SOURCE: Allen, Elizabeth Cheresh. “Turgenev's Last Will and Testament: Poems in Prose.” In Freedom and Responsibility in Russian Literature: Essays in Honor of Robert Louis Jackson, edited by Elizabeth Cheresh Allen and Gary Saul Morson, pp. 53-68. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1995.

In the following essay, Allen considers Turgenev's Poems in Prose as the appropriate conclusion to a great literary career in an attempt to reassert the author's position in literary history.

Turgenev's final published work, Poems in Prose (Stikhotvoreniia v proze), can prove puzzling—and even somewhat discomfiting—to those of his current readers who encounter it. In contrast to the preponderance of his earlier works, this last collection of writings appears, to put it charitably, uneven, whether judged aesthetically, psychologically, or philosophically. Except for brevity, it is difficult to discover any common thread, any unifying force for coherence among these brief sketches. Nor do strong underlying...