The Story of the Turgenev Brothers

17 hrs. 47 min.

Romance & Prose

Language Russian

Author Anatoly Vinogradov

Narrator Margarita Ivanova

Description

A novella that brings back one of the bright and little-explored pages of Russia’s revolutionary past.
The Turgenev family—father, mother, and four sons—becomes for the first time the subject of a historical novel. Each character is interesting in their own way, but, of course, the most vivid figure, from the standpoint of historical value, is Nikolai. Old Ivan Petrovich Turgenev—raised on the ideas of Masonic humaneness, a friend of the republican Radishchev—his wife Ekaterina Semyonovna, a serf-owner and a disciplinarian with a whip, a beauty with a riding crop who spared the greyhounds yet drew red stripes on the backs of little children—this is the first collision tormenting the first consciousness of the young Turgenevs. And then “the poverty of millions and the wealth of the happy thousand,” Alexandrine sentimentality and Arakcheyev’s cruelty—truly Russian “rudeness, puke of a freckled, unruly-haired boy with an accordion” and “brilliant intellects of Germany, France, and England”—all these contradictory impressions inevitably produced a painful and long-lasting upheaval in the minds of Turgenev’s youth.
But each of the four brothers perceived life differently; each made different demands on it. As far as the author could, he tried to portray this lack of uniformity in balanced form—yet since Nikolai, in his young years, became a “criminal of tsarist Russia” and went through, on his long, complicated, and remarkable path, the fates of all his brothers, his story naturally came to the forefront in this novella.
Nikolai Turgenev was born in the tragic 1789, when the refreshing thunder of the Great French Revolution sounded—when the young bourgeoisie, overthrowing the nobility by the hands of working people, itself was becoming the ruling class. Turgenev died in 1871, when the strengthened proletariat of Paris for the first time in open battle made an attempt to take power away from the bourgeoisie.
The fate of Nikolai Turgenev and his brother Alexander is especially fascinating—two plants torn from their native soil by the flooding of great historical rivers, and that spent their flourishing years “without roots on чужие берегів.” And isn’t their fate, despite all its vivid and varied caprice, the fate of almost fruitless plants—a deeply tragic fate of voluntary exiles who wandered amid the heat and rains of nineteenth-century European weather?