Murder had been known among them: a grandmother had suffocated her page – Turgenev tells us – and there is a strong suggestion that Varvara Petrovna ran away from her stepfather’s house when she was a girl because he had tried to rape her.

The Turgenevs were a distinguished family with a long tradition of service to the Tsar and of success in intellectual and diplomatic life, but their money had melted, their estate was not much more than a farm. After his marriage, Turgenev’s father resigned his commission and settled to the idle life of a country gentleman. Riding, shooting birds and pursuing women were his passions. He did not love his ugly wife who, like his son, adored him. All women were drawn by his charm and his fashionably feminine good looks. First Love, one of Turgenev’s most powerful stories, gives the following portrait of his father, a man of small education who spoke Russian badly – family conversation was in French – and whose character was ‘elaborately serene’.

He took scarcely any interest in my education, but never hurt my feelings; he respected my freedom; he displayed – if one can put it that way – a certain courtesy towards me; only he never let me come at all close to him. I loved him…he seemed to me the ideal man – and God knows how passionately attached to him I should have been if I had not felt constantly the presence of his restraining hand. Yet he could, whenever he wished, with a single word, a single gesture, instantly make me feel complete trust in him.

He remembered two of his father’s sayings: ‘Take what you can yourself, and don’t let others get you into their hands; to belong to oneself, that is the whole thing in life.’ And on another occasion he uttered words that the son would have reason to dwell on later in his life: ‘Beware of the love of women; beware of that ecstasy-that slow poison.’ What did he mean by that? Did he mean that he had let ‘others’ put him into the hands of this domineering woman and that he was perforce a spectator in his own family ? In this role of spectator and in his susceptibility to young women, Ivan was his father’s son.

The father died young. The love Ivan had now to fear was his mother’s: she poured her frustrated love of her husband upon her two sons, upon Ivan the favourite especially. This did not prevent her from birching the boys – indeed once she fainted while doing so. As he grew up she flirted with him; he became the intermediary between her and the servants she tormented and the peacemaker of the terrorized household. Her tyrannies became more extravagant: as the boys grew up she tried to rule them by keeping them short of money, indeed when they became men and she was dying she plotted to swindle them out of their inheritance. If Ivan was thought of as an evasive, irresolute and will-less man in later years, one has to suppose that his mother had broken his will.

But not in the deepest part of his nature: there were two gains from his life at Spasskoye. As we know from the story of Punin and Baburin – a late story – his early awakening to literature came from the company of the serfs and in his life as a sportsman when he went out shooting with them on the vast estate: he became the passionate observer of nature and the enemy of serfdom. The famous album, A Sportsman’s Sketches, which he began to write in his late twenties and thirties, did more for the emancipation of the serfs than any other piece of Russian protest.

Before the sketches were written Turgenev went through the conventional education given to gifted young men of the Russian upper class, at the universities of Moscow, St Petersburg and Berlin. He declared himself a Westerner and was soaked in romantic German idealism: Russia must learn from the West. When he returned from his travels in Europe he became known as a dandy of the fashionable drawing-rooms of St Petersburg and as a minor Romantic poet, his head full of Byron and Italianate themes. The gnome-like little boy had grown into a tall and lazily heavy giant. His chestnut hair and his stone-blue eyes, his wit, the flow of malicious stories that came from him, his elegance and manners enchanted the women and indeed all his life these graces, and his lisping voice which grew ridiculously shrill when he was excited, gave him a spell even when the shrillness aroused mockery. But he had intellectual qualities far beyond those of the poetaster and it was largely due to the influence of the great Radical critic Belinsky that he eventually found his direction: a committal to the realities of Russian life.

And there was one more decisive, yet in some ways calamitous, influence. Turgenev described himself as a man ‘saturated with femininity’, unable to write unless he experienced what he called l’épanouissement de l’étre brought about by love. He had had his sexual adventures with serf women and had even had children by two of them; with women of his own class he was given to the sentimental amitié amoureuse. Now, in St Petersburg he suddenly felt passion. He fell in love with a young married woman, a Spanish opera singer, Pauline Viardot. She may have become briefly his mistress when he followed her and her husband to Paris; it was largely on her account that he became an expatriate for long periods of his life and for this Russian critics never forgave him. His friends were mystified by his blind devotion to her, her husband and their children. It was noted that she was as ugly and domineering as his mother and strictly conventional. He seems to have drawn on the early years of the affair for his play A Month in the Country, although the characters and scene have been transformed. In that play Rakatin-Turgenev talks of putting an end to this ‘consumptive’ passion. That it lasted all his life seems a perversity: he had become, perhaps, a Narcissus in love with his own love.