The fragment of the new play was written in June 1844, after the Viardots had gone back to Paris. Like “Imprudence,” it was to be a French-style one-act comedy of love, also set in Spain, though, as Turgenev remarked in his preface, a Spanish friend told him the setting could just as well be China. The characters’ names are a random mixture, none of them Russian: Fabian, a wealthy nobleman, thirty-five; Valery, Fabian’s friend, fifty; Nemorino, a poor student, nineteen; Klara, Fabian’s lady-love, twenty-three; Antonietta, her sister, seventeen. There are also Klara’s mute black servant and her pageboy. The fragment suggests that the plot would turn on the rivalry between Klara and her sharp-tongued young sister over Fabian. The student’s role is barely hinted at (Antonietta pretends to be indifferent when he is mentioned), and he does not appear in the fragment.

Five years later, while living with the Viardots in Paris and nearby Courtavenel, Turgenev began work on a play he entitled The Student, which was a major reworking of the earlier semi-Spanish comedy, now extended to five acts, set in Russia, and with additional characters. He sent the finished play to Petersburg in 1850 for publication in the liberal magazine The Contemporary, but the censors did not pass it. It circulated in the Petersburg salons, however, with considerable success. Turgenev made some revisions and resubmitted it to the censors under the title Two Women, but it was refused again. The censors insisted not only on cuts in some speeches but on making the heroine, Natalya Petrovna, a widow instead of a married woman, because they thought it improper to portray a possible adulteress on the stage. Turgenev finally agreed to all the changes, and the play was published in 1855 under its definitive title, A Month in the Country.

Turgenev wrote ten plays between 1843 and 1852, several of which were staged, though without much success. During those same years he also began to write the prose fiction on which his reputation now mainly rests. His first published story, “Andrei Kolosov,” appeared in the magazine Notes of the Fatherland in November 1844. (Curiously, he gave the same name to the hero of The Student in its early drafts.) Two years later he began to write the stories that would go into his first major work, A Hunter’s Notes (or A Sportsman’s Sketches), published in 1852, and considered by many, including himself, to be his finest contribution to Russian literature. These realistic stories, most of them written in Paris, are set in the deep Russian countryside around Turgenev’s estate, Spasskoe, in Orel province. The book met with much praise from both liberal and conservative critics. Then, in 1856, a year after the publication of A Month in the Country, he brought out his first novel, Rudin. And he never went back to playwriting.

In 1869 Turgenev included a volume of Scenes and Comedies in a collected edition of his works, prefacing it with a disclaimer: “Recognizing no dramatic talent in myself, I would not have yielded to the requests of my publishers, who wanted to publish my works with all possible completeness, if I had not thought that my plays, while unsatisfactory on stage, might be of some interest to read . . .” He added an intriguing comment about A Month in the Country specifically: “In its original version I set myself quite a complicated psychological task in this comedy, but the censorship of the time, having forced me to throw out the husband and turn his wife into a widow, completely distorted my intention.” In the 1869 version, which became canonical, he resurrected the husband, but did not restore the cuts that had been demanded by the censors.