Ivan Turgenev Ppt. by B. Ting 2015

Transcription

1 Ivan Turgenev Ppt. by B. Ting 2015

2 Painting by Ilya Repin (Image from

3 From Romanticism - symbolic representation - multiple meanings - focus on the formal aspects of the text (e.g., vocabulary, rhyme) - predominance of metaphors - fantastic occurrences - poetry as dominant genre - exotic themes

4 to Realism - direct, unambiguous representation - focus on the events described - predominance of metonymy i.e. detail that gives a description - believable occurrences - prose as dominant genre Literary realism began with mid-nineteenth century French literature and Russian literature and extended to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. - themes of everyday reality

5 Early Years Ivan Turgenev was the son of a rich, landowning family. And grew up on the estate passkoe in Oryol province: the Russian heartland. Educated at home; learned French, German, passable English.

6 passkoe

7 and its surroundings.

8 Turgenev s Mother When Ivan's father died, his abusive mother oversaw the running of the farms and their serfs, and her two sons, Nikolay and Ivan. Turgenev s cruel, domineering mother was a great influence in his life; her strong personality left traces on his later works. Turgenev portrayed his mother in his fiction as a tyrannous and unreasonable domestic despot. Yet Turgenev understood her real tragedy that she desperately wanted to be loved by her sons, but the actions to which her warped character drove her repelled them. An entry in her diary, made shortly before her death, suggests that she had realized this herself: Mother of God, my children, forgive me. And you, oh Lord, forgive me as well for pride, this mortal sin, was always my sin.

9 Varvara Petrovna Turgeneva Ivan was even afraid of her as she beat him constantly. he was eager that Turgenev should make a brilliant official career. And later, when he resigned from the Interior Ministry, she showed her disapproval by cutting down his allowance, thus forcing him to support himself by the profession he had chosen.

10 When his mother died, the estates were settled, and with an income of about $5,000 a year, Turgenev became a wanderer. He had, or imagined he had, very bad health, and the eminent specialists he consulted sent him from one resort to another - to Rome, the Isle of Wight, oden, just to name a few.

11 tudent Years tudied at Moscow University, then t Petersburg ( ). Turgenev first attended the University of t. Petersburg. At 19, he travelled to Germany and entered the University of Berlin. On his way to Germany, the steamer he was traveling on caught fire and rumours spread in Russia that he had acted cowardly. Accounts of this incident vary, but all agree that Turgenev behaved badly. ome versions say he screamed in French, "ave me, I am my widowed mother's only son!" The event rankled in his mind until his death.this revealing experience later formed the basis for his story A Fire at ea. In Germany, he concentrated on studying history and philosophy, mainly the works of Georg W. F. Hegel. Berlin and the philosophical school had a great influence on young Russians of his generation. Turgenev a Westernizer, not a lavophile.

12 A Fateful Meeting Louis Viardot, born in Dijon 31 July 1800 and died May 5, 1883, was a writer, art critic and French translator appointment as civil servant in t Petersburg. He met French opera singer Pauline Garcia Viardot, with whom he had a lifelong platonic relationship, in 1843 when she was in t Petersburg for the season. He lived near her, and at times with her and her husband, and travelled extensively with them. Viardot remained Turgenev's greatest and unfulfilled love. In his youth, he had one or two affairs with servant (serf) girls and fathered an illegitimate daughter, Paulinette. Turgenev hunted with Pauline s husband, Louis Viardot. Portrait of Ivan Turgenev s daughter. Pauline Viardot [née García] was a leading nineteenthcentury French mezzosoprano, pedagogue, and composer of panish descent. Born Michelle Ferdinande Pauline García July 18, 1821 in Paris, France, she died in the same city on the 18 th of May, Her album: Douze Mazourkes. Best known for her ongs: Hai luli!, Havanaise, Les filles de cadix, Berceuse.

13 Turgenev set up residence in France and it was here that he began writing in earnest. Turgenev first made his name with (Записки охотника), also known as ketches from a Hunter s Album or Notes of a Hunter, and by several other names, a collection of short stories, based on his observations of peasant life and nature, while hunting in the forests around his mother's estate of passkoye. It was his experiences in the woods of his native province that supplied the material for A portsman s ketches. It is said that the work contributed to Tsar Aleksandr II's decision to liberate the serfs. The short pieces were written from the point of view of a young nobleman who learns to appreciate the wisdom of the peasants living on his family's estates. Traveling often between Europe and Russia, Turgenev was arrested and imprisoned for suspicious revolutionary activities. Turgenev's opinions brought him a month of detention in t. Petersburg and 18 months of house arrest.

14 A Revolutionary? No one will pretend that Turgenev was a revolutionary. On many occasions he professed his political liberalism and gradualism and his abhorrence of revolution. But, with the exception of his friend Herzen, he was the only great Russian [19 th ] century writer to have the direct experience of revolution. Unlike Herzen, he was the first to give fictional lineaments to the revolutionary type in Russian literature [He was a] writer who took a remarkably objective, fair minded view of the political scene while always seeking to hold the middle ground. Richard Freeborn

15 The first of A portsman s ketches appeared in 1847, and in the same year he left Russia in the train of Pauline Viardot. For a year or two he lived chiefly in Paris or at a country house at Courtavenel in Brie, which belonged to Madame Viardot. In 1850 he returned to Russia. There he found Dostoevsky banished to iberia and Belinsky dead. Turgenev himself was under suspicion by the government on account of the popularity of A portsman s ketches. For praising Gogol, who had just died, he was arrested and imprisoned for a short time, and for the next two years he was kept under police surveillance. In the meantime he continued to write. The end of the Crimean War made it possible for him to travel to Western Europe again and by that time he had become recognized the foremost living Russian author.

16 Though Turgenev never graduated from any university, while studying in Berlin he became convinced that Russia needed to be Westernized. Lacking an interest in religious issues like his two great compatriots, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, he represented the social side of the reform movement. In 1855 he met Leo Tolstoy, who had returned to t. Petersburg from the siege of evastopol. Tolstoy had not become a famous writer yet, but Turgenev recognized his literary genius. "I'm not exaggerating when I say that he'll become a great writer," he wrote to Tolstoy's sister. In 1857 he travelled with Nikolay Nekrasov and Tolstoy to Paris, and showed the younger novelist all the sights. "Turgenev is a bore," Tolstoy recorded in his diary in Dijon. The relationship between these two great writers remained tense, although they never broke contact and also had family ties. Turgenev's mother had given birth in 1833 to a daughter, whose father was rumoured to be Dr. Andrey Bers, who became Tolstoy's father-in-law. Once Turgenev visited Tolstoy at Yasnaya Polyana Estate and demonstrated a can-can to Tolstoy s children. "Turgevev s can-can sad," was Tolstoy's reaction.

17 During the period of Turgenev wrote some of his finest stories and novellas and the first four of his six novels: Rudin (1856), A Nest of Nobles (1859), On the Eve (1860) and Fathers and ons (1862). The central themes in these works were the beauty of early love, failure to reach one's dreams, and frustrated love, which partly reflected the author's lifelong passion for Pauline. Turgenev s Fathers and ons deals with nihilist philosophy and personal and social rebellion. "Whatever a man prays for, he prays for a miracle. Every prayer reduces itself to this: Great God, grant that twice two be not four" (from Fathers and ons).

18 Nihilist Turgenev s Invention Hostile reaction to Fathers and ons prompted Turgenev's decision to leave Russia. As a consequence he also lost the majority of his readers. The novel examined the conflict between the older generation, reluctant to accept reforms, and the idealistic youth. In the central character, Bazarov, Turgenev drew a classical portrait of the mid-nineteenth-century nihilist the word was invented by the author. "A nihilist is a man who does not bow to any authorities, who does not take any principle on trust, no matter with what respect that principle is surrounded" (from Fathers and ons). Later the temperament of a nihilist found a number of different manifestations: the terrorist, the anarchist, the atheist, the materialist, and the communist. Fathers and ons was set during the six-year period of social ferment, from Russia's defeat in the Crimean War to the Emancipation of the erfs. The central character is the young medical student and nihilist Evgeny Bazarov, who has been described as the 'first Bolshevik' in Russian literature. "I share no man's opinions; I have my own." These words became central in Turgenev s life. The figure of Bazarov was conceived on the Isle of Wright, where Turgenev had spent three weeks in 1860.

19 Gustave Flaubert ( ), was an influential French novelist and playwright who was perhaps the leading exponent of literary realism of his country. He is known especially for his first published novel, Madame Bovary (1857). After Fathers and ons failed, Turgenev lived first in Germany, and then he moved to London, where Fathers and ons had had great success. He settled finally in Paris, where he lived until his death. He became a corresponding member of the Imperial Academy of ciences in 1860 and a Doctor of Civil Law at Oxford University in Among Turgenev's close friends in France was the writer Gustave Flaubert, with whom he shared similar social and aesthetic ideals. They both rejected the extremist right and left and stuck to a nonjudgmental, if somewhat pessimistic, depiction of the world. Turgenev's later works include the novellas A King Lear of the teppes (1870) and pring Torrents, which rank with First Love (1860) as his finest achievements in the genre. His last published work was a collection of meditations and anecdotes, entitled Poems in Prose (1883).

20 The new Realism First seen in portsman s ketches (Записки охотника) Art turns its back on mythological themes, romantic scenes, important personages. Emphasis on detail reflection of the invention of photography. ocial conscience, depiction of scenes of country life: in France gives rise to the Barbizon school, J.-F. Millet.

21 Jean-Francois Millet The Gleaners / Les Glaneuses 1857

22 The Goncourt brothers, Edmond (left) with his brother, Jules (right), formed a partnership that is possibly unique in literary history. Not only did they write all their books together, they did not spend more than a day apart in their adult lives, until they were finally parted by Jules's death in They are known for their literary work and for their diaries, which offer an intimate view into the French literary society of the later 19th century. Wikipedia _ _portraits_Edmond_et_Jules_Goncourt.jpg Henry James was an American writer who spent most of his writing career in Britain. He is regarded as one of the key figures of 19th-century literary realism. Wikipedia James-320.jpg Becomes a fixture in Paris; besides Flaubert, a friend of Henry James and the Goncourts. Builds a villa next to the home of the Viardots at Bougival.

23 Ivan ergeyevich Turgenev Painted by Vasily Perov, 1872

24 Alexei avrasov torm over the Kremlin

25 Vasily Polenov A Moscow Yard

26

27 Turgenev died of cancer outside of his homeland Russia, at Bougival in 1883, but his body was returned and buried in Volkovo cemetery in t. Petersburg - a Russian literary hero and legend.

28 Bibliography Ivan Turgenev (Author), Michael R. Katz (Editor, Translator, Middlebury College), Ivan Turgenev: A Chronology. Norton Critical Edition Fathers and Children. UA: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. Page 415. Russiapedia. Internet Address: Turgenev Realism. Ivan Turgenev PowerPoint slides. University of Ottawa. Internet Address: http%3a%2f%2faix1.uottawa.ca%2f~jdclayt%2flides%2frus2102%2fturgenev_realism.ppt&usg=afqjcnednrcc06ogr344 ceuzsfqny3o_g&sig2=k4uwc72aedzypup_wf9bwg For more information on Turgenev s life: