’s Sketches” which were to meet with great success.

A FULL-TIME WRITER

When the Viardots returned to Russia in 1847 for a concert tour, Turgenev joined them; when they left he left with them. He followed them around Europe, writing his sketches and articles and sending them to Russian publications. Turgenev was in France during the 1848 Revolution, and was greatly stirred by the tumult around him.

In June of 1850, he returned to Russia. He had, by then, completed his “Sportsman’s Sketches” and several plays (including A Month in the Country, which was not performed in Russia until many years later). During his absence his mother had appealed to him to return, and when he refused, she stopped sending him money and, as further punishment, took his 7-year-old daughter from her mother and put the child to work in the kitchen. Shortly after Turgenev’s return home, Varvara Petrovna died and Ivan was at last an independent and rich man.

GOGOL’S OBITUARY

During October 1851, Turgenev had his one and only meeting with the great Gogol. Four months later the master died. Turgenev wrote a glowing obituary for the St. Petersburg News which the censor banned. The authorities, strained after the European events of 1848, wanted no public show of sympathy for the great satirical realist. Turgenev sent the obituary to Moscow where it appeared in the Moscow News. It was not an incendiary article, but one line got Turgenev into trouble: “He is dead, this man whom we have the right, the sorrowful right granted to us by his death, to call great.”

Three days after the obituary was published, Turgenev was arrested for “manifest disobedience.” He was kept in jail for a month, after which he was confined under police supervision to his estate at Spasskoye for sixteen months. During Turgenev’s exile, The Diary of a Sportsman was published (containing twenty-one of the “Sportsman’s Sketches”). The book was an instantaneous success.

LITERARY SUCCESSES

By 1854, Turgenev was back in St. Petersburg, leading an active and exciting literary life. Then, in 1855, he completed his first big work, Rudin. Published in 1856, Rudin was a great triumph for Turgenev. In the summer of that year, he returned to Paris and Pauline Viardot. Their relationship soon became tumultuous and Turgenev suffered nervous disorders akin to a breakdown. Despite his physical and mental disarray, Turgenev traveled around Europe, meeting the literary elite and turning out articles and stories.

In 1858, he finally returned to Russia and finished A Nest of Gentlefolk, an enormous and immediate success. With time out for a quick European jaunt, he set to work on On the Eve which was published, with hue and cry, in 1860. “The upper strata of Russian society were alarmed by Turgenev’s novel,” wrote a critic. On February 19, 1861, when Turgenev was in Europe, the manifesto emancipating the peasants was published in Russia. Turgenev returned to Spasskoye in May, 1861, to finish work on Fathers and Sons. During this summer he had a foolish, furious argument with Tolstoy which led to a challenge to a duel-fortunately the duel was never fought. Turgenev returned to Paris in September with the completed manuscript for Fathers and Sons in hand. When the storm of reaction broke over the novel (see below), Turgenev became utterly disillusioned with his native land, and from then on he was more or less an expatriate.

He lived for eight years in Baden-Baden, where Pauline Viardot had set up a singing school. He wrote only one novel during this time, the ill-received and bitter Smoke. But, during a brief visit to Russia in 1871, he was given an enthusiastic reception by his ever-growing audience.

YEARS IN FRANCE

After the Franco-Prussian War, Turgenev moved to Paris, where he spent the last 12 years of his life. He became involved with French literary circles although he never fully appreciated French literature: “Their literature stinks of literature,” he wrote a friend, “that’s what’s so bad.” He was talking about Zola, Daudet, de Maupassant, de Goncourt and even at times his dear friend Flaubert. Turgenev was regarded as a master at the famous French literary dinners of the 1870s, and his style was praised by all the great writers of the age.

Turgenev suffered violently from gout, but he continued to travel and write. In 1876, he finished his longest, and in ways most ambitious, novel, Virgin Soil which, when it was published in 1877, caused another storm of vituperation from left and right. Turgenev had expressed in this novel his still-held conviction that the Populist movement was premature and Russia would not be ready for her revolution for 30 years.

Once more, as after the failure of Fathers and Sons, Turgenev vowed never to write another thing. But in 1879, on a “business trip” to Russia, he was so widely and enthusiastically acclaimed, he forgot his vow of punitive silence.

LAST YEARS

Starting in 1878, Turgenev began writing his Poems in Prose, which contained his thoughts on philosophical, political and personal subjects. Some of them were published in Russia in 1882; the remainder were published posthumously.

Although Turgenev at times during his last years felt physically fit and optimistic, by May of 1882 he was bedridden by his “gout.” The disease (actually cancer of the spinal cord) became debilitating, and Turgenev suffered cruelly. In July of 1883, he wrote his famous letter to Tolstoy, beseeching the younger man to return to literature (which he had abandoned in favor of a life of religious asceticism). After that, Turgenev could devote himself only to agonized dying. He died on September 3, 1883, and, after the writer Renan had delivered a commemorative service at the Paris train station, Turgenev’s body was shipped to St. Petersburg where his funeral assumed the character of national mourning. “Turgenev,” says his biographer Magarshack, “had come home to stay.”

THE TIMES

Reformers

In the nineteenth century in Russia the great, continuous, ubiquitous struggle was for reform-reform of serfdom, of political persecution, of censorship; reform of autocracy, of oppressive social conditions; reform of conservative unenlighte...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• 1) Introduction to Ivan Turgenev
• 2) Fathers and Sons
• 3) Fathers and Sons
• 4) A Sportsman’s Sketches
• 5) Rudin
• 6) A Nest of Gentlefolk
• 7) On The Eve
• 8) Character Analyses
• 9) Critical Commentary
• 10) Essay Questions and Answers
• 11) Bibliography