Though Turgenev had advised against it, A Month in the Country was finally performed in 1872, but the production drew little attention. Then, in January 1879, Maria Savina, a young actress at the Alexandrinsky Theatre, the imperial theater in Petersburg, decided to stage it again in a benefit performance, with herself in the role of Vera. It was a tremendous success. Turgenev visited Petersburg a month later, eventually persuaded himself to attend a performance, where he received a standing ovation, and promptly fell in love with Savina. He was over sixty; she was twenty-five. This was the last love of his life, expressed mainly in the letters he wrote to her while still in Russia and then from Paris, where he died in 1883. “Rakitin is me,” he confessed in one of them. “I always portray myself as the unsuccessful lover . . .”

A Month in the Country permanently entered the Russian repertory after the production at the Alexandrinsky Theatre. In 1909 Stanislavsky staged the play at the Moscow Art Theatre, with himself as Rakitin and Olga Knipper, Chekhov’s widow, as Natalya Petrovna. His work on the production was of great importance in the development of his “method.” He wanted the stage to be almost bare and the acting to be minimal, almost without gestures, an “inner delineation of character” by means of intonation. The Irish playwright Brian Friel echoed Stanislavsky in a note on his 1992 adaptation of the play: “Turgenev fashioned a new kind of dramatic situation and a new kind of dramatic character where for the first time psychological and poetic elements created a theater of moods where the action resides in internal emotion and secret turmoil and not in external events.” This understanding bears out Turgenev’s comment about the “complicated psychological task” he set himself in the play. A Month in the Country is often called “Chekhovian.” In fact, Turgenev’s theater not only preceded Chekhov’s by some forty years, but differs from it in important ways. On the other hand, it was undoubtedly Stanislavsky’s earlier work with Chekhov that led to this landmark production of Turgenev’s play.

Turgenev was one of the “men of the Forties,” as they came to be known. At the age of nineteen he twice saw Alexander Pushkin from a distance, not long before the poet was killed in a duel. His collection of stories, A Hunter’s Notes, was praised by Nikolai Gogol. But his contemporaries were the liberal intellectuals who emerged during the last years of the repressive reign of Nicholas I, largely in response to its repression. From 1838 to 1841, Turgenev studied classics and philosophy at the University of Berlin, where he made friends with a group of “Russian Hegelians,” among them Mikhail Bakunin, later the chief exponent of Anarchism, who was the model for the hero of his first novel, Rudin. In Russia and then in their “self-exile” abroad he made the acquaintance of Alexander Herzen and Vissarion Belinsky, two of the most forceful social critics of their time, opponents of the Russian autarchy and above all of serfdom. When his mother died in 1850, Turgenev returned to Russia to arrange the affairs of the estate at Spasskoe. One of his first acts was to free the household serfs; he also enabled the peasants to buy their freedom at rates very advantageous for them. This was more than a decade before the new emperor, Alexander II, known as the “tsar-liberator,” signed the proclamation that finally put an end to serfdom. The stories collected in A Hunter’s Notes were, among other things, a sharply critical portrayal of the conditions of serfdom and the life of the landed gentry. The book’s publication in 1852 cost Turgenev a month in prison and a year in “exile” on his estate. He was not allowed to travel abroad again until 1856.