SOURCE: Seeley, Frank Friedeberg. “First Stories.” In Turgenev: A Reading of His Fiction, pp. 84-100. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

In the following essay, Seeley traces Turgenev's development as a short story writer through an examination of his early short stories.

Turgenev's ‘remarkable decade’ (1843-52) saw first the brief, four-year efflorescence of his narrative poetry; simultaneously, but extending beyond that, his ten-year-long experimentation with play-writing that culminated in the psychological drama A Month in the Country; and thirdly, his struggles with the genre in which he was to achieve his greatest triumphs: the prose fiction that was to bring him national and international fame.

But the road to fame was no easy one: in fact, when Turgenev left Russia for the West in January 1847, he was sufficiently depressed by the level of recognition he had reached to be ready to play with the idea of giving up literature. Admittedly...