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on his broad shoulders; there were moments of freedom from the
restless tyranny of his mother and he was permitted to hold a place
of comparative neutrality in family quarrels. His father's early death
hastened his maturity and the need of escape from his mother's domin–
ance foreshadowed his many years of exile from Russia. For Turgenev
the act of living away from home has its analogy to Proust's seclusion
while writing
A La R echerche du 'Temps Perdu,
and with Proust he
shared a long-sustained tendency toward hypochondria.
In this known picture Magarshack fills in the important detail of
the young Turgenev's romantic attachment to the philosophy of Hegel,
which included a friendship with Bakunin and Bakunin's sister. Tur–
genev's earliest attempts at writing were in Byronic dramatic verse. His
early choice of Byron as a model was a natural affinity; being of the
gentry it was easy enough for him to identify himself with the English
milord who had written of the wandering Childe Harold and Don Juan
-and Byron was the most notorious exile of his day. Following the
lead of Pushkin, Turgenev shared Russian enthusiasm for what was
fashionable in English Regency literature ; as W. M. Praed became a
hidden tutor of the speed and brilliance in Pushkin's verse, so Maria
Edgeworth's
Castle Rackrent
and
The Absentee,
Anglo-Irish and pre–
Victorian ventures into "the social novel," provided Turgenev with hints
toward the writing of
A Sportsman's Notebook.
However limited such
influences and examples may have been their contributions were definite
and penetrating. The literature of England's Regency period, which in–
cluded the novels of Sir Walter Scott, held exotic and fashionable appeal
to at least two generations of Russian writers. In his later years Turgenev
was to confess an admiration for the writings of George Eliot and
Dickens, but this admiration was scarcely more than an accession to
his general knowledge of current literature; the figures of Byron and
Maria Edgeworth were of clear affinity to what he, as an absentee
landlord himself, had to say.
The larger motives for Turgenev's exile can be easily understood:
the need for freedom from his mother's tyranny, the Byronic legend
and the intellectual's, the artist's protest against Russian bureaucracy,
censorship and the Czar. Turgenev's income from his mother's estate
allowed for extraordinary freedom in living away from home. It is the
use that Turgenev made of that freedom which is important, which
brought him closer to exiles of temperament like Flaubert, and to
Henry James's double vision of Europe and America, than to the political
exiles from his own country.
