I am on my death-bed; there is no possibility of my recovery. I write you expressly to tell you how happy I have been to be your contemporary, and to utter my last, my urgent prayer. Come back, my friend, to your literary labors. That gift came to you from the source from which all comes to us. Ah, how happy I should be could I think you would listen to my entreaty! My friend, great writer of our Russian land, respond to it, obey it!
From the Humanym archive
Ivan Turgenev to Leo Tolstoy, 1883
Dying of cancer, Turgenev sent a last plea urging the estranged Tolstoy to return to his fiction; it survives only as quoted by Henry James in a memorial essay.
Why this letter
Ivan Turgenev and Leo Tolstoy were rival giants of Russian fiction who had once quarrelled badly and gone years without speaking. By 1883 Turgenev was dying of spinal cancer at Bougival, near Paris, and Tolstoy had largely turned from fiction to religious and moral writing. This brief letter, among the last Turgenev wrote, was his plea that Tolstoy return to the literary work Turgenev believed was his true gift. The American novelist Henry James, who had known Turgenev, quoted it in a memorial essay in 1897 and credited no translator for the English wording.
Provenance
- Author
- Ivan Turgenev (1818–1883)
- To
- Leo Tolstoy
- Written
- June or July 1883
- Source
- Library of the World's Best Literature, essay on Ivan Turgenev by Henry James (1897), via Wikisource
- Rights
- Public domain — Ivan Turgenev died in 1883; the text follows the English wording as quoted in Henry James's 1897 essay, which names no translator.
- Translation
- From Russian by Unnamed translator, Library of the World's Best Literature (New York, 1896-97), 1897
Quoted by Henry James in his 1897 essay on Turgenev for the Library of the World's Best Literature; this text follows James's quotation, which names no translator. The original Russian appears in Turgenev's collected correspondence.