Chapter Biography of Fathers and Sons - Study Guide by Ivan Sergevevich Turgenev

of consideration, and directing him towards a life dedicated to writing. For the five following years of friendship that preceded Belinsky’s death, Turgenev looked up to him as a mentor and he continued to revere his memory to the end of his own life.

Towards the end of the same year, 1843, Turgenev met Pauline Viardot, a twenty-two year old opera diva who had come to Russia with an Italian opera company and had become the darling of Moscow and St. Petersburg. Turgenev fell madly in love with her and remained in that state for the remaining forty years of his life. Although the pair wrote hundreds of letters to each other, the nature of their relationship over these years still remains unclear. On Turgenev’s side however, one sees an attitude towards Pauline of courtly romantic worship much reminiscent of that to be found in mediaeval Italian or French literature. It seems however from Pauline’s responses and from the quantities of Turgenev’s letters to her that their relationship was sweetest in the first ten years, which proved to be a period of great productivity for Turgenev. During this time he wrote his four long poems, all his ten plays, all but five of his twenty- five sketches and nine of his thirty-three stories. He also made many visits to the West; broadening his knowledge of foreign cultures, literature and languages, absorbing political and philosophical views and, importantly, living through the unsuccessful French Revolution of 1848, forcing him to create a new philosophy for his own worldview. He came to believe that Russia could not be saved by the people or by revolution but instead that it must be changed from "above" and through education.

After the death of Turgenev’s mother in the early 1850’s he was finally freed from the awful dependence on her that had up until that point been the chief bane of this life. However, although her death left him theoretically a very rich man, his unbridled generosity combined with the bad management of his estates by a succession of poorly-chosen stewards meant that during the course of his life he was often short of money.

In 1852, after the publication of an obituary to Gogol in which Turgenev proclaimed him a "great man", he was sentenced on the instructions of the Emperor himself to one month in a police jail, followed by internal banishment to his estate.

Apart from a brief meeting with Pauline Viardot using a borrowed passport, it was not until after the death of the Emperor and the end of the Crimean War that Turgenev once again saw his love and returned to the West, finally arriving in Paris in August 1856. Pauline soon made it clear however that they would never again be able regain the intimacy in their relationship that they had previously enjoyed, and there followed a ten-year period of estrangement.

Strangely, it was during this ten year period that Turgenev turned away from the literary forms of lyric and narrative poetry, plays and sketches with which he had previously been primarily concerned, concentrating his efforts instead on the story and novel genres, producing nine stories and his four best novels, including Fathers and Sons, which was written in 1862. It was also during this time that Turgenev met the young Tolstoy, an impetuous young man at the time who admired and was admired by his fellow writer, and although they enjoyed a tempestuous love-hate relationship over the following years they undoubtedly exchanged views on many of the primary concerns of both of their writings.

Turgenev returned to France in 1856, but torn between his love for Pauline and his yearning for a wife and family amongst his own people he returned to Russia in 1858, where he stayed for eleven months before returning to France for the summer of 1859 after which he was back in Russia again for seven and a half months, these two spells in Russia constituting his two most prolonged visits home in the last twenty-seven years of his life.

At this time it was evident that the emancipation of the Russian serfs was on the horizon, and Turgenev decided to preempt the event, freeing his own peasants in 1859, even though in the end it proved to be to his own personal financial loss.

In 1860 it seems that Turgenev was spurned by Pauline when he returned to France to see her, and it is not until the later half of 1862 that her attitude towards him seems to have changed. In 1863 the