The Gentle Barbarian, Turgenev essays

The Gentle Barbarian, Turgenev essays In 1870s Turgenev was known in Europe as the conducting Russian novelist, but he was far to not be known to the large public in Europe or America. In 1877 he has become world famous after the publication of Virgin Soil, his longest and most ambitious novel. In one month after the publication, fifty-two young people... were arrested in Russia on accusations of revolutionary conspiracy. This incident the public in America and France was shaken. Its effect on American readers was so enormous: as powerful, in its way, as the effect of Uncle Tom's Cabin had been. For Turgenev the novel was one more attempt to present the Russian situation with detachment, and above all he sought to show to his critics that he had not lost touch with the younger generation. (V. S. Pritchett). Some years ago the British writer and critic V.S. Pritchett asked: "What is it that attracts us to the Russian novelists of the nineteenth century?" What Pritchett was voicing was the obvious truth that the Russian writers touch and move us with immediacy, a sense of freshness and vitality that we do not always find in Western literature in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Turgenev creates moving novels that depict life in Russia. We respond to Russian writers, as we typically do not to most Anglo-Saxon writers. Turgenev evokes such a strong a sense of reality that readers with no particular passion for literature accept without qualification his vision of life. Some tentative answers to Pritchett's question may provide us with some understanding of why so much of the pessimistic literature of this century has failed to engage our deepest sympathies, our most profound sense of life. One of the most obvious characteristics of Russian fiction in the nineteenth century is the as tonishing way in which characters talk about themselves and others. In his book on Turgenev, The Gentle Barbarian, Pritchett writes: "It is the nature of Dostoevsky's genius to ...