Home of the Gentry

HOME OF THE GENTRY

IVAN TURGENEV, Russian novelist, was born in Oryol in 1818, and was the first Russian writer to enjoy an international reputation. Born into the gentry himself, and dominated in his boyhood by a tyrannical mother, he swore a ‘Hannibal’s oath’ against serfdom. After studying in Moscow, St Petersburg and Berlin (1838–41), where he was influenced by German Idealism, he returned to Russia an ardent liberal and Westernist. He gained fame as an author with a series of brilliant, sensitive pictures of peasant life. Although he had also written poetry, plays, and short stories, it was as a novelist that his greatest work was to be done. His novels are noted for the poetic ‘atmosphere’ of their country settings, the contrast between hero and heroine, and for the objective portrayal of heroes representative of stages in the development of the Russian intelligentsia during the period 1840–70. Exiled to his estate of Spasskoye in 1852 for an obituary on Gogol, he wrote Rudin(1856), Home of the Gentry(1859), On the Eve(1860), and Fathers and Sons(1862), but was so disillusioned by the obtuse criticism which greeted this last work that he spent most of his life at Baden-Baden (1862–70) and Paris (1871–83). His last novels, Smoke(1867) and Virgin Soil(1877), lacked the balance and topicality of his earlier work. He died in Bougival, near Paris, in 1883.

RICHARD FREEBORN, is at present Professor of Russian Literature at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University of London. He was previously Professor of Russian at Manchester University, a visiting Professor at the University of California at Los Angeles, and for ten years he was Hulme Lecturer in Russian at Brasenose College, Oxford, where he had graduated. His publications include Turgenev, A Study(1960), A Short History of Modern Russia(1966; 1967), translations of Sketches from a Hunter’s Album(Penguin Classics, 1967) and Rudin(Penguin Classics, 1973), a couple of novels and The Rise of the Russian Novel(1973)· He has also edited Russian Literary Attitudes from Pushkin to Solzhenitsyn(1976) and Russian and Slavic Literature(Slavica Publishers, 1977).

Ivan Turgenev

HOME OF THE GENTRY

TRANSLATED BY

RICHARD FREEBORN

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This translation first published 1970
Reprinted 1971, 1974, 1975, 1977, 1979, 1982, 1985, 1987

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Copyright © Richard Freeborn, 1970
All rights reserved

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Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

ISBN: 9781101492901

To Ros and Liz

Introduction

Home of the Gentry (Dvoryanskoye gnezdo) is Turgenev’s second novel, conceived in 1856 shortly after the completion of his first novel Rudin, and written for the greater part at Spasskoye during the summer of 1858. It was completed on the eve of Turgenev’s fortieth birthday (27 October 1858), revised in December of the same year and published in the Contemporary at the beginning of 1859.

This work has received many tides in English translation (Liza, or a Nest of Nobles, A House of Gentlefolk, A Nest of Gentlefolk, A Nest of the Gentry, A Nest of Nobles, A Nest of Hereditary Legislators, A Noble Nest, A Nobleman’s Nest), all of which testify to the inherent difficulty of combining in English the twin concepts of which the Russian title is composed. The word ‘nest’ in association with ‘nobility’ has its Victorian charm, or it may seem faintly Wodehouse-ish (the Hereditary Legislators are bound to have kept some sort of Jeeves in their Nest), or it may sound like Maudie Little-hampton trying to be chummy. Turgenev himself alleged (probably untruthfully) in a letter to W. R. S. Ralston, his English translator, that the tide was chosen by his publisher, not by him. He approved of Ralston’s proposal to use the heroine’s name in the title of the first authorized English translation (of 1869) and this much licence has clearly done nothing to inhibit the extraordinary variety of subsequent tides. The grounds for clarifying the tide still further by substituting ‘home’ for ‘nest’ are to be found in the novel itself: it is a novel about the home of Turgenev’s class, the gentry (or nobility), and about the problems of Turgenev’s generation in readjusting to their homeland after experiencing the profound but fickle influence of European ideas.

Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev (1818–83) had his own Russian home on the large estate of Spasskoye-Lutovinovo in the province of Oryol. Here, as a boy, he experienced something of the harshness from his mother that he describes in the strange education which his hero, Fyodor Lavretsky, received from his father (chapter XI). Like Lavretsky, though at a much earlier age than his hero, he escaped from his mother’s tutelage, attended the universities of Moscow and St Petersburg and in 1838 travelled to Berlin, where his university education was to be completed. He emerged from what he called his plunge into ‘the German sea’ with a clear conviction of the need for Russia to follow Europe. After returning to his own country in 1842, he soon made a reputation for himself as a leading writer of the period known as ‘the forties’. He began publishing his famous Sketches* of peasant life in the Contemporary in 1847 and the first separate edition of this work appeared in 1852. He wrote about rural Russia, about his own ‘home’, meaning the province of Oryol, with the mastery of one who was both a landowner, a member of the gentry class, and an intellectual, a member of the newly-emerged Russian intelligentsia. He combined the urbanity of the intellectual with the mildly laconic manner of the sporting country gentleman, the compassion of the educated reformer with the sensitive eye of the poetic observer, the artist’s fine sense of balance with the poignancy of the tragic philosopher. But his Sketches, even if they acquired fame as pictures drawn from the life of the peasantry, were concerned quite as much with the life of the landowning class, the gentry; and their effectiveness as propaganda against serfdom was due less perhaps to their sympathetic and humane portrayal of peasant types than to their exceedingly clearly observed, laconic, wryly satirical and unsentimental portraits of the gentry. Of all the Sketches concerned with the gentry the most satirical and the most compassionate is Hamlet of the Shchigrovsky District, for in it Turgenev deals not only with the gentry class at its most fatuous and repellent, but also with the type of introspective, Hamlet-like intellectual who was, despite his manifest inadequacies, the conscience and saving grace of his class and his generation.

Turgenev became the chronicler of this type of ‘superfluous man’ intellectual. His studies, moving gradually from censure of the type towards a more balanced and sympathetic treatment of his problems, culminated in his first novel, Rudin, which portrayed probably the most typical example of such a ‘superfluous man’ – an intellectual, educated abroad, who can find no place for himself in semi-feudal Russian society and whose primary function becomes that of an eloquent, but ineffectual, disseminator of ideas. When the heroine of the novel, Natalya, inspired by his high-minded talk of service and sacrifice, challenges him to act upon his words, he fails her.