Ivan Turgenev (1818-1883)
Biographical note
Russian novelist and playwright. His novel Fathers and Sons is regarded as one of the major works of 19th-century fiction.
Turgenev first made his name with A Sportsman's Sketches (Записки охотника), also known as Sketches from a Hunter's Album or Notes of a Hunter, a collection of short stories, based on his observations of peasant life and nature. Turgenev himself considered the book to be his most important contribution to Russian literature; and Tolstoy, among others, agreed wholeheartedly, adding that Turgenev's evocations of nature in these stories were unsurpassed.
Fathers and Sons ("Отцы и дети"), Turgenev's most famous and enduring novel, appeared in 1862. Its leading character, Bazarov, was in turns heralded and reviled as either a glorification or a parody of the 'new men' of the 1860s. Many radical critics at the time did not take Fathers and Sons seriously; and, after the relative critical failure of his masterpiece, Turgenev was disillusioned and started to write less.
Turgenev wrote on themes similar to those found in the works of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, but he did not approve of the religious and moral preoccupations that his two great contemporaries brought to their artistic creation. Turgenev was closer in temperament to his friends Gustave Flaubert and Theodor Storm, the North German poet and master of the novella form, who also often dwelt on memories of the past and evoked the beauty of nature. Turgenev's artistic purity made him a favorite of like-minded novelists of the next generation, such as Henry James and Joseph Conrad, both of whom greatly preferred Turgenev to Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. James, who wrote no fewer than five critical essays on Turgenev's work, claimed that "his merit of form is of the first order" (1873) and praised his "exquisite delicacy", which "makes too many of his rivals appear to hold us, in comparison, by violent means, and introduce us, in comparison, to vulgar things" (1896).
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Works
Novels
- Rudin [1856 ; translated by Constance Garnett] [ read | download ]
- A House Of Gentlefolk [1859 ; translated by Constance Garnett] [ read | download ]
- On the Eve [1860 ; translated by Constance Garnett] [ read | download ]
- Fathers and Sons [1862] [ read | download ]
- Smoke [1867]
- Virgin Soil [1877 ; translated from the Russian by R. S. Townsend] [ read | download ]
Short stories
- A Sportsman's Sketches [1852 ; translated by Constance Garnett] [ read | download ]
- The Inn [1852 ; translated by Constance Garnett] [ read | download ]
- First Love [1860 ; translated by Constance Garnett] [ read | download ]
- Mumu [ translated by Constance Garnett] [ read | download ]
- The Dog [1866 ; translated by Constance Garnett] [ read | download ]
- Lieutenant Yergunov's Story [1867 ; translated by Constance Garnett] [ read | download ]
- Knock, Knock, Knock [1870 ; translated by Constance Garnett] [ read | download ]
- Punin and Baburin [1874 ; translated by Constance Garnett] [ read | download ]
- The Watch [1875 ; translated by Constance Garnett] [ read | download ]
- Dream Tales and Prose Poems [1897 ; translated by Constance Garnett] [ read | download ]
Contents: Clara Militch [1882] — Phantoms — The Song of Triumphant Love — The Dream — Poems in Prose - A Desperate Character and other stories [1899 ; translated by Constance Garnett] [ read | download ]
Contents: Pyetushkov [1847] — The Brigadier [1867] — A Strange Story [1869] — Punin and Baburin [1874] — Old Portraits [1881] — A Desperate Character [1881] - The Torrents of Spring [1872 ; translated by Constance Garnett] [ read | download ]
- The Jew, and other stories [1899 ; translated by Constance Garnett] [ read | download ]
Contents: The Jew — An Unhappy Girl [1868] — The Duellist — Three Portraits [1846] — Enough [1864] - The Diary of a Superfluous Man, and other stories [1899 ; translated by Constance Garnett] [ read | download ]
Contents: The Diary of a Superfluous Man — A Tour in the forest — Yakov Pasinkov — Andrei Kolosov — A Correspondence
