Turgenev's early education was patchy. Among his numerous tutors, indiscriminately engaged by his mother, there were all sorts of odd people, including at least one professional saddler. One year at the Moscow University and three at the Petersburg University, whence he was graduated in 1837, did not give him a feeling of having obtained a well-balanced education, and from 1838 to 1841 he attended the university in Berlin, filling out its gaps. During his life in Berlin he became intimate with a group of young Russians similarly engaged, who later formed the nucleus of a Russian philosophic movement highly colored by Hegelianism, the German "idealist" philosophy.
In his early youth Turgenev produced some half-baked poems mostly imitative of Mikhail Lermontov. Only in 1847, when he turned to prose and published a short story, the first of his series of A Sportsman's Sketches, did he come into his own as a writer. The story produced a tremendous impression and when later together with a number of others it was published as a volume, the impression only grew stronger. Turgenev's plastic musical flowing prose was but one of the reasons that brought him immediate fame, for at least as much interest was contributed by the special subject of these stories. They were all written about serfs and not only present a detailed psychological study, but go even further to idealize these serfs as superior in their human quality to their heartless masters.
From these stories some purple patches:
"Fedya, not without pleasure, lifted the forcedly smiling dog up into the air and placed it into the bottom of the cart."
("Khor' and Kalinych")
"... a dog, all his body a-quiver, his eyes half-closed, was gnawing a bone on the lawn." ("My Neighbor Radilov")
"Vyacheslav Illarionovich is a tremendous admirer of the gentle sex, and as soon as he sees a pretty little person on the boulevard of his country-town, he there and then starts to follow her, but —and this is the peculiar point—he at once begins to limp." ("Two Country Squires")
At sunset on a country-road:
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Vladimir Nabokov: Lectures on Russian literature
"Masha (the hero's gypsy mistress who left him) stopped and turned her face to him. She stood with her back to the light —
and thus appeared to be of a dusky black all over, as if carved in dark wood. The whites of her eyes alone stood out like silver almonds, whereas the iris had grown still darker." ("Chertopkhanov's End")
"Evening had come, the sun had hid behind a small aspen grove ... its shadow spread endlessly across the still fields. A peasant could be seen riding at a trot on white horse along a dark narrow path skirting that distant grove; he could be seen quite clearly, every detail of him, even the patch on his shoulder—although he was moving in the shade; the legs of his horse flickered with a kind of pleasing distinctness. The setting sun flushed the trunks of the aspen-trees with such a warm glow that they seemed the color of pine-trunks." {Fathers and Sons)
These are Turgenev at his very best. It is these- mellow colored little paintings—rather watercolors than the Flemish glory of Gogol's art gallery—inserted here and there into his prose, that we still admire to-day. These plums are especially numerous in A Sportsman's Sketches.
Turgenev's presentation in the Sketches of his gallery of idealistic and touchingly human serfs stressed the obvious odiousness of serfdom, an emphasis that irritated many influential people. The censor who had passed the manuscript was retired and the government seized the first opportunity to punish the author. After Gogol's death Turgenev wrote a short article which was suppressed by the Petersburg censorship; but when he sent it to Moscow the censor passed it and it was published. Turgenev was put in prison for a month for insubordination and then was exiled to his estate where he remained for more than two years. Upon his return he published his first novel Rudin, followed by A Nest of Gentlefolk and On the Eve.
Rudin, written in 1855, depicts the generation of the 1840s, the idealistic idealistic Russian intelligentsia bred in German universities.
There is some very good writing in Rudin, such as ". . . many an old lime-tree-alley, gold-dark and sweet-smelling, with a glimpse of emerald light at its end," where we have Turgenev's favorite vista. Rudin's sudden appearance in Lasunski's house is fairly well done, based as it is on Turgenev's pet method of having a convenient fight at a party or dinner between the cool, bland, clever hero and some quick-tempered vulgarian or pretentious fool. We may note the following typical sample of the whims and ways of Turgenev's characters : "Meanwhile Rudin went up to Natalia. She rose, her face expressed confusion. Volyntsev, who was sitting next to her, rose too. '—Ah, I see a pianoforte,'—Rudin began softly and caressingly, as if he were a travelling prince.' " Then somebody else plays Schubert's Erlkonig. " '—This music and this night'
[a starry summer night which "seemed to nestle and to let one's soul nestle too"—a great exponent of the "music and night" theme was Turgenev], said Rudin,—'reminds me of my student years in Germany.' " He is asked how students dress.
"—Well, at Heidelberg I used to wear riding boots with spurs and a Hungarian jacket with braidings; I had let my hair grow, so that it almost reached down to my shoulders." Rudin is a rather pompous young man.
Russia in those days was one huge dream: the masses slept—figuratively ; the intellectuals spent sleepless nights—
literally—sitting up and talking about things, or just meditating until five in the morning and then going out for a walk.
There was a lot of the flinging-oneself-down-on-one's-bed-without-undressing-and-sinking-into-a-heavy-slumber stuff, or jumping into one's clothes. Turgenev's maidens are generally good get-uppers, jumping into their crinolines, sprinkling their faces with cold water, and running out, as fresh as roses, into the garden, where the inevitable meeting takes place in a bower.
Before going to Germany, Rudin had been a student at Moscow University. A friend of his thus tells us of their youth: "Half-a-dozen youths, a single tallow candle burning . . . the cheapest brand of tea, dry old biscuits . . . but our eyes glow, our cheeks are flushed, our hearts beat . . . and the subjects of our talk are God, Truth, the Future of Mankind, Poetry—we talk nonsense sometimes, but what is the harm?"
As a character, Rudin, the progressive idealist of the 1840s, can be summed up by Hamlet's answer "words, words, words."
He is quite ineffectual in spite of his being wholly wrapped up in progressive ideas. His whole energy spends itself in 46
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passionate streams of idealistic babble. A cold heart and a hot head. An enthusiast lacking in staying power, a busybody incapable of action. When the girl who loves him, and whom, he thinks, he loves too, tells him there is no hope of her mother consenting to their marriage, he at once gives her up, although she was ready to follow him anywhere. He departs and roams all over Russia; all his enterprises fizzle out. But the bad luck that haunts him and which at the outset was the inability to express the energy of his brain otherwise than by a flow of eloquent words finally shapes him, hardens the outline of his personality, and leads him to a useless but heroic death on the barricades of 1848 in remote Paris.