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

Viardots moved to a villa they had built in Baden-Baden, prompted by Pauline’s decision to stop singing for the big opera houses and by her husband’s hatred of the political regime of Napoleon III, and Turgenev followed their example. There Pauline summoned Turgenev back to her and, while she composed operettas, he wrote the libretti for them and even acted in them himself at the small opera house that she had had built in the grounds of her house. Turgenev also followed the Viardots to Karlsruhe in 1869-69 and to Weimar in 1869-70. Indeed, during the years 1864-70 his visits back to Russia added up to no more than eight months, and his only reality seemed to be that found when close to Pauline.

However, during this period he also found a new passion, namely for Pauline’s second child, Didie, who had been born in 1852. From 1862 she became an object of devotion for him, and in 1868 he even began to put aside money for her dowry, which by the time she married in 1874 amounted to 100,000 francs, a not inconsiderable sum. But despite the happiness of the period 1863-70, Turgenev was by no means at his most productive and only produced one novel, Smoke, during that time, which is generally considered to be his worst.

Turgenev’s time in Germany was brought to an end by the advent of the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-1 and until the end of that conflict he joined the Viardots in England, where they had gone for refuge, and after their return to Paris in 1871 he still stayed with them, occupying rooms on an upper floor of their house. In 1874 they jointly bought a summerhouse on the river west of Paris and Turgenev continued to live with them in this and their Paris house until his death nine years later. During these years, although increasingly reluctant to spend time away from Pauline and his adoptive family, Turgenev returned several times to Russia to keep a current knowledge of conditions and opinions there with a view to writing his last novel, and also in order to write in the tranquil surroundings afforded by his estate at Spasskoye. And although his actual literary output at this time was lower than ever before, Turgenev made great efforts to introduce his fellow countrymen to the literature of the leading French writers of the time such as Flaubert, Zola, Maupassant, Daudet and Edmond de Goncourt, who were not only his admirers but had also become his friends. He also, importantly, went to great lengths to bring the works of Lev Tolstoy, whom he considered to be the greatest Russian writer of his era, to the attention of a Western readership. At the same time he took great pains to help young Russian radicals and émigrés who found themselves drawn to his side by his sympathetic demeanour, appealing on their behalf to the Russian authorities, giving them money and applying his influence in efforts to get their political writings published. He called these protégés "my revolutionaries", and in correspondence with P. L. Lavrov remarked that he himself was under police surveillance and was regarded by them as "the very fountainhead of nihilism" ("samaya matka nigilistov").

Ever since his student days Turgenev was sporadically plagued by cardiac problems and other ailments such as the bladder or kidney trouble, which made such a misery of his life at the end of the 1850s and reappeared for extended periods during the 1870s. This strain on his health was also exhibited by his premature physical ageing, which began when his hair started to turn white in his early thirties.

The spinal cancer that finally killed him was not discovered until after his death, but it seems that it cannot have set in any later than April, 1882, when he was diagnosed as having angina pectoris and became immobilised. On occasions he let himself be deceived into thinking of a lasting remission, but when in the second half of 1882 the symptoms hit once again with their full strength, he hardened himself "to look the devil in the eye".

During the last year of his life Turgenev could neither stand nor walk, but he still continued to write (he penned four hundred and sixty letters in the last sixteen months of his life). A few weeks after the death of Pauline’s husband Louis in May 1883, Turgenev admitted that his pain had become "unbearable" and that he longed for death. During his last months he was nursed by Pauline and her daughters and died on 3^rd September 1883.

His body was taken back to St. Petersburg by Pauline’s daughters Didie and Marianne and their husbands and was seen off at the Gare du Nord in Paris by several hundred Russians and distinguished Frenchmen,