SOURCE: Costlow, Jane T. “Speaking the Sorrow of Women: Turgenev's ‘Neschastnaia’ and Evgeniia Tur's ‘Antonina.’” Slavic Review 50, no. 2 (summer 1991): 328-35.

In the following essay, Costlow explores the influence of Evgeniia Tur's Antonina on Turgenev's “Neschastnaia.”

In a letter of 1868 to Pavel Annenkov, Ivan Turgenev spoke of “Neschastnaia,” the story that he had just finished writing, as “moia posledniaia dochka.”¹ Authorship and paternity are conflated in this phrase, as are story and heroine: The melancholy Russian has given birth to a daughter.

Turgenev's statement of affiliation both hints at and obscures the genealogical truths of a story that takes familial complexity and silence as its explicit topic. “Neschastnaia” is a story which is about the silence surrounding a young woman's true place in a patriarchal household; its heroine is at once bound by and excluded from filial relationship. Beyond such explicit thematics, however, there lies another genealogical story in...