Patrie et Enfants: Turgenev and Bourgeois Revolution

• In Event: Left Perspectives on Narrative I: Literatures as Political Practice and Critique

Abstract

This paper returns to the question of how to read Ivan Turgenev's art politically, searching not for intimations of future revolution in Russia, but for traces of past revolutions in Western Europe, including the places (France and Baden) where Turgenev spent most of the later part of his life. Focusing especially on Fathers and Children, but with reference to the earlier Rudin and later Spring Torrents, I argue that certain patterns of Turgenev's fiction indicate anxiety over the origination of the bourgeois civilization that Turgenev valued in violent revolutionary upheavals (with the French Revolution and British Civil War as paradigmatic examples). In particular, the idiom of natural law that legitimated the late 18th century's revolutions reappears transformed in Turgenev's artistic treatment of nature, while the issues of disruptive violence and its role in founding a new sociopolitical order are transferred to the erotic and familial realm.

Author

• Dominick Lawton, Stanford U