An interregnum

Abstract

Fathers and Sons was not published until February 1862, in the Russky vestnik, but before that date it was Turgenev’s constant preoccupation and a favourite talking-point with his friends. Herzen was naturally concerned by it and anxious to know what role, if any, might be reserved in it for himself or Ogaryov. At the same time he was worried lest any more of their thunder be stolen by Turgenev’s hare-brained schemes for the reorganisation of the Russian empire. No sooner had the literacy project been blown into the doldrums than wind came of another idea, a ‘Proposal for a Constitution in Russia’. Although this may only have been a gesture (little remains of it now), it was symptomatic of the growing rift between radicals and liberals which led to Turgenev’s own break with Sovremennik. But he was still ‘collaborating’ with the Russian exiles. Annenkov had to write things like ‘tell our old woman that …’ and Turgenev would communicate the same to Herzen. Such were the conspiratorial techniques which, in a later age, would have made the novelist an accomplice of the great Lenin himself. In reality he was just a vacillating constitutionalist — as he always took pains to make clear.