The Cancer Diagnosis, Surgery and Cause of Death of Ivan Turgenev (18181883)

Abstract

Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev (1818-1883) was a Russian novelist, poet and playwright born in Oryol, Russia, the second of three sons (Fig. 1). Only French was spoken at home, so he learned Russian mainly with family servants. His first major publication, a short story collection entitled A Sportsman’s Sketches (1852), was a milestone of Russian Realism ; this work takes aim at the cruelties of a serf society. Actually, his mother controlled over 500 serfs with strict demeanor and ran her family as despotically as she did her estates. Nevertheless, at the time he attended preparatory schools in Moscow, the young Turgenev was already rebelling against his aristocratic background ; his fellow students, struck by his democratic leanings, called him “the American”. His most famous and enduring novel Fathers and Sons (1862) is regarded as one of the major works of 19th-century fiction, that include themes such as the beauty of early love, and failure to reach one’s dreams. However, the leading character in this novel, Eugene Bazarov, considered the ‘first Bolshevik’ in Russian literature, was in turn heralded as either a glorification or a parody of the ‘new men’ of the 1860s. Indeed, Bazarov illustrates the conflict between the older generation, reluctant to accept reforms, and the nihilistic youth. From the central character of Bazarov, Turgenev drew a classical portrait of the mid-nineteenth-century nihilist movement (derived from the Latin nihil, meaning “nothing”). This Russian movement rejected all authorities and can be summarized by Mikhail Bakunin’s famous dictum : “Let us therefore trust the eternal Spirit which destroys and annihilates only because it is the unfathomable and eternal source of all life. The passion for destruction is a creative passion, too !”. After the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881, the Nihilists were known throughout Europe as proponents of the use of violence in order to bring about political change. Fathers and Sons was set during the first nihilist period of social ferment, from Russia’s defeat in the Crimean War to the Emancipation of the Serfs. Hostile reaction to Fathers and Sons and his personal stand as a liberal between tsarist autocratic rule and the spirit of revolutionary radicalism prompted Turgenev’s decision to leave Russia. Turgenev wrote on themes similar to those found in the works of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, but he did not approve of the religious and moral preoccupations that his two great contemporaries brought to their artistic creation. Turgenev was closer in temperament to his French friends Gustave Flaubert, Emile Zola and Guy de Maupassant. Turgenev’s artistic purity made him a favorite of novelists of the next generation, such as Henry James and Joseph Conrad. James wrote no fewer than five critical essays on Turgenev’s work and considered him as the Acta Chir Belg, 2015, 115, 241-246