…Turgenov. The great emancipator. Turgenov helped bring freedom to the serfs by an ingenuously devastating method: he showed the serfs what their lives were like. Turgenov returns from Berlin to take a post in the Russian Ministry of the Interior…
…If this new clerk from the rarefied Berlin salons supposed that his memorandum would be taken seriously in Petersburg, he was sorely disappointed. he was not even reprimanded, he was merely ignored. By the end of a month, he was passing his time at the office writing verse, studying the rules for a newly popular card game called preference, and reading the novels of George Sand.
—English: Sergei Ivanov (1864-1910). A Peasant Leaving His Landlord on en:Yuri’s Day.
Русский: С. В. Иванов. Юрьев день. 1908—WIKI
Just as his disillusionment withthe Ministry of the Interior as an instrument of change became total, a new and decisive influence entered his life in the person of the critic Vissarion Belinski. In Belinski, Turgenev found a man who reinforced his own Westernist ideas. More important, Belinski, a powerful advocate of social significance in art, convinced Turgenev that he could do more to end serfdom through his writing than he ever could in the dusty warrens of the imperial civil service.
—Full Length View of Serfs(3) in mixed media.
Figure from the George S. Stuart collection.—click image for source…
Within a year after meeting Belinski, Turgenev resigned from the ministry. Most of his time was now spent at Sapsskoye, where he had good cause to know his mother’s increasing brutality. In 1842 he had a brief affair with one of his mother’s seamstresses, and a child was born. Vavara Petrovna, now a widow, had willingly agreed to raise the girl, but Turgenev soon discovered that when she became angry with him, she would punish the child by dressing her beautifully, bringing her into the drawing room to be shown off, and sending her back to the kitchen to work and be ridiculed by the serfs. ( to be continued)…
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