Ivan Turgenev
1818–1883 · Russia
“Nature is not a temple, but a workshop, and man's the workman in it.”
Peak-work percentile in the canon.
The lineage through Ivan Turgenev
Drew From(3)
who shaped Ivan Turgenev
via Hamlet
- Bazarov is Turgenev's 'Hamlet type' made flesh — the figure he defined in his 1860 essay 'Hamlet and Don Quixote'
- Like the prince, Bazarov is a skeptic of pure negation whose corrosive self-awareness dooms him to unhappiness and an inability to love
- Read Hamlet first and the nihilist's tragedy snaps into focus as a very old shape in a new costume
via Eugene Onegin
- Bazarov and Odintsova descend from the "superfluous man" Pushkin first drew in Onegin — gifted figures who can't quite fit the life around them
- Pushkin was Turgenev's inescapable idol; read Eugene Onegin first and the archetype behind Fathers and Sons comes into focus
via Don Quixote
- Fathers and Sons sits inside a framework Turgenev drew from Cervantes — his 1860 essay "Hamlet and Don Quixote" set the idealist against the doubter
- The Quixote pole — conviction, self-sacrifice, idealism doomed to fail — is the archetype against which Bazarov is measured
- Reading Don Quixote first surfaces the type Turgenev is testing: the believer who would rather act and be broken than hesitate
Inspired(2)
who Ivan Turgenev shaped
- This is where "nihilism" entered the bloodstream — Turgenev's Bazarov gave the idea a face
- Four years later Dostoevsky took those floating nihilist "incomplete ideas" to their violent extreme in Raskolnikov
- Even the disciples carry over: Crime and Punishment's Lebezyatnikov echoes Bazarov's caricatured followers, Sitnikov and Kukshina
- James read his Turgenev to pieces and talked with him in Paris — and credited Turgenev's method as the genesis of The Portrait of a Lady
- Turgenev builds the novel around a single morally interesting figure; James borrowed that and made Isabel Archer the axis everything turns on
- Reviewers in 1881 caught it immediately, comparing the two writers head to head
Portraits
Repin's second oil of Turgenev (Kroshitsky Art Museum, Sevastopol), a tighter head-and-shoulders study made five years after the famous 1874 version.
Ilya Repin, 1879
Half-length portrait of Turgenev in a dark coat, lit from the left, his face lined and grave, set against a plain dark ground.
Vasily Perov, 1872
Famous Quotes
“Nature's not a temple, but a workshop, and man's the workman in it.”
“A nihilist is a person who does not bow down to any authority, who does not accept any principle on faith, however much that principle may be revered.”
“A nihilist is a man who does not bow down before any authority, who does not take any principle on faith, whatever reverence that principle may be enshrined in.”
“However passionate, sinning, and rebellious the heart hidden in the tomb, the flowers growing over it peep serenely at us with their innocent eyes; they tell us not of eternal peace alone, of that great peace of 'indifferent' nature; tell us too of eternal reconciliation and of life without end.”
About Ivan Turgenev
Russian novelist, short story writer, and playwright, the first Russian author to gain wide European recognition. Fathers and Sons defined the generational conflict between Russian liberals and nihilists. He spent much of his life in Western Europe and served as a bridge between Russian and Western literary cultures.