Ivan Turgenev
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Ivan Turgenev was born in Orel, Russia, of wealthy, landowning parents. Tutored at home, a usual practice among the aristocracy, Turgenev entered Moscow University at the age of fifteen, later transferring to the University of St. Petersburg, where he took his degree in 1838. The next three years were spent in Germany studying philosophy at the University of Berlin, and it was there that Turgenev fell under the influence of Western European culture, upon whose example, Turgenev came increasingly to believe, Russia's own future advancement must depend. Returning to Russia, Turgenev entered the Ministry of the Interior and embarked upon a career as a civil servant that soon left him restless and unhappy. Abandoning government service for literature, Turgenev experienced almost immediate success with the publication (at first serially, 1847 to 1851; and then in book form, 1852) of A Sportsman's Sketches, a series of lyrical, yet realistic portraits of Russian peasant life, and the treatment of the serfs at the hands of the nobility. In the years before reform, these sensitive Sketches, which marked the first notable attempt to treat Russian peasants as individualized human beings, became regarded by many as a manifesto against the institution itself and boosted Turgenev's reputation accordingly. Such literary statements also attracted the attention of the authorities, who banished Turgenev for some eighteen months to his provincial estate (which he had by then inherited, together with a considerable fortune). Though the political situation in Russia brightened with the coming of Czar Alexander II in 1855, Turgenev himself lost ground among Russian liberals who increasingly criticized the protagonists of such novels as Rudin (1856), A House of Gentlefolk (1859), On the Eve (1860), Fathers and Sons (1862), Smoke (1867), Torrents of Spring (1872), and Virgin Soil (1876) as politically ineffective instead of helping to forge a new and heroic ideal for the emerging nation. Gradually disillusioned, Turgenev elected to leave Russia and spend the last twenty-one years of his life abroad, first in Baden-Baden in Germany (1862–1870) and then in Paris (1871–1883), where he made the friendship of many of the most influential writers of the day, including Henry James, who helped bring Turgenev's realism to the attention of American readers. Author Links
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"The Country Doctor"
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