Turgenev’s ‘Constancy’ in His Final Novel

Abstract

Few readers of Turgenev’s last novel Nov’ (‘Virgin Soil’, 1876) have challenged his own assessment of it as ‘unsuccessful’.1 The usual view of the work, with which Turgenev concurred, is that in this longest and most ambitious of his novels he attempted a task that was simply beyond his powers, and that it was beyond his powers because he lacked, due to his prolonged absences abroad in the late sixties and seventies, the intimate knowledge of social developments in Russia which he needed in order to present a convincing picture of the Populist movement and its representatives. ‘In the fate of all Russian writers of any prominence’, he wrote, ‘there has been a tragic side; mine was my absenteeism’ (P., XII, 116).