SOURCE: Johanson, Christine. “Turgenev's Heroines: A Historical Assessment.” Canadian Slavonic Papers 26, no. 1 (March 1984): 15-23.

In the following essay, Johanson examines Turgenev's female characters as realistic representations of contemporary Russian women.

“Kukshina … that progressive louse which Turgenev combed out of Russian reality”: thus Dostoevskii decried the false emancipée in Ottsy i deti.¹ Dmitrii Pisarev, the literary critic whose radical social views disgusted the great novelist, thought differently: “Between Kukshina and the emancipated woman, there is nothing in common.”² He went on to explain that Turgenev could not possibly portray an emancipated woman “in the finest sense” because such women did not yet exist in Russia.³

Both critic and novelist judged the fictional heroine not according to artistic criteria, but as a historical portrait of the contemporary Russian woman. So did the Russian reading public.⁴ Since the time of Belinskii, reader and critic had become accustomed to viewing fictional...