Nest of the Gentry

Ivan Turgenev

Description

Coming back to the "nest" of his family home in Russia after years of fruitless endeavours away from his roots, Lavretsky decides to turn his back on the vacuous salons of Paris and his frivolous and unfaithful wife Varvara Pavlovna. On his return he meets Liza, the daughter of one of his cousins, whom he had known when they were children and who rekindles in him long-smothered feelings of love. News of Varvara's death arrive from France, offering Lavretsky the prospect of a new life, but a cruel twist threatens to shatter his dreams and forces him to re-evaluate his plans.Hailed as a masterpiece of Russian literature, A Nest of the Gentry, Turgenev's most successful and widely read novel - here presented in a new translation by Michael Pursglove - deals with the personal struggles of the individual in a period of turbulent social change.

Informations

• Publié par: Alma Books
• Date de parution: 01 janvier 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780714546018
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

A Nest of the Gentry
Ivan Turgenev


Translated by Michael Pursglove

ALMA CLASSICS


Alma Classics an imprint of
alma books ltd 3 Castle Yard Richmond Surrey TW10 6TF United Kingdom www.almaclassics.com
A Nest of the Gentry first published in Russian in 1859 This translation first published by Alma Classics Ltd in 2016
Translation, Introduction and Notes © Michael Pursglove, 2016 Extra Material © Alma Classics Ltd
Cover image: Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky / Library of Congress
Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR 0 4 YY
isbn : 978-1-84749-590-7
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Contents
Introduction
A Nest of the Gentry
Note on the Text
Notes

Extra Material
Ivan Turgenev’s Life
Ivan Turgenev’s Works
Se lect Bibliography


Introduction
Between 1856 and 1877, Ivan Turgenev published six novels; A Nest of the Gentry was the second of these . Begun in France in 1856, completed in Russia, on Turgenev’s estate – his “home nest” – at Spasskoye-Lutovinovo in 1858, it was published in the January 1859 number of the Sovremennik ( Contemporary ). After some hesitation, he set it in 1842, the year before he met Pauline Viardot. His lifelong relationship with her was going through an unhappy period when he wrote A Nest of the Gentry and has clear echoes in this novel, which is, like all Turgenev’s novels, at its heart a love story. Although A Nest of the Gentry is significantly longer than its predecessor, Rudin , which is no longer than the average novella, it is not always described as a novel. For instance, a modern critic, David Lowe, describes the work as an “overgrown novella”. This echoes Turgenev’s own words in a letter to Countess Lambert of January 1858, in which he speaks of working on a “‘large story’ ( bolshaya povest’ ), the main character of which is a girl – a religious being”. This pithy characterization of the novel is interesting in other ways too: it was written before the addition of Chapter 35, which supplies Liza’s biography and is clearly intended to explain her piety. This additional chapter was included by Turgenev at the instigation of the same Countess Yelizaveta Yegorovna Lambert (1821–83), the recipient of over a hundred letters from Turgenev and a devout Christian. The feature of the novel which is probably best remembered is the denouement. Given Turgenev’s avowed scepticism towards organized religion, this resolution of the plot may well come as something of a surprise to most readers and was largely due to the influence of Countess Lambert. The book contains a good many religious, ecclesiastical and liturgical references, and in the descriptions of worship (Chapters 31, 32 and 44) the sharply satirical note which characterizes the church scene in Chapter 8 of Virgin Soil , though occasionally present, is considerably muted. There is even a religious significance to some of the names: Lavretsky’s surname, for instance, derives from one of his two estates, Lavriki, the name of which suggests a small monastery ( lavra ), while his given name, Fyodor, is the Russian equivalent of Theodore (i.e. “gift of God”).
In sharp contrast to the critical furore created by Turgenev’s final three novels ( Fathers and Children , Smoke and Virgin Soil ), the reception of A Nest of Gentry , by critics of every political persuasion, was, with the exception of minor reservations, very favourable. At least thirteen review articles were devoted to the novel in 1859 and 1860. Pavel Annenkov, who himself wrote a long piece in praise of the novel, records in his memoirs that “satisfied with all the reviews of the work and even more so by various critiques which all tinged with sympathy and praise, Turgenev could not fail to see that his reputation as a social writer, a psychologist and a painter of social mores was firmly established by this novel”. Indeed, Turgenev did not fail to see this. In 1880, he wrote: “ A Nest of the Gentry enjoyed the greatest success which had ever fallen to my lot. From the moment the novel appeared I began to be regarded as a writer who merited the attention of the public.” The radical critic Dmitry Pisarev rated the novel on a par with the classics Eugene Onegin , A Hero of our Time , Dead Souls and Oblomov . The St Petersburg News found the novel to be “pure, lofty poetry” and, in a letter to Annenkov written shortly after the publication of the novel, the satirist Saltykov-Shchedrin said, “it’s a long time since I was so shaken”, and speaks of the “lucid poetry suffused through every sound of the novel”.
This favourable critical response was, of course, due mainly to the excellence of Turgenev’s writing, but there were two other, secondary, factors to account for this critical unanimity. Firstly, unlike Turgenev’s later novels, A Nest of the Gentry appeared before the Emancipation of the Serfs in 1861, at a time when the whole of Russia was expecting reform. Opposition figures, liberal and radical, Westernizing and Slavophile, overcame their many differences in the hope that the Tsar, Alexander II, would effect the changes Russia so badly needed. Some of the more liberal Slavophiles, for instance, attempted to align their views with those of the socialist Alexander Herzen. In the event, the Emancipation decree proved a disappointment, particularly for those on the radical left, and their differences with gradualist liberals such as Turgenev became more acute. Secondly, A Nest of the Gentry was published before the major split in the editorial board of the Sovremennik between the plebeian radicals Nikolai Dobrolyubov and Nikolai Chernyshevsky, supported by the editor, Nikolai Nekrasov, on the one hand, and the aristocratic Turgenev, Dmitry Grigorovich and Leo Tolstoy on the other. The split had been simmering since 1856, but only came to a head in early 1860, when Turgenev, Grigorovich and Tolstoy left the journal and ceased to publish their works in it.
There is one curious exception to the widespread acclaim with which the novel was received. The author Ivan Goncharov, whose Oblomov began to appear in January 1859, the same month in which A Nest of the Gentry was published, claimed that elements of his next novel The Precipice (eventually published in 1869) had been discussed with Turgenev in 1855 and then plagiarized by him for A Nest of the Gentry . The argument rumbled on between 1858 and 1860 and led to the convening of a panel of experts to adjudicate on the matter. Their verdict was bland and non-committal, and relations between Turgenev and Goncharov were patched up. However, in 1875 and 1876 Goncharov committed an account of the affair to paper, in a piece which was published 1924 under the title An Unusual Story . In it he claims that The Precipice was the unacknowledged source not only of A Nest of the Gentry but of all Turgenev’s subsequent four novels.
The novel had considerable influence on Turgenev’s contemporaries. Dostoevsky, in his famous “Pushkin speech” of 1880, placed Liza Kalitina on a par with Pushkin’s Tatyana (from Eugene Onegin ) and Tolstoy’s Natasha Rostova (from War and Peace ) as an archetypal portrait of Russian womanhood. The influence of the novel has also been detected, with varying degrees of plausibility, in works by Chekhov, Saltykov-Shchedrin, Lev Tolstoy, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, George Moore, John Galsworthy and the Danish author Herman Bang.
Liza is indeed far removed from the stereotypical females who inhabited Russian literature before 1820 and takes her place alongside the strong-minded women who feature in every one of Turgenev’s six novels, culminating in Marianna, the “new woman” heroine of Virgin Soil . However, although A Nest of the Gentry is perhaps the most autobiographical of Turgenev’s novels, the character of Liza, like most of Turgenev’s characters, is not based on any one person but is an amalgam of a number of real-life prototypes. However, the celebrated playwright Alexander Ostrovsky dissented from the prevailing view of Liza, declaring that “…for me Liza is insufferable: the girl seems to be suffering from internalized mumps”.
Liza is everything that Varvara Pavlovna is not: chaste, demure, sincere, self-sacrificing, self-denying, patient and pious. Above all however, she is Russian, so much so that, for Lavretsky, she becomes, in effect, a symbol of Russia. Varvara Pavlovna is, of course, also Russian, but she belongs to that class of Frenchified, French-speaking Russians whom Turgenev lambasts in Smoke . It is this quality of Russianness which sometimes gives rise, somewhat misleadingly, to the novel’s being sometimes classified as “Slavophile”; Richard Freeborns’s reference to “diluted Slavophilism” is nearer the mark.
Broadly speaking, Fyodor Lavretsky, the landowning son of a peasant girl and a landowner father, belongs to a type which stretches back to the 1820s in Russian literature, and beyond that in French literature, and to which Turgenev gave a name in 1850 with his short story ‘Diary of a Superfluous Man’. However, he is a new variant of the type. Unlike Rudin and Nezhdanov (from Virgin Soil ), he does not