return to title page Introduction The Momentum of Byronism Terms of engagement Turgenev: biography Early upbringing Early influences Developing lifestyle Exile, repatriation, death Turgenev and political turbulence Slavophiles and Westernizers Forces of negation Byronic influence through others Pushkin and Lermontov Anarchists and early nihilists Fathers and Sons: from the source Bazarov as nihilist? Bazarov as Romantic hero? Conclusion Bazarov as Byronic negator and idealist Bibliography Text-Only Version

Tracing Byron's Influence on the Creation and Development of the Nihilist Bazarov in Ivan Turgenev's Fathers and Sons TURGENEV: BIOGRAPHY Early Artistic & Philosophical Influences Even before his tenure as a student in Berlin, Turgenev had been writing. His earliest writing illustrates the influence Byron had on the adolescent Turgenev. Transferred to the University of St. Petersburg to be nearer his brother Nicholas (and to find greater intellectual challenges than at Moscow University), Turgenev brought with him "a three-act poetic play-Steno-'a fantastic drama in pentameters, in which,' he explains in his reminiscences, 'I attempted with puerile clumsiness an imitation of Byron's Manfred,' " the action of which occurred in Italy: in the Coliseum, in a mountain cabin, in a Gothic church, and in the cell of a pious monk. By 1837, at the age of 19, Turgenev wrote Alexander Nikitenko that he had already written over a hundred poems, begun a long narrative poem, and planned another long poem. He wrote also that he had translated significant portions of King Lear, the first two acts of Othello, and Manfred (Magarshack 36-8). While in Berlin, Turgenev fell under the influence of German post-romantics and Russian Romantics-followers of Goethe, Schiller, and Schlegel-including the anarchist Bakunin, the Romantic Lermontov, and the not-yet-famous Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Magarshack describes Turgenev during this period as "an admirer of the Russian 'pseudo-sublime school' of writers and an imitator of Byron" (33). Turgenev also associated with and befriended several Russian literary critics, namely Peter Pletnyov, who discerned a glimmer of talent in the juvenile Steno (38) and Vissarion Belinsky, with whom Turgenev intensely discussed philosophical principles and ideals before Belinsky died of tuberculosis in 1848 (Moser 1972, 7). These and later friendships began to haunt him in the years after writing Fathers and Sons and Smoke, a time during which some of those same critics and friends who had earlier embraced him turned hostile toward him for his ambivalent attitudes toward Bazarov and nihilism. return to top of page