Abstract
Few readers of Turgenev’s last novel Nov’ (‘Virgin Soil’, 1876) have challenged his own assessment of it as ‘unsuccessful’.1 The usual view of the work, with which Turgenev concurred, is that in this longest and most ambitious of his novels he attempted a task that was simply beyond his powers, and that it was beyond his powers because he lacked, due to his prolonged absences abroad in the late sixties and seventies, the intimate knowledge of social developments in Russia which he needed in order to present a convincing picture of the Populist movement and its representatives. ‘In the fate of all Russian writers of any prominence’, he wrote, ‘there has been a tragic side; mine was my absenteeism’ (P., XII, 116).
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Notes
Letter of 7 March 1877 to M. M. Stasiulevich in I. S. Turgenev, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem v dvadtsati vos’mi tomakh (Moscow-Leningrad, 1960–68): Pis’ma, Vol. XII (1966), p. 116. References to Nov’ in this essay are to Volume XII (1966) of the fifteen volumes of works in this edition, and page numbers are entered in the text. References to other works and to the thirteen volumes of letters in the edition are also entered in the text, cited as S. and P. respectively and by volume and page numbers. Unless otherwise stated, dates of letters are given in ‘Old Style’.
A. G. Tseitlin, ‘Nov’’, Literaturnoe nasledstvo, LXXVI (1967), 106–46 (p. 130).
S. M. Petrov, I. S. Turgenev. Zhizn’ i tvorchestvo, 2nd supplemented edition (Moscow, 1968), p. 299. Compare the reference to ‘the social character of the conflicts that lie at the basis’ of the novel in
N. F. Budanova, Roman I. S. Turgenev ‘Nov’’ i revoliutsionnoe narodnichestvo 1870-kh godov (Leningrad, 1983), p. 44.
See the comment: ‘After Ottsy i deti a new type of Turgenevan novel is developed, based on structural principles which had previously been uncharacteristic of it’ (V. M. Markovich, Chelovek v romanakh I. S. Turgeneva [Leningrad, 1975], p. 6).
See, for example, N. K. Mikhailovskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v shesti tomakh (hereafter PSS) (St Petersburg, 1906–9), Vol. III (1909) p. 895, and P.N. Tkachev Izbrannye sochineniia na sotsial’nopoliticheskie temy, edited by Boris P. Kozmin (Moscow, 1932–37), Vol. V (1933), p. 104.
See, for example, E. M. Rumiantseva, ‘Kompozitsiia romana I. S. Turgeneva “Nov’”’, Uchenye zapiski Leningradskogo gosudarstvennogo pedagogicheskogo instituta im. A. I. Gertsena, CCXV (1959), 78; Tseitlin ‘Nov’’, op. cit., p. 136;
G. V. Kurliandskaia, Khudozhestvennyi metod Turgeneva-romanista (Tula, 1972), pp. 218–19;
A.I. Batiuto, Turgenev-romanist (Leningrad, 1972), p. 210.
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Woodward, J. (1990). Turgenev’s ‘Constancy’ in His Final Novel. In: McMillin, A. (eds) From Pushkin to Palisandriia. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21065-7_9
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