A Month in the Country. Ivan Turgenev

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      In 1844, the twenty-six-year-old Ivan Turgenev wrote the beginnings of a one-act comedy entitled Two Sisters, consisting of a brief note “instead of a preface,” a list of characters and two scenes, the second broken off in mid-page. The manuscript eventually turned up in Paris and was published almost a century later. Turgenev had been serving in the Russian interior ministry at the time and dabbling in various sorts of literary work—fantasies, lyrics, longer poems, plays—most of it quite unoriginal, as he himself admitted. His models were Pushkin and Gogol among the Russians, Prosper Mérimée and Alfred de Musset among the French. A year earlier he had written his first play, the one-act “Imprudence,” a slight comedy set in Spain. The publication of his long poem, Parasha, in the same year, had brought him some critical recognition. He had also met the French/Spanish opera singer Pauline Viardot, who performed during winter season in Petersburg, and had fallen in love with her, a relationship that was to last with varying degrees of intimacy for the rest of his life. He also became and remained friends with the singer’s husband, Louis Viardot, twenty years her senior, a journalist, art critic and onetime director of the Théâtre des Italiens in Paris, who acted as Pauline’s manager. The two men collaborated on translations from Russian into French, of Turgenev’s own works among others, and also went hunting together.

      The fragment of the new play was written in June 1844, after the Viardots had gone back to Paris. Like “Imprudence,” it was to be a French-style one-act comedy of love, also set in Spain, though, as Turgenev remarked in his preface, a Spanish friend told him the setting could just as well be China. The characters’ names are a random mixture, none of them Russian: Fabian, a wealthy nobleman, thirty-five; Valery, Fabian’s friend, fifty; Nemorino, a poor student, nineteen; Klara, Fabian’s lady-love, twenty-three; Antonietta, her sister, seventeen. There are also Klara’s mute black servant and her pageboy. The fragment suggests that the plot would turn on the rivalry between Klara and her sharp-tongued young sister over Fabian. The student’s role is barely hinted at (Antonietta pretends to be indifferent when he is mentioned), and he does not appear in the fragment.

      Five years later, while living with the Viardots in Paris and nearby Courtavenel, Turgenev began work on a play he entitled The Student, which was a major reworking of the earlier semi-Spanish comedy, now extended to five acts, set in Russia, and with additional characters. He sent the finished play to Petersburg in 1850 for publication in the liberal magazine The Contemporary, but the censors did not pass it. It circulated in the Petersburg salons, however, with considerable success. Turgenev made some revisions and resubmitted it to the censors under the title Two Women, but it was refused again. The censors insisted not only on cuts in some speeches but on making the heroine, Natalya Petrovna, a widow instead of a married woman, because they thought it improper to portray a possible adulteress on the stage. Turgenev finally agreed to all the changes, and the play was published in 1855 under its definitive title, A Month in the Country.

      Turgenev wrote ten plays between 1843 and 1852, several of which were staged, though without much success. During those same years he also began to write the prose fiction on which his reputation now mainly rests. His first published story, “Andrei Kolosov,” appeared in the magazine Notes of the Fatherland in November 1844. (Curiously, he gave the same name to the hero of The Student in its early drafts.) Two years later he began to write the stories that would go into his first major work, A Hunter’s Notes (or A Sportsman’s Sketches), published in 1852, and considered by many, including himself, СКАЧАТЬ