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Ivan Turgenev

Ivan Turgenev

Writing

Biography

Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev (1818-1883) was a Russian novelist, short story writer, poet, playwright, translator and popularizer of Russian literature in the West. Turgenev made his name with 'A Sportsman's Sketches', also known as 'Sketches from a Hunter's Album' or 'Notes of a Hunter', 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 Spasskoye. The book is credited with having influenced public opinion in favour of the abolition of serfdom in 1861. Turgenev himself considered the book to be his most important contribution to Russian literature. One of the stories, 'Bezhin Lea' or 'Byezhin Prairie', was to become the basis for Sergei Eisenstein's controversial film Bezhin Meadow (1937). In the early 1850s, Turgenev wrote several novellas ('The Diary of a Superfluous Man', 'Faust', 'The Lull') expressing the anxieties and hopes of Russians of his generation. During the period of 1853–62 Turgenev wrote some of his finest stories as well as the first four of his novels: 'Rudin' (1856), 'A Nest of the Gentry' (1859), 'On the Eve' (1860) and 'Fathers and Sons' (1862). Fathers and Sons remains Turgenev's most famous novel. The novel examined the conflict between the older generation, reluctant to accept reforms, and the nihilistic youth.

Known For

Bezhin Meadow: Sequences from an Unfinished Film
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Bezhin Lug (Bezhin Meadow) was to be a Soviet film about a young farm boy whose father attempts to betray the government for political reasons by sabotaging the year's harvest, and the son's efforts to stop his own father to protect the Soviet state, culminating in the boy's murder and a social uprising. Assigned to Soviet film-maker Sergei Eisenstein, the filming followed the same path as with his previous effort, "Que Viva Mexico", into cost overrun and over-shooting of footage. Furthermore, Eisenstein's usage of forbidden experimental film techniques outraged his government superiors, who ordered the film destroyed before it was even completed. All that survives are the first and last frames of each shot, preserved by Sergei Eisenstein’s wife, Pera Atasheva. The 1967 reconstruction, by Naum Kleiman of the Eisenstein Museum and Sergei Yutkevich of Gosfilmofond, places these frames in order, approximating the original film.

Bezhin Meadow: Sequences from an Unfinished Film

1968Movie