Virgin Soil

Ivan Turgenev

Description

Turgenev's final novel, Virgin Soil traces the destinies of several middle-class revolutionaries who seek to "go to the people" by working on the land and instilling democratic ideas in the countryside's locals. They include the daydreaming impoverished young tutor Nezhdanov - employed by the liberal councillor Sipyagin and his vain and beautiful wife Valentina - the naive young radical Maryanna and the progressive factory manager Solomin.Their liaisons, intrigues and conspiracies, set against the backdrop of Tsarist Russia, form the matter of Turgenev's most ambitious and elaborate work, which cemented the author's place in the West as Russia's foremost novelist while at the same time proving controversial at home - culminating in the arrest of fifty-two real-life revolutionaries barely a month after it was published.

Informations

• Publié par: Alma Books
• Date de parution: 01 janvier 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780714546070
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Virgin Soil
Ivan Turgenev
Translated by Michael Pursglove

ALMA CLASSICS




alma classics an imprint of
Alma BOOKS Ltd 3 Castle Yard Richmond Surrey TW10 6TF United Kingdom www.almaclassics.com
Virgin Soil first published in Russian in 1877 This translation first published by Alma Classics Ltd in 2014 Reprinted 2015
Translation, Introduction and Notes © Michael Pursglove, 2014 Extra Material © Alma Classics Ltd
Cover image © Christopher Walker
Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR 0 4 YY
isbn : 978-1-84749-375-0
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Contents
Introduction
Virgin Soil
Part One
Part Two
Note on the Text
Notes
Extra Material
Ivan Turgenev’s Life
Ivan Turgenev’s Works
Se lect Bibliography


Introduction
On 11th February 1873, Turgenev wrote to the German literary historian Heinrich Julian Schmidt that he was working on a novel “with which… I intend to end my literary career”. That novel was Virgin Soil , which he had first conceived in July 1870 and on which he had begun to work at the end of 1872, while domiciled in Paris. A year later, still in Paris, he was complaining, in a letter to the writer M.V. Avdeyev, that the work was proceeding but slowly. In January 1876 he writes of a “large novel” and simultaneously expresses the thought that he will not finish it at all and that he will finish it “this year”. In June that year he returned to his family seat at Spasskoye-Lutovinovo and began serious work on the novel, telling Gustave Flaubert: “I’ve never worked like I have done since I arrived here; I spend whole nights at my desk.” By the middle of July he had finished the novel. It was published in two parts (to minimize censorship difficulties), in the January and February numbers of The Russian Messenger for 1877, and in a single volume the following year. Even before it appeared in book form, it was translated into at least eight languages, including English, French, German and Italian. No fewer than five translations into German alone appeared before the end of 1877, which is a mark of the worldwide reputation Turgenev enjoyed by this time. Nowhere was his popularity greater than in the Anglophone world. Here the first in the field was an American translation by T.S. Perry, closely followed by a translation, published in London, by Ashton W. Dilke, brother of the famous politician Sir Charles Dilke. Dilke’s preface was one of at least nine critiques of the novel published in England in 1878 alone. Better known now than either of these versions is the translation by the redoubtable Constance Garnett, originally published in 1896 and republished many times since. America’s answer to Constance Garnett, Isabel Hapgood, published her own translation in 1904. A translation by Rochelle S. Townsend appeared in 1911, a version which, like all the other translations into English, is still widely available.
For his title Turgenev chose the monosyllabic Russian word Nov’ , in effect the root of the word for “new”. The word has two meanings, and Turgenev appears to have intended both. The first, usually translated as “virgin soil”, although “new ground” would be equally acceptable, is indicated by the epigraph to the novel. The second meaning is “anything new”, a concept Turgenev might not have been overly anxious to draw to the attention of the censorship. Throughout his career as a novelist, beginning with Rudin , Turgenev had returned to the theme of the “new man” and speculated what his characteristics might be. His answer – although Turgenev was too subtle a writer to be wholly or successfully dogmatic – is the stolid gradualist Solomin, who is eulogized in the closing paragraphs of the novel by the character who is often Turgenev’s mouthpiece, Sila Paklin. The word “new” and its derivatives recur constantly, and in the famous Chapter 19, devoted to the Darby and Joan couple Fomushka and Fimushka, we read that “no ‘novelty’ ever breached the boundary of their ‘oasis’”. Patrick Waddington has suggested that Breaking New Ground might be a better title, not least because it retains the word “new”. However, the first French translation, by Louis Viardot, supervised by Turgenev himself, was Terres vierges , and the name stuck, despite early German translators who opted either for Neuland or The New Generation ( Die neue Generation ), both of which have the advantage of retaining the idea of “new”. Virgin Soil was the title adopted by both Constance Garnett and Isobel Hapgood, and also by the translators of the first Italian and Spanish versions.
Turgenev’s search for a “new man” was matched, at least in On the Eve , in the person of Yelena, and here in the person of Marianna, by his search for a “new woman”. Marianna, who bears the name of the symbol of Republican France, is, unlike Nezhdanov, able to break away from her privileged background and live the “simple life”, following Tatyana’s advice. There was, in addition to the connotations of Turgenev’s adoption of the word nov’ as his title, an unintended consequence: the word, from being relatively rare, even obscure, shot to prominence and was soon taken up as the title of a “people’s journal”. Other journals, including one currently published in Russia, have the word in their title.
Critical reactions to the novel were as polarized as they had been to Fathers and Children and Smoke . The left-wing critics Nikolai Mikhailovsky and Pyotr Tkachev were hostile, while on the other hand the short-story writer Vsevolod Garshin described the work as “a delight”. Modern views about the novel are almost equally divided. Richard Freeborn, and most Russian critics, see it as a political novel, while James Woodward considers it to be a philosophical novel, with the pivotal theme being Nezhdanov’s need for beauty. Support for this line can be found in the plethora of cultural references in the novel, mainly from the world of Russian literature, but also from the worlds of painting and music. The novel is unusual in containing two complete poems both ostensibly written by Nezhdanov, but of course actually written by Turgenev, who began his literary career as a poet. Frank Seeley, unlike critics such as Anthony Briggs who find the novel artistically flawed, writes of the “taut and deft handling of the storyline” (James Woodward also employs the adjective “taut” in the same context) and sees the work as the culmination of a six-novel social chronicle. In taking this line he is echoing Turgenev’s comment in his foreword to the 1880 Collected Works that his task was the “depicting and embodying” of the “changing face” of “Russians of the cultured stratum”. In other words Turgenev aimed to do for the Russian novel what Disraeli, Elizabeth Gaskell and Dickens, among others, had done for the English novel a generation earlier when they produced such “condition of England” novels as Sybil , Mary Barton and Hard Times . One result of this approach is that the novel is by some way the longest of all Turgenev’s work; he had intended his first novel, Two Generations , to be a large novel, but in its final form, as Rudin , it is more a novella than a novel. It is generally conceded that Turgenev was more at home with shorter prose forms; Virgin Soil on the other hand, is, by any standards, a large novel, a panorama of Russian society, with representatives of many strata of society: aristocrats, landowners, officials, peasants, clergy, religious dissenters, factory workers, radicals; there are many subdivisions within these categories. The setting of the novel is similarly varied: Moscow, Petersburg, lodging houses, a theatre, country estates, a governor’s mansion, a factory, a drinking house, a wooden town house. It was a feeling that such a broad canvas was beyond him that led Turgenev himself, in letters written shortly after the publication of the novel, to express the view that his novel was a failure, blaming this on his “absenteeism” from Russia. Despite this, Turgenev also saw Virgin Soil , for better or worse, as the culmination of his life’s work, writing to the poet Yakov Polonsky in February 1877: “Whatever may be its eventual fate, this is my last independent literary work; my decision is irreversible. My name will appear no more.” In fact, other literary works were to come from his pen before his death in 1883, notably his Poems in Prose , but this, by far his most ambitious novel, was also his last.
The action of the novel takes place between 1868 and 1870 and conflates two phenomena somewhat loosely lumped together under the term “populism”. The first was the sensational trial of the terrorist Sergei Nechayev in 1873, whose surname, like that of Turgenev’s hero Nezhdanov, means “unexpected”. Nechayev had come to prominence in 1868 and to notoriety in 1869 when he took part in the murder of a dissenting member of his People’s Reprisal terrorist cell. The second was the “going to the people” in 1874 by a few thousand idealistic young people. They, like Markelov in the novel, were soon turned in to the authorities, often by the very peasants they were trying to help. Their le