Seer. Master of words. Ivan Turgenev.

What happens when two people with completely opposite personalities meet in this life? She’s madly in love, also smart, rich, yet… very unattractive. He’s a rake who’s already managed to charm dozens of women. No wonder. After all, he’s so handsome that he’s considered the most handsome man of his time. A well-born but impoverished officer, a brilliant commander, a veteran of the Napoleonic Wars.

We’re talking about the parents of the Russian author Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev. Two radically different people, and the only thing that united them was their indomitable natures. The priest of the village of Spasskoye-Lutovinovo married them in church, but as he held a candle before the newlyweds, he didn’t know that she was the only one in love. He wasn’t. He, a handsome and dandy man, wanted a wife like himself. He knew perfectly well that he would never be able to bring his wife into society, never dance with her at balls, but five thousand serf souls… Oh, that number had been haunting him for some time now! Escape from poverty at any cost—that was what he truly desired.

 And the dashing officer, “a handsome man with mermaid eyes,” as he was often described, decided to make a peculiar “knight’s move”: to link his life with someone who was completely unloved by him. He was attracted by the wealth of his future wife, but nothing more. Such marriages usually end in something very unusual, and nine months later, Varvara Petrovna wrote in her notebook: 1818, October 28, 1818, in her home in Oryol, a son, Ivan, was born. He was twelve inches tall. The birth took place at midnight. “What’s so unusual about that?” the reader might ask. “The whole story is more than trivial. People got married, and after some time, they had a child…”

It seems like everything in life is going according to the rules dictated by life. But… 

An unloved, unhappy woman, Turgenev’s mother was a cruel serf-owner. Perceiving her entire life as a harsh punishment from fate, she even accepted the difficult birth as a punishment. For the rest of her life, she seemed to seek revenge for her failed marriage and her difficult childhood, when she was constantly bullied. Then, to avoid being dishonored by her stepfather, she fled to her uncle, in whose house she lived as a housekeeper. As an adult, she wept bitterly over French novels, grieving over what she had read, over the injustice and cruelty of life towards the protagonists, and would emerge for lunch or dinner with tear-stained eyes and a red face. Meanwhile, in the stables, peasants were flogged, their punishment ordered personally by her.

She was, in fact, a very interesting woman, who put her own desires above all else. Once, finding a phrase in a church book that she couldn’t quite comprehend, she felt “offended” by God and forbade Easter celebrations on her estate. And while the joyful sound of church bells rang out across the countryside, the bells in Spasskoye-Lutovinovo remained silent.

And what about the father? Sergei Nikolaevich didn’t lift a finger to change his attitude toward life while married. A womanizer through and through, he had affairs left and right with both respectable women and serf girls. He didn’t love his wife and showed no interest in his son. Varvara Petrovna was terribly jealous, but… she was afraid of her husband, so she didn’t throw tantrums in the house. Each of them seemed to live independently, living for themselves. Sergei Nikolaevich established this order in the house himself, and his wife (this was the only time she couldn’t disobey) accepted it.

Where could a child go when his mother was ready to punish him for any offense, no matter how minor, and his father paid no attention to him? There was such a place in the Spassky-Lutovinovo house, and it was called the library.

Little Ivan’s favorite book was an encyclopedia of birds. This isn’t surprising, though. After all, a bird is the embodiment of freedom. It flies where it wants, lands where it pleases. It’s not easy to catch; not everyone can catch this freedom-loving creature, much less punish it. Not to mention people!

The library was just a stone’s throw from the nursery. The servants’ quarters were also close by, where young Ivan would often escape, despite his mother’s strict prohibitions. It was there that he heard Mikhail Matveyevich Kheraskov’s poetry from Leon Serebryakov, one of the serfs. The serf, effectively half-slave, turned out to be surprisingly knowledgeable in literature. He recited excerpts from “Rossiada” to Ivan by heart. He read them twice. As Turgenev later recalled, “The first time was a rough draft, so I could understand what was being said, but the second, the final version, was read with the correct stress and intonation. However, both times I listened greedily and never took my eyes off Leon. I listened little. I swallowed little. I choked—good.”

Young Turgenev also loved to simply chat with the peasants. Leon lamented the fact that Russian children were often sent to be educated by German and French teachers. “Russians! Russian people must teach our younger generation!” Leon exclaimed. Turgenev would later insert these words into one of his works, “Punin and Baburin”:

— We have deviated from the Russian, we have leaned towards the foreign, we have turned to foreigners.

Turgenev later lived for a long time in France, where he was often called a “Russian European.” He often heard criticism that what was the point of supposedly advocating for his own Russian poets and writers when he was so far from them?

But Turgenev wasn’t simply “so far.” Fluent in French, he translated works from Russian and introduced Russian literature to the French intelligentsia. The worldwide fame of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky—would it have been possible without Turgenev’s dedication?

Meanwhile, back home, one of his stories—or, more accurately, “Khor and Kalinych”—was published in Sovremennik magazine. The editor-in-chief scratched his head for a long time, wondering what section to place this “unconventional” work, as he put it. Unable to come up with anything, he placed it in the “Mixed” section, adding a handwritten note: “From a Sportsmen’s Sketches.” A sort of attempt to incline the readers to be lenient!

However, the Russian reader took a liking to the “absurd story.” No, it contained no words exposing serfdom, no calls for revolution. It was a celebration of Russian nature, the dawns, the meadows, the forests of Russia, a description of the Russian people. “A Sportsman’s Sketches” is literature, not politics. But what, if not literature, can literally move mountains? What can reshape human consciousness? Incidentally (and this is a reliably known historical fact), Czar Alexander II asked to convey to Turgenev that the first thoughts about the abolition of serfdom arose in his mind precisely while reading “A Sportsman’s Sketches.”

One is tempted to exclaim: “What kind of country is this, where emperors make decisions after reading literary stories? What kind of country is this, where the word of a writer is so powerful that it exerts more force than legislative acts and established laws?”

The name of this country is Russia.

Turgenev’s novels would later spark countless heated debates. After all, they would change many lives. Turgenev’s young ladies would seem to step straight out of the pages of Turgenev’s works. Emerging from their aristocratic nests, they would go to war, some to a monastery, some to become teachers, educating children while earning a meager salary.

Bazarovs, Rudins, Insarovs—readers will gradually recognize themselves in them. Turgenev, who never stood on the barricades, keenly observed all the changes taking place in Russia, all public moods. He didn’t participate in demonstrations, but he did participate in the clash of ideas. Therefore, his novels so vividly capture the atmosphere of the age. And readers couldn’t help but notice.

Turgenev… This name will live forever. Pushkin’s genius created the great, powerful Russian literary language, and Turgenev’s genius brought it to perfection. A writer who was read with interest by both ordinary people and those in power. Not every master of words can boast such a claim.

— Magdalena Gross
(Translated from Russian by Bogdan Michka)