Turgenev is nearly universally mentioned, along with Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Leo Tolstoy, as one of the great masters of the psychological novel, although Turgenev himself disparaged more than once the emphasis on psychological analysis that marks the works of the other two members of that triumvirate. Turgenev further distinguished himself from Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky by beginning his career as a poet: his first major work was the long poem Parasha, published in 1843-a year before Dostoyevsky’s entr?e into literature and nearly a decade before Tolstoy’s. Parasha was followed by a handful of other significant verse works, though Turgenev later wrote that he felt a nearly physical antipathy toward his verse works.
Although his poetry was enthusiastically received by Vissarion Belinsky, the leading literary critic of the time, Turgenev’s first work of lasting influence was a series of sketches of what Turgenev knew first-hand from his childhood: the manorial, rural, and peasant milieus. The brief, episodic descriptions were initially published separately, beginning in 1847, and then as a single work, A Huntsman’s Sketches, in 1852. The work exercised a profound influence on the public that is often likened to that of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, published the same year. Turgenev’s work is one of the highest artistic quality-exquisite, tightly crafted descriptions of the physical world combined with engaging and complex portraits of peasants (generally positively portrayed) and gentry (generally negatively portrayed).
Beginning soon after the death of Nicholas I in 1855, Turgenev, always sensitive to the winds of change, wrote his four most significant novels: Rudin (1856), Home of the Gentry (sometimes translated, more literally, as Nest of Gentlefolk) (1859), On the Eve (1860) and Fathers and Sons (more precisely Fathers and Children) (1862). All are penetrating chronicles of the quickly shifting alliances, mores, and institutions that marked the initiatory period of the Great Reforms, with all its optimism and surety of a brighter future. The greatest of these, Fathers and Sons, depicts the intergenerational conflict between the liberal men of the 1840s, with their refined, European (more specifically, Gallic) sensibilities and an inclination toward incremen-talism in social and political change; and the new people of the younger generation, nihilists (a word Turgenev brought into coinage), men of science who embraced German-inflected positivism, disparaged aesthetics per se, and believed in the creative potential of destruction. The older generation
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
Ivan Turgenev, engraving from a French publication of 1881.
found Turgenev’s portrait of their brethren dismissive and patronizing, and the younger generation found their reflection insulting and patronizing. Turgenev, criticized from nearly every political angle, responded by quitting Russia for Western Europe. From his refuge in Baden-Baden, Turgenev wrote Smoke (1867), a venomous satire that attacked, inter alia, the radicalized intelligentsia in exile, the Europeanized Russian aristocracy, and the conservative Slavophiles.
Poems in Prose, Turgenev’s final work, sealed his reputation as the first Russian stylist. The final poem famously praises the Russian language as great, powerful, truthful, and free, a tribute perhaps nowhere truer than when the Russian words flowed from Turgenev’s own pen. He died near Paris in 1882, and, according to his wishes, his body was transported back to St. Petersburg where it was interred in perhaps the largest public funeral in Russian history. See also: DOSTOYEVSKY, FYODOR MIKHAILOVICH; GOLDEN AGE OF RUSSIAN LITERATURE; TOLSTOY, LEO NIKO-LAYEVICH
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Allen, Elizabeth Cheresh. (1992). Beyond Realism: Tur-genev’s Poetics of Secular Salvation. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Costlow, Jane T. (1990). Worlds within Worlds: The Novels of Ivan Turgenev. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Magarshack, David. (1954). Turgenev: A Life. New York: Grove Press. Schapiro, Leonard Bertram. (1978). Turgenev, His Life and Times. New York: Random House. Seeley, Frank Friedeberg. (1991). Turgenev: A Reading of His Fiction. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.
Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and southern Kazakhstan cover the territory of former Turkestan. The region is mostly desert and semi-desert, with the exceptions of the mountainous east and the river valleys. The major rivers are the Amu Darya, Zeravshan, Syr Darya, Chu, and Ili. Of the five major ethnic groups, most Turkmen, Kyrgyz, and Kazakhs were still nomads in 1900, but most Uzbeks had taken up agriculture or urban life, the traditional pursuits of the Tajiks.
Russia was drawn into Turkestan by the need for a stable frontier and the desire to forestall British influence. The Turkestan oblast was formed in 1865, subject to the Orenburg governor-general, from territories recently conquered from the Kokand khanate. These included Tashkent, one of the two largest towns in the region (the other was Bukhara). In 1867 the Turkestan government-general was established, consisting of two oblasts-Syr Darya and Semireche-responsible directly to the war minister, with Tashkent as its capital.
Further annexations from the Uzbeg khanates expanded the government-general. Bukhara’s defeat in 1868 added the Zeravshan okrug, including Samarkand. The right bank of the lower Amu Darya was annexed to the Syr Darya oblast as a result of Khiva’s defeat in 1873, and the remainder of Kokand was annexed as the Fergana oblast in 1876. In 1882 Semireche was transferred to the new Steppe government-general, reducing Turkestan to two oblasts, but four years later the Zeravshan
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okrug, enlarged at the expense of Syr Darya, was renamed the Samarkand oblast. In 1898 Semireche was returned to the Turkestan government-general and the Transcaspian oblast was added to Tashkent’s jurisdiction.
Turkestan’s value to Russia was primarily strategic until the late 1880s. In the wake of the construction of the Central Asian Railroad, connecting the Caspian seacoast with Samarkand in 1888 (extended to Tashkent in 1898), the government-general’s importance as a source of cotton grew rapidly. It supplied almost half of Russia’s needs by 1911. The opening of the Orenburg-Tashkent railroad in 1906 facilitated imports of grain to deficit areas like Fergana, where 36 to 38 percent of the sown area was given over to cotton by World War I. To the same end the construction of a line from Tashkent to western Siberia was begun before the war. Cotton fiber and cottonseed processing were the major industries.
As of the 1897 census, Turkestan’s five oblasts contained 5,260,300 inhabitants, 13.9 percent of them urban. The largest towns were Tashkent (156,400), Kokand (82,100), Namangan (61,900), and Samarkand (54,900). By 1911, 17 percent of Semireche’s population and half of its urban residents were Russians, four-fifths of them agricultural colonists. In the other four oblasts in the same year, Russians constituted only 4 percent of the population, and the overwhelming majority lived in European-style settlements alongside the native quarters in the major towns.
The Soviet government reorganized the government-general in 1918 as the Turkestan ASSR of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic. In 1924 the Turkestan republic was abolished. Its northern districts, inhabited by Kazakhs, were incorporated in the Kazakh ASSR of the Russian republic; its eastern districts, inhabited by Kyrgyz, were joined to the Kazakh republic as the Kyrgyz Autonomous Oblast. The remainder of Turkestan was divided into the Turkmen and Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republics, the latter’s southeast forming the Tajik ASSR. See also: CENTRAL ASIA
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Becker, Seymour. (1988). “Russia’s Central Asian Empire, 1885-1917.” In Russian Colonial Expansion to 1917, ed. Michael Rywkin. London: Mansell Publishing.
