The Life of Turgenev

A fictionalized biography of Turgenev. Zaytsev, in addition to telling about the classic’s life, also tries to analyze his work and reconstruct his worldview.

Zaytsev addressed Turgenev’s work and personality throughout his life, and wrote about him about twenty essays, articles, and notes. The first of these publications—“About Turgenev” (dated September 7, 1918)—appeared in the collection “Turgenev and His Time.” M., Pg., 1923; republished by A. D. Romanenko in the book: Zaytsev B. K. Blue Star. M: Moskovsky Rabochy, 1989. In the article, Zaytsev writes about what he found close and akin in the Russian classic’s work: “Turgenev remains—and remains in the first ranks of our literature—as an image of calm and melancholy, contemplative balance and moderation, without strong passions; a benevolent and delighting face, with refinement and deep spiritual upbringing. Feminine, and as though shrouded in a kind of mist. The sphere of his influence is mainly the younger years. Through Turgenev, each person seems to be required to pass. And the one who wrote these lines is glad that Turgenев’s light illuminated his adolescence and (early) youth. He owes him his first artistic stirrings, first dreams and longings, perhaps even the first ‘tears I shall shed over fiction.’ This feeling for Turgenev as for ‘one’s own,’ ‘dear’ never left him; later it endured the Sturm und Drang of modernism and, with calm love, remained with him in mature years.”

As the American researcher Ariadna Shilyaeva writes, “Boris Zaytsev made a valuable contribution to the genre of creative biography in Russian literature: his fictionalized biographies are a rare harmonious combination of cognitive and aesthetic categories… Like a true artist, Boris Zaytsev sought to capture the leitmotif of life of each of these writers and fix it in words: in ‘The Life of Turgenev’—this is devotion to the ‘eternally feminine’; in ‘Zhukovsky’—following the call ‘Seek above all the Kingdom of God’; and in ‘Chekhov’—the unconscious Christian mood of the writer’s soul. The dominant feature of each of these biographies is the documentarily grounded revelation of the heroes’ inner world, and the creative reconstruction of their individual, inimitable uniqueness. At the same time, a certain pattern becomes evident: the higher the degree of inner kinship between the author and the chosen hero, the brighter is the figurative reconstruction of that hero and the artistic solution of the creative task. Therefore, the greatest fullness of the author’s design is found in the biography of Zhukovsky, then in ‘The Life of Turgenev,’ and to a significant extent—in ‘Chekhov’” (Shilyaeva A. Boris Zaytsev and his fictionalized biographies. New York: Volga, 1971. pp. 163–164).