2 - Adapting Turgenev’s Novel as a Pastorale: Avdotya Smirnova’s Fathers and Sons

Summary

Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev, one of the most celebrated Russian nineteenth-century writers, was often criticised by his contemporaries for having a westernising outlook. Yet, as Frank Seeley suggests, Turgenev’s works tend to reveal his preference for home-grown Russian settings, showing a ‘countryman’s precise and detailed knowledge of vegetable and animal life and atmospheric conditions’. While some of Turgenev’s works were influenced by romanticism, most of them incorporate symbolism, mysticism, and the supernatural. In general, his mode of writing can be described as philosophical. According to James B. Woodward, ‘in each of the novels there is a significant substratum of philosophical ideas’. Woodward affirms that Turgenev presents himself as an impassionate observer of reality. Turgenev’s striving for objectivity and his self-presentation as a writer-observer who studies human behaviour make him unique among Russian writers. In Woodward’s opinion, Turgenev’s novels and essays ‘are the creations of a writer who is concerned […] with the tragedy of the human condition’. Likewise, Maria Ledkovsky points to Turgenev’s ability to reveal ‘the significance of the irrational in human life’. It would be wrong therefore to interpret his works as being preoccupied solely with social issues.

According to Robert Reid, many readers think that art, not ideology was Turgenev’s major concern. Additionally, Turgenev’s unique position as a cosmopolitan writer with close ties to France, Germany and Britain enabled him to popularise Russian literature abroad. Turgenev’s international reputation, as Reid asserts, ‘provided a cultural benchmark for successive generations of Russian émigrés’. Reid thinks that Turgenev’s influence was felt also by post-Soviet practitioners of the new Russian novel and by filmmakers. In the present chapter I will discuss Avdotya Smirnova’s 2008 television series based on Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons with a view to highlighting the democratising effect of her adaptation and her role as a co-author of the text participating in a dialogue with previous adaptors of his novel.