All he can offer her is the advice to submit – to submit to their inevitable parting, to circumstances, to Fate – and his own life, after his parting from Natalya, becomes an inglorious saga of lost opportunities and failed hopes until he sacrifices himself on the Paris barricades of 1848.

Rudin was written during the final stages of the Crimean War (1854–5) but was concerned with the Western-orientated intelligentsia of a decade earlier. Home of the Gentry, though ostensibly concerned with the 1840s (it opens in 1842), reflects in many ways the new upsurge of nationalist and Slavophil feeling experienced by the intelligentsia in the years immediately following the Crimean War. Turgenev was himself unsympathetic to Slavophilism, which united a Romantic belief in Russia’s superiority to Europe with an ultra-conservative admiration for the Orthodox Church, but he was dispassionate enough as a writer to recognize its appeal. This was a period, moreover, when the authority of Turgenev’s generation of the intelligentsia (the so-called ‘men of the forties’) was first seriously challenged by the new, radical, nihilist generation of the 1860s, whom Turgenev was to depict obliquely in On the Eve(1860) and directly in the figure of Bazarov in Fathers and Children(1862). Home of the Gentry is thus the last of Turgenev’s major works to be concerned exclusively with his own generation. It is both valedictory in its elegiac treatment of Lavretsky’s failure to achieve happiness and optimistic, if cautiously so, in its twin assumptions that Lavretsky’s unspectacular determination ‘to plough the land’ is a worthy task and that another, younger, generation is likely to revitalize the ‘home’ of the gentry when Lavretsky has gone. Lavretsky’s biography (chapters VIII to XVI) can be criticized for obtruding into and delaying the action of the novel, but it has an essential function despite this: it relates the novel to its time, recapitulating in miniature the experience of Turgenev’s own generation of the intelligentsia by showing how its Western education served to uproot it from Russia, to divorce it from its ‘home’ and to make it ultimately superfluous. Two characters in the fiction serve to highlight the ideological aspect of Lavretsky as a representative of his generation: Mikhalevich, his impoverished university friend, and Woldemar (or Vladimir) Panshin, his rival for Liza’s hand.

Mikhalevich’s arrival at Vasilyevskoye (chapter XXV) may seem gratuitous, just an interpolation, but Mikhalevich himself is not an interpolation in Lavretsky’s life. He is a ghost of Hamlet’s father come to remind him of the idealism (‘Religion, progress, humanity!’ he shouts as he leaves, almost falling out of the tarantass) to which he, Lavretsky, had aspired before his wife’s betrayal and four years of solitary reflection had nurtured such scepticism in his soul. Mikhalevich has the enthusiasm and idealism of a previous epoch and he indicts Lavretsky, notwithstanding the latter’s emotional state, for taking refuge in the self-pitying apathy of the well-read gentry, who excuse their inaction by assuming that ‘everything’s nonsense’. Man of words though he may be, Mikhalevich insists that ‘each individual has a duty, a great responsibility before God, before the people and before himself!’ – the duty, in other words, of the intelligentsia to work for Russia. It may be noticed that Lavretsky does not defend himself, for he does not conceive his duty in quite such grandiose terms. The curious and unbalanced education which he received from his father has taught him the danger of trying to implant ideas by force, of implementing changes from above without due regard for those who are to be changed. If it is the intelligentsia’s duty to act, what form should the action take? Lavretsky’s answer becomes clear in chapter XXXΙII during the controversy with Panshin. Here he forthrightly opposes Panshin’s view that changes must be introduced from above by speaking out in favour of Russia’s youth and independence and by demanding above all a recognition of Russia’s own ‘truth’ and reconciliation with it. But, though Turgenev ascribes these vague Slavophil sentiments to his hero, Lavretsky’s only statement of purposeful action is expressed in the words ‘To plough the land’ – to cultivate his garden, one supposes, in Voltairean fashion or to do his duty as a landowner in his own ‘home of the gentry’. In the Epilogue, which carries us eight years forward, we learn that ‘Lavretsky had a right to be satisfied: he had really made himself into a good proprietor, he had really learned how to plough the land, and he laboured not for himself alone; so far as was in his power, he tried to ensure and stabilize the livelihood of his peasants’. This, then, is the single positive achievement in Lavretsky’s life; in this way, and in this way only, Lavretsky readjusted to his home, became reconciled to its ‘truth’ and found his own ‘nest’.

All Turgenev’s novels have a topical reference. They are works which chronicle the ‘body and pressure of time’, meaning chiefly the evolution of Russian society and the Russian intelligentsia in its several epochs of the 1830s, 1840s and 1860s. Yet, though topical, they entirely lack that rumbustiousness, that sense of being written out of the noise and activity of their time, which is the pervasive sea-shell whisper in the novels of Charles Dickens; or in George Eliot’s Middlemarch, where her hortatory sermonizing, conjuring with manifold themes, presumptuousness towards her characters leave the impression that, through the window of the room where she writes and intermingling with her fiction, come the bustle and roar of a Victorian England which is for her more important than her representation of it; or in the work of Henry James, ever conscious of the noise outside, whose eloquence is of the slightly defensive kind which recognizes that an author’s voice must be tempered to the four walls of his novel’s setting. But the greatest of the nineteenth-century Russian novelists wrote out of the profundities of a silent country. In a real and literal sense Dostoyevsky wrote out of the nocturnal silence of St Petersburg, Tolstoy from the rural silence of Yasnaya Polyana and Turgenev from the summer quiet of Spasskoye. Their novels have the special, spell-binding absorption of voices speaking out of a natural stillness. None of Turgenev’s novels is more eloquent of such stillness than Home of the Gentry.

It is precisely such stillness that Lavretsky discovers when he returns finally to his ‘home’, the Vasilyevskoye that he preferred to the Lavriki of his boyhood (chapter XX):

And once again he began to listen to the silence, awaiting nothing – and yet at the same time endlessly expectant: the silence engulfed him on every side; the sun ran its course across the tranquil blue of the sky, and the clouds floated silently upon it; it seemed as if they knew why and where they were going. At that very time, in other places on the earth, life was seething, hurrying, roaring on its way; here the same life flowed by inaudibly, like water through marshy grass; and until evening Lavretsky could not tear himself away from contemplation of this receding, outflowing life; anguish for the past was melting in his soul like spring snow and – strangest of all! – never before had he felt so deep and strong a feeling for his country.

The boredom of such stillness will, he hopes, bring him to his senses and prepare him to ‘take up his task without hurry’. What awaits him, though, in his homeland is not such leisurely recovery but the exultation and heartbreak of his love for Liza. This experience is suggested to us as much in terms of sound as explicitly in terms of Lavretsky’s emotions. The novel is a Prospero’s isle in which the silence of Lavretsky’s homecoming is broken by the music of Liza’s presence. Lemm’s music, in which he invokes the stars (chapter XXII), is the accompaniment to the first stage in this process, interwoven as it is with Mikhalevich’s visit; but Lemm’s romance, like his cantata, ‘had striven to express something passionate and profound, but nothing had come of it’ and it is only through a vicarious sense of the passion and profundity of Lavretsky’s feeling that he is able to achieve his masterpiece and thereby orchestrate Lavretsky’s exultant love at the end of chapter XXXIV. This is the moment of climax in the novel when Lavretsky triumphs both ideologically and personally in his defeat of Panshin and his winning of Liza’s heart.