A MONTH IN THE COUNTRY

Background Notes

The road to becoming a classic play, it seems, is not always direct, and A Month in the Country took the long route. Written over a period of two years (1848-1850) mostly in France while Turgenev was  pining after his life-long love, opera superstar Pauline Viardot, it took more than fifty years for this play to be fully accepted even in Turgenev's native Russia. 

In 1850 the Russian censor refused to allow the play – then titled The Student – to be produced, strongly disapproving of its overt social criticism. Turgenev, never completely confident of his theatrical abilities, made some adjustments to the text, including changing the title to Two Women, and then submitted the play for publication in 1854. Permission was granted, provided certain changes, more moral than political, were made. Turgenev did another re-write and finally found a title that stuck: A Month in the Country. It came out in Russia in 1855 but the play's lack of a clear moral stance was controversial enough to ensure that no theatre company stepped forward to produce it. Its author was so disheartened he gave up writing for the theatre altogether to focus on novels and prose works. 

A Month in the Country was in fact not produced until 1872 by the Maly Theatre, and then only in a single "benefit" performance, chiefly because one of their actresses longed to play the lead character, Natalya Petrovna. The reception was tepid and the play was not produced again until 1879, when it was more cordially received. Most sources agree that the play did not enter the Russian canon until thirty years later, twenty-plus years after Turgenev's death, by way of a visionary production at the renowned Moscow Art Theatre. That incandescent interpretation appeared in 1909, directed by the great actor/manager Constantin Stanislavsky, who also played the role of the hopelessly enamored, frustrated lover Rakitin. 

Richard Freeborn, who translated the play into English some years ago, has said, "This play has been called Chekhovian though it predates Chekhov's great works for the theatre by more than forty years. Its success was due to Chekhov's popularity and also to the Moscow Art Theatre's production." Perhaps Stanislavsky's troupe was able to reveal the heart of the play because of their understanding of Chekhov, or possibly because they had developed a strong, ensemble style of acting. The early productions of the play tended to serve as a vehicle for the actress playing the role of Natalya Petrovna, when what Turgenev actually wrote was an ensemble piece that derives its power and warmth from the interplay between all of the characters' hopes and longings, dreams and frustrations.   

What is timeless – and so modern – is Turgenev's refusal to judge his characters. It's easy to see why people in 1850 might have been baffled by this story. In those days, it was generally believed to be impossible for a married woman to have feelings for anyone other than her husband without being a bad person. Natalya Petrovna is many things but she is not malicious or mean, and Turgenev neither condemns nor approves of her behaviour. He simply reveals her to us in all her human frailty: a woman who is, ultimately, a failure at love. The writer himself had a love affair that defied convention and, some might say, good sense too, so he knew from his own experience that the heart does not observe societal codes, nor obey the dictates of reason. There is no grand or tidy lesson to be learned – necessarily – from the goings-on during this month in the country. There is only the sudden, shocking, fierce experience of love: original, sometimes brutal and always unforgettable.

Artist Biography 

1818 – On October 28^th in Orel Province (now in the Ukraine) the second of three sons, Ivan, is born to Sergei Nikolaevich, a colonel in the Russian cavalry, and Varvara Petrovna Lutovinova, an heiress.  The shy, soft-spoken boy is raised as an aristocrat, meaning he speaks French at home, learns Russian from servants, and is privately tutored. 

1834 – His father dies and Ivan and his brother Nicholas endure a lonely, abusive adolescence at the hands of their mother who rules her sons, as well as her 5,000-plus serfs, with an implacable will, and a whip. 

1835 – After a year at the University of Moscow, Turgenev studies classics, Russian literature and philology at the University of St. Petersberg. His fellow students call him "The American" because of his democratic leanings. 

1838 – He decides to get his Masters in philosophy and history at the University of Berlin. En route, the steamer in which he's traveling catches fire. Rumours spread in Russia that he behaved in a selfish, cowardly way during the crisis. This experience, and the calumny that followed it, will haunt him for the rest of his life.   

1841 – Turgenev begins a career at the Russian Civil Service. He believes passionately in social reform for his country through Westernization, which eventually causes the Ministry to let him go. His mother, enraged, refuses to give him a kopek. He has already begun to write and he now earns a precarious living from his poems, criticism and short stories, though his writing is strongly and recognizably influenced in these early days by the great Russian writer Nicolai Gogol.   

1843 – Turgenev sees mezzo-soprano Pauline Viardot in a production of The Barber of Seville and falls instantly in love with her, a passion he will maintain unswervingly until the moment of his death more than forty years later. 

1844-50 – During these years the romantically unsure Turgenev has a couple of brief affairs with servant girls. One of these relationships produces his only child, a girl later known as Paulinette. 

1852 – Turgenev's reputation is made with the publication of A Sportsman's Sketches. These short pieces are written from the point of view of a young nobleman who comes to see the serfs who work on his property as human beings in their own right. This book is said to have contributed to the emancipation of the serfs (by Tsar Alexander II in 1861) but it, along with a “treasonable” obituary praising Gogol, earns its writer a stay in jail and nearly two years of house arrest. 

1853-60 – Turgenev writes some of his finest work in this period: A Nest of the Gentry, First Love and his best-known play, A Month in the Country. His pervading themes are the beauty of early love, the failure to reach one's dreams, and frustrated love. In 1855 he meets Lev Tolstoy, then an unknown writer. He champions him but their relationship is always prickly. 

1861 – Animosity with Tolstoy reaches its height when Tolstoy challenges Turgenev to a duel. He later apologizes but the damage is done and the two men do not speak for 17 years. 

1862 – Fathers and Sons, Turgenev's enduring classic novel about an older generation clinging to the past and an idealistic younger generation who long for reform, appears in this year. Bazarov, the main character, has been called the first Bolshevik in Russian literature. He is also the first nihilist, a term coined by Turgenev. Unfortunately, Fathers and Sons is not embraced by the critics, causing its author such pain and disillusionment that he decides to leave Russia.   

1863 – Turgenev moves first to Germany – perhaps because he knows it from his student days – and then to London, where Fathers and Sons enjoys great acclaim. He is embraced in Britain and receives many honours and awards. 

1871 – In this year he settles definitively in Paris with Pauline Viardot and her family. Thereafter he, Viardot, and her husband live together. He treats her children as his own and later buys the family a villa. The exact nature of his relationship to the celebrated Viardot is still a subject of debate among scholars. 

1872 – 1882 – He writes, though his great works are behind him. He and Gustave Flaubert become close friends.

1883 – On September 3^rdat Bougival near Paris, in the house where he lives with the Viardots, Turgenev dies in Pauline's arms. His remains are returned to Russia where he is buried in the Volkoff Cemetery in St. Petersburg.

Tidbits 

• In 1965, Ingrid Bergman starred in a London production of A Month in the Country, directed by Michael Redgrave.
• The Royal Ballet’s Frederick Ashton freely adapted the novel into a one-act ballet in 1976, set to the music of Chopin. Natalya was danced by Canadian Lynn Seymour. The National Ballet of Canada is the only other company given permission to perform Ashton’s ballet. Karen Kain danced Natalya in 1995.
• At the Roundabout in New York in 1979, mother and daughter Tammy Grimes and Amanda Plummer starred as Natalya Petrovna and Vera Alexandrovna.
• A film version was released in 1983, starring Susannah York and Ian McShane (later of HBO's Deadwood).

• In the 1990's a translation by Brian Friel (writer of this season's Faith Healer) enjoyed multiple productions at the Abbey in Dublin, the RSC and at the Pit in London.

• A 1995 New York production of the play starred Helen Mirren (herself of Russian extraction), who won a Theatre World Award for her work as Natalya Petrovna, and Ron Rifkin (now starring in the television series Brothers and Sisters with Sally Field), as Rakitin.