Turgenev’s Plays 1848–1850

Abstract

Turgenev’s second major play for the professional theatre, The Parasite, was written at the request of Shchepkin and completed, in France, in 1848. Like the pictures in the album which Mukhin contemplates in Where It’s Thin, There It Breaks of ‘views from Italy’ — with the suggestion of a reciprocal process, both ‘views of and ‘views from’ — this play is a view of Russia ‘from abroad’, where one of the characters, Tropachov, always intends going but, instead, has to make do with lithographs in an album. The play was immediately banned, ostensibly because, according to the censor, it presented the Russian nobility in a ‘contemptuous light’.