SOURCE: Ripp, Victor. “Turgenev as a Social Novelist: The Problem of the Part and the Whole.” In Literature and Society in Imperial Russia, 1800-1914, edited by William Mills Todd III, pp. 237-57. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1978.

In the following essay, first presented at a conference in 1975, Ripp considers Ivan Turgenev's depictions of social constraints and his conception of an ideal future for Russia.

I

In the early 1850's, shortly before the publication of the first collected edition of Notes of a Huntsman, Turgenev began to express dissatisfaction with his literary achievements. This was a recurrent phenomenon in his career, since he believed, notoriously, that life had set him tasks beyond his capacity as a writer, not to say as a human being. As many contemporaries perceived, Turgenev's modest pose was often only a form of self-dramatization; but in this case it had concrete consequences. Specifically, the dissatisfaction...