Ivan Turgenev and his passion for liberty. The time was the mid-nineteenth century and a third of all Russians were serfs. Turgenev was a great emancipator and a gifted writer; he helped bring freedom to the serfs by an ingeniously devastating method: showing what their lives were like…
…After his release from prison,Turgenev was immediately exiled to Spasskoye, the family estate, where he remained under police surveillance for a year. Only once, at great risk, did he elude his jailers. It was to slip into Moscow to hear his mistress Pauline Viardot sing.
When The Sportman’s Sketches appeared in book form in 1852, by coincidence the same year as Uncle Tom’s Cabin, itwas at one labeled incendiary by most serf owners. But it was praised by all who called themselves liberals as the most devastating attack ever written against serfdom. And there can be no doubt about its effectiveness. “Emperor Alexander had me informed,” Turgenev later wrote a friend, “that among other things, the reading of my book led him to free the serfs.”
But that was ten years away, and after his exile at Spasskoye, Turgenev was anxious to escape the oppressive atmosphere of Russia, to get to Paris and to Pauline. He found himself a hero in the French capital, for his book had become he first Russian literary work to be widely read and admired in France. It was ni Paris, in 1856, that he met Harriet Beecher Stowe. The two talked for a long time about their two countries’ “peculiar institutions”- slavery in the United States, serfdom in Russia. “She was a kind, sensible, and shy American woman,” Turgenev wrote….(to be continued)…