Turgenev is very much the outsider, a diagnostician and collector of convictions. His own were those of Western liberal humanism and he believed strongly in the values of Western civilization. As a writer and as a person, he struck our grandfathers as the most European of Russians: in the Goncourt phrase: ‘le doux géant, l’aimable barbare’. He had passed long periods of his life in France and Germany as an expatriate. He had the allure for us of the aristocrat, sportsman and poet in an industrial age. He was a vast reader in English, French, German and Spanish literature: he worshipped Goethe; he had even translated plays of Shakespeare and had been eccentric enough to translate Burns and Crabbe. Henry James was enchanted by ‘his beautiful mind’, and Flaubert loved his conversation.

Yet, somewhere about the turn of the century, the great figures of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky replaced him in European esteem. He was older than they: despite the world-wide success of his last novel, Virgin Soil, in the late seventies, he seemed old-fashioned. He evoked a Russia which was long dead and gone, lacked the range and urgency of his successors and, unlike these preachers, he was thought of – quite wrongly – as a painter of miniatures and, unfashionably, the pure artist. Yet like Dostoyevsky he believed that ‘art must not be burdened with all kinds of aims’, that ‘without art men might not wish to live on earth’, and that ‘art will always live man’s real life with him’.

Fortunately there are many signs that this diminution of Turgenev’s achievement is no longer acceptable. Those who read his first novel Rudin in our own 1930s could see Russian social history of a hundred years before, transplanted in our own century. English Rudins abounded in the Spanish Civil War; and when today we read Fathers and Sons we meet Bazarov the anarchist, even the incipient terrorist of today. We too are acquiring the habit of those ‘convictions’ we smiled at and may even see ourselves in Turgenev’s own situation. The warring movements in the nineteenth century no longer seem to be peculiar to Russia but to have reappeared in the modern world. As Isaiah Berlin in his eloquent introduction to that novel wrote:

The situation that [Turgenev] diagnosed in novel after novel, the painful predicament of the believer in Western values, a predicament one thought peculiarly Russian is today familiar everywhere. So too is his own oscillating, uncertain position, his horror of reactionaries, his fear of the barbarous radicals, mingled with passionate anxiety to be understood and approved by the ardent young. Still more familiar is his inability, despite his greater sympathy for the party of protest, to cross over unreservedly to either side in the conflict of ideas, classes and, above all, generations. The figure of the well-meaning, troubled, self-questioning liberal witness to the complex truth, which, as a literary type, Turgenev virtually created in his own image, has today become universal…The doubts Turgenev raised have not been stilled. The dilemma of morally sensitive, honest and intellectually responsible men at a time of acute polarization of opinion has, since his time, become world-wide.

What has been forgotten until recent years is that Turgenev was more than a master of Russian prose, and that, although he described himself as apolitical in the sense that he hesitated in politics, his convictions or moral concern were strong. To understand the foundation of his complex character we must go back to his early life and upbringing.

Turgenev was born in 1818 in the provincial capital of Orel some 300 miles south-west of Moscow and grew up in a period when all hope of liberal reform was repressed. The family lived on the estate his mother, Varvara Petrovna Lutinov, had brought to her marriage with a handsome penniless cavalry officer who had been forced to marry her for her wealth. Varvara Petrovna was one of those Russian Cinderellas who turn into arrogant viragos avenging their early miseries. Short, ugly, with glaring eyes under heavy brows, her mouth large, sensual and cruel, like many ugly women she could be charming, but her nature was violent and capricious. She ruled her huge estate of 5,000 serfs, which was almost a remote nation in itself, like an absolute sovereign. Her serfs could not marry without her permission; she could send any of them to a ‘settlement’, to prison or Siberia, for a trifle. In two of Turgenev’s short stories – and his stories rather than his novels tell us everything about his early life – we see his mother in action, persecuting a servant in Mumu and in Punin and Baburin brutally dismissing a gardener’s boy because he did not give the required smile and her serf clerk for protesting. The dismissal meant they would become vagrants. She had forty house serfs in her mansion at Spasskoye and they included not only her maids and butler, but tutors, her doctor, her clerks, her tanners, shoemakers, dressmakers and paper-makers, and her orchestra. She came of a brutal family, less distinguished than her husband’s. The Lutinovs were a barbarous lot who had robbed their way to fortune.