SOURCE: Lowe, David A. “Turgenev and the Critics.” In Critical Essays on Ivan Turgenev, pp. 1-15. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1988.

In the following essay, Lowe provides an overview of the critical response to Turgenev's work.

Turgenev and the Critics

As an artist, Ivan Turgenev has long since acquired the reputation of an apostle of moderation. As Dmitry Merezhkovsky noted in a presentation delivered in 1909, “In Russia, in a land of every sort of maximalism, revolutionary and religious, a land of self-immolations, a land of the most frenzied excesses, Turgenev is practically our only genius of the right measure after Pushkin. …”¹ Predictably, however, especially in a Russian context, Turgenev's perceived moderation and minimalism evoked extreme responses in his lifetime and continue to produce partisan reactions even today.

The major issues in Turgenev criticism revolve around a few fundamental polarities, most of them interrelated and several of them having perhaps...