The practically immediate reappearance of his wife (chapter XXXVI) is accompanied not only by the repugnant smell of patchouli, but also by her fondness for showy music. Her playing and singing, in dilettante partnership with Panshin, nicely offset and enhance, by their artificiality, the heartbreak of Lavretsky’s parting from Liza. When, after eight years, he returns to the Kalitins’ house, it is the single reverberant note played on the piano that summarizes for him the extent of his loss.

The impossibility of happiness is the novel’s underlying theme. Turgenev tended to believe that man is never destined to experience happiness save as something ephemeral and inevitably foredoomed. In Home of the Gentry Lavretsky tries initially to assume that happiness is dependent upon the truth of the heart, as he tells Liza in chapter XXIX, but eventually he is obliged to accept Liza’s view that ‘happiness on earth does not depend on us’. But the pessimism implicit in this Turgenevan view of life is relieved throughout the novel by the affirmation of nature’s power to redeem, by the summer atmosphere in which the brief and poignant story is clothed and by the poetry with which Turgenev has invested the portrait of Liza, the heroine.

Naturally this portrait, so central to the novel, caused Turgenev more difficulty than any other. When the novel was given its first reading in draft form to an ‘areopagus’ (Turgenev’s term) of advisers in St Petersburg in late November or early December 1858, the chief criticism, it seems, was concerned with the religious background of Liza. Turgenev took particular care to amplify the portrait after this criticism by stressing aspects of her religious nature and by adding chapter XXXV which describes her religious upbringing. The uniqueness of Liza’s portrait is due chiefly to the fact that no other Turgenevan heroine has her specifically religious character, and commentators have consequently been tempted to seek for living prototypes, of whom the most frequently quoted is Countess E. E. Lambert who was Turgenev’s correspondent during the years when he was meditating his novel. His letters to her mirror the elegiac feeling which pervades his novel, but her claims as a prototype for Liza seem slender. Ivan Goncharov, the novelist, suspected that Turgenev had plagiarized the figure of Liza from his own heroine, Vera, of The Precipice (Obryv), cl aiming that he had told Turgenev the plan of his novel in 1855. The Precipice, however, was not published until 1869, which means that the plagiarization, even allowing for the possibility, could not have been based on anything more substantial than Goncharov’s initial sketches of his heroine’s character. Goncharov nursed his suspicions of Turgenev’s perfidy for the rest of his life. It is no more absurd to point to the faint similarity between Turgenev’s heroine and Tolstoy’s Liza of Two Hussars(1856), a work conceived and written at a time when both writers were living in close proximity and on fairly amicable terms.

The genesis of Turgenev’s heroine may be in doubt; there is no doubt that Turgenev’s hero is based to a great extent on autobiographical experience. Lavretsky’s portrait is the fullest of any hero in Turgenev’s novels. His life is traced to its source in the mixed blood of his birthright and the vivid record of his boyhood, adolescence and early adulthood. With this burden of experience, mature and vulnerable, he appears at the fiction’s beginning. His emotional and psychological state is explored carefully and charted with a subtle exactitude through the various stages of the novel. His is obviously the dominant portrait. But Turgenev devoted great care also to the characterization of Panshin, second only (among the minor figures) to the care which he lavished on the wickedly convincing portrait of Lavretsky’s wife, Varvara Pavlovna. Convincing and detailed observation of character traits, rather than a plumbing of psychological states, is the principle governing Turgenev’s portrayal of such minor figures. They have the veracity of roles well acted upon a stage. There is a theatrical principle also about the way in which Turgenev offers his fiction to us. Despite the freedoms permitted by the novel, he restricts the action of his work to a particular time and place, and supplies his characters with biographies and characteristics in order to ‘place’ them in a particular setting and then permit them to enact their separate roles within those confines. It is not difficult to see how the novel is composed of different worlds which are contiguous but alien: Marfa Timofeyevna’s world upstairs, Marya Dmitrievna’s downstairs, the world of the Kalitins’ home and the external official or social world represented by Panshin and Varvara Pavlovna, Lavretsky’s world of Vasilyevskoye and the modest, cell-like world of Liza’s room. The destinies of the characters appear to be dictated by the worlds to which they belong and are ultimately as separate and irreconcilable as are the two figures of Lavretsky and Liza in our final glimpse of them.

No other work by Turgenev is quite so ‘Turgenevan’ as this novel. At its first appearance in 1859 it received abundant critical praise. In the West, particularly in England, it suited Victorian tastes and appealed to many writers, some of whom, like Galsworthy, show signs in their work of having imitated its quietly elegiac tone.