Turgenief, IVAN SERGEITCH (whose family name is represented by spellings as various as Tourghénieff, Turgenjew, Turgenef), one of the greatest of Russian novelists, and the first to make the life of Russia familiar to western Europe, was born the son of a noble and wealthy family at Orel, 9th November 1818, and educated at Moscow, St Petersburg, and Berlin. For about a year he held a post in a government office (1840-41), but retired voluntarily into private life, subsequently living on his estate in Orel, at St Petersburg, or abroad. He became known as a poet in 1843; but his Annals of a Sportsman (1846; trans. New York 1885) made him famous—especially for his singularly vivid pictures of the life of the serf and his powerful impeachment of the evils of serfdom. His outspoken liberalism in a Letter on Gogol (1852) led to a short imprisonment and his seclusion on his own estate till 1855. Thereafter he lived mainly in Baden-Baden (till 1871) and Paris—where he was a member of the most brilliant literary circles—with short summer visits to Russia. He died at Paris 3d September 1883; and his body was taken to Russia and buried at St Petersburg on the 9th October. A careful rather than a facile writer, Turgenief was a prolific author; though none of his novels is long (many of the most striking extend to only thirty or forty pages), and all are very slight in plot. In Roudine (1855; Eng. trans. 1883), A Nest of Nobles (1858; trans. by Ralston as Lisa, 1869), and Helene (1860; trans. as On the Ece, 1871) he depicts scenes and characters from the period of enthusiastic dreaming and theorising; in Fathers and Sons (1861; trans. 1867), Smoke (1867; badly trans. in 1868, better in 1872), and Virgin Soil (1876; trans. 1877, and another in 1878) he deals with the period of practical reform and the triumph of Slavophil ideas. But in the latter series he shows himself suspicious of a movement carried through on lines he, an admirer of the methods of western Europe, did not sympathise with, and he dwells too exclusively on the errors and extravagances of the new ideas, caricaturing Young Russia in a manner that gave much offence and led to the author's being regarded as reactionary. His freshness, noble realism, and poetic insight are somewhat impaired by increasing pessimism and hopelessness; the really good men are mostly fools, and progress leads but to evil continually. His accuracy of observation, variety of interests, and width of sympathy are everywhere visible; he is a master in the art of character-sketching; and his style is singularly finished and perfect. Even in France he was by many regarded as the greatest novelist of his time. He left several collections of epic and lyric poems and a series of dramas; and of his other tales—all on Russian themes—First Love, Mumu, Anna, An Unfortunate Woman have also been translated into English, some of them by American translators. In person Turgenief was exceptionally tall and strongly built, with a majestic bearing; his hair and full beard were in his later years silver-white. He was a magnificent talker in several tongues; some of his novels he wrote in French. He had read much English literature and paid several short visits to England.
See Henry James, French Poets and Novelists (1884) and Partial Portraits (1888); C. E. Turner, The Modern Novelists of Russia (1890); De Vogüé, Le Roman Russe (1888); Paul Bourget, Psychologie Contemporaine (1888); and German monographs on Turgenief by Zabel (1883) and Thorsch (1886).