One advantage of the early years at Courtavenel, her house outside Paris, was that he was confronted by a fellow artist who put her art before everything: the example awakened his will to write. He called Courtavenel ‘the cradle of his fame’, for it was there that he began to write A. Sportsman’s Sketches. At least two of them, The Singers and Byezhin Prairie, are masterly studies of peasant character and wonderfully observant of the landscape on the edge of the steppe. The problem of serfdom usually lies off the scene; in presenting the serfs as natural, feeling, changing human beings his art liberates them. Each one is more alive and human than his ‘situation’. To call their lot ‘a problem’ would have dehumanized them.

When he was a boy Turgenev disturbed people by his prolonged, solitary staring. He was looking at people, at skies, fields, trees and birds as they moved and changed from moment to moment. Nothing is still. There is a line in Byezhin Prairie in which he catches even the moment between seeing and not seeing:

The moon at last had risen: I did not notice it at first: it was such a tiny crescent.

And in his portraits of the people they are real because he seems to show the hour of the day passing through them as he watches.

There was no settled or established tradition of storytelling and novel-writing in Russian prose literature when Turgenev began to write in the forties. He is one of the disparate founders and innovators. Just before him there were two very different guiding lights: the superb verse narrative of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin which offered to novelists the classic Russian love story and, far less spontaneous, Pushkin’s prose tales. After Pushkin there was Gogol whose realism broke into chaotic or poetic fantasy: he dived into comic disorder and the grotesque – his language was malign, rich, his imagination was so secretive, devious and conniving that it spread into the underground of character and situation. Turgenev’s talent was for the classical and concise. He was, by his upbringing, the detached spectator and, above all, his work was shaped. He sought to tell the observable truth. Another contemporary was Lermontov who was killed in a duel, a violent and romantic Byron. There was no violence, no taste for danger, for romantic actes gratuites or dramatic pungency in Turgenev – though one sees touches of Lermontov in early stories, like The Jew and The Duellist, and of Gogol, too, in others.

The central preoccupation, deeply rooted in Turgenev’s mind, was with establishing the idea of civilization – which he eventually spelled out letter by letter – and the autonomy of art. As a novelist his part was to see the Russian situation in terms of living human beings, to begin with them and watch how philosophic and political ideas affected them, truthfully and not as a preacher. At the beginning he saw that the gentry class to which he belonged was prolific in ‘superfluous’ or unnecessary men who did not pull their weight and he was later to conclude that their character, like his own, contained a continuous struggle between Hamlet’s scepticism and Don Quixote’s chivalrous and reckless idealism. The first of his Hamlets appears in The Hamlet of the Shchigrovsky District, which has a good deal of Gogol-like farce in it. We see the characters assembled at an all-male party and we hear the absurd Hamlet’s confession of his burning incompetence in growing up, marrying, his troubles as a landowner and as a widower who cannot even be sad. We laugh and are half ashamed of our laughter. The story reveals one of Turgenev’s chief gifts: he is able to convey how everyone is aware of everyone else as if they were in telepathic communication with one another’s passing thoughts. Turgenev’s prose has a liquid quality which links mind and feelings, and conveys how much we glide in and out of one another’s minds; this seems to be a projection of his astonishing conversational gifts and is important because, without such gifts, the serious discussions about convictions would become stodgy and sermon-like set pieces: they never are. Turgenev’s liquidity is beautifully serpentine and is prophetic of the manner of Proust. Another story, written in the old-fashioned form of an exchange of letters, this between a man and woman who have failed in love, is on a similar theme. It is called A Correspondence and contains a diagnosis:

We Russians have set ourselves no other task but the cultivation of our personalities – so we get one monster more in the world, one more of those worthless creatures in whom habits of self-consciousness distort the very striving for truth.

Turgenev’s stories run to five volumes and there is no doubt that, accomplished as the early period is, his finest work belongs to the period that opens with First Love.

First Love is a study of the awakening from innocence: of how a boy of sixteen becomes aware of the nature of adult love. As is usual in Turgenev’s stories, the tale turns on the growth of knowledge of the heart. Love is not a simple yet tormenting rapture of adolescence; it is revealed as an awe-inspiring complex passion which leaves its trail of jealousies and guilt and a completely changed view of the meaning of life.