Ivan was the son of a country gentleman, and his real education began among the heathery hills and in the company of indefatigable hunters, whose stories, colored by the blaze of the camp-fire, were transcribed afterward by Ivan's wonderful pen. His intellect was awakened and formed in Berlin, where he ranged through the philosophies of Kant and Hegel, and, as he expresses it, threw himself head-first into the ocean of German thought and came out purified and regenerated for the rest of his life. Is it not wonderful,--the power of this German philosophy, which, though it seems but a chilly and lugubrious labyrinth, gives a new temper to a mind of fine and artistic quality, like the Toledo blade thrust into the cold bath, or Achilles after washing in the waters of the Styx? As scholasticism gave a strange power to the poetry of Dante, so German metaphysics seems to give wings to the imagination in our times. Those artist writers (like Zola, for example) who have not wandered through this dark forest seem to lack a certain tension in their mental vigor, a certain tone in their artistic spectrum!
Russian youth, about the year 1838, had their Mecca in the Faculty of Philosophy at Berlin, of which Hegel held one chair; and there the future celebrities of Russia were wont to meet. On leaving that radiant atmosphere of ideas and returning to his country home in Russia, Turguenief was overcome by the inevitable melancholy which attacks the man who leaves civilization behind with its intellectual brightness and activity, and enters a land where, according to the words of the hero of "Virgin Soil," "everything sleeps but the wine-shop." This feeling of nostalgia the novelist has analyzed with a master hand in the pages of "The Nobles' Nest."[1]
Hungry for wider horizons and for a literary life and atmosphere, Turguenief went to St. Petersburg. All the intellect of the time was grouped about Bielinsky, who was a rare critic, and its sentiments were voiced by a periodical called the "Contemporary." Bielinsky, who had adopted the pessimist theory that Russian art could never exist until there was political emancipation, was obliged to acknowledge the indisputable worth of Turguenief's first efforts, and encouraged him to publish some excellent sketches in a collection entitled "Papers of a Sportsman." Contrary to Bielinsky's prediction, Turguenief's success was the greater because, with that exquisite artistic intuition which he alone of all Russian writers possesses, he preached no moral and taught no lesson in it, which was the fashion or rather the pest of the novel in those days.