Speaking the Sorrow of Women: Turgenev's “Neschastnaia” and Evgeniia Tur's “Antonina”

In a letter of 1868 to Pavel Annenkov, Ivan Turgenev spoke of "Neschastnaia," the story that he had just finished writing, as "moia posledniaia dochka."' Authorship and paternity are conflated in this phrase, as are story and heroine: The melancholy Russian has given birth to a daughter. Turgenev's statement of affiliation both hints at and obscures the genealogical truths of a story that takes familial complexity and silence as its explicit topic. "Neschastnaia" is a story which is about the silence surrounding a young woman's true place in a patriarchal household; its heroine is at once bound by and excluded from filial relationship. Beyond such explicit thematics, however, there lies another genealogical story in which Turgenev himself takes part. This second story concerns the legitimacy of Turgenev himself as much as that of his heroine; it touches on the genesis of Turgenev's own art and his relationship to women writers of the 184Qs. It is a story suggested by the thematics of paternity and legitimacy and also by the very structure of Turgenev's narrative.