Two figures came to typify the intellectuals of mid-nineteenth-century Russia: the superfluous man, and the nihilist. Both terms were coined by Turgenev, the first in his novella of 1850, The Diary of a Superfluous Man, and the second in his novel Fathers and Sons, published in 1862. While Turgenev shared the liberalism of his intellectual contemporaries, who often found themselves “superfluous” in the Russia of Nicholas I, he came to detest the revolutionary and utopian extremism that was embodied by the nihilists, the so-called “new men” of the Sixties, whose first spokesman was the thinker and novelist Nikolai Chernyshevsky. Chernyshevsky’s thesis, The Aesthetic Relations of Art to Reality, which he defended at the university in 1855, the same year that A Month in the Country was published, propounded a purely utilitarian notion of art. Turgenev found his writing physically repulsive; Tolstoy said that it “stinks of bedbugs.” A later aristocrat, Vladimir Nabokov, gave us the most pitiless and at the same time moving portrait of Chernyshevsky in the fourth chapter of his novel The Gift.

In expanding the sketch of “Two Sisters” into A Month in the Country, Turgenev made two important additions to the cast: Mikhail Rakitin and Dr. Shpigelsky. They are the two major speechmakers of the play, and their speeches suffered most from the censors’ cuts. In the original version of the last act, Rakitin, who is paying the price for his superfluousness, continued his long speech to the student Belyaev, describing the slavery and humiliation of love, by advising the young man to seize his chance with women, not to lose time, not to worry about fine feelings, because a woman’s love is like a spring freshet, rushing with water one day, and dried up the next. The censors considered the passage morally inadmissible. Shpigelsky’s speech to Lizaveta Bogdanovna in the fourth act suffered even more. His description of his kowtowing to the gentry was a more detailed and pointed caricature of their gullibility and his own duplicity, and in describing his childhood, he confessed that he was illegitimate, the son of a poor girl, had gone about barefoot and hungry, and nursed an undying hatred of the “benefactor” (one of his mother’s noble “friends”) who had sent him to Moscow and the university to get him out of the way. That was all removed. As for Belyaev, in the original cast list Turgenev described him as a student in the department of political studies at the university. The censors left only the word “student.”

The fact that the first version of A Month in the Country was entitled The Student suggests that Belyaev was to be the central character of the play. And in a sense he is. But not in the way that Soviet criticism thought. In the Soviet view, the play is built on the conflict between the decadent gentry (Natalya Petrovna, Rakitin, Anna Pavlovna, Bolshintsov) and the new forces, embodied by Belyaev and Vera, with Islaev and Shpigelsky somewhere between the two, the one partly justified by his hard work, the other by his poor origins and class consciousness. Belyaev asks to borrow a magazine from Rakitin, probably an intellectual journal not unlike The Contemporary, in which Turgenev published his own work. When Rakitin asks him if he reads poetry or stories, Belyaev says he prefers the critical articles, suggesting the practical turn of mind of the “new men.” The social and political situation of Russia at the time is certainly implicit in the play, as is Turgenev’s hope for a renewal brought about by fresh young people like Belyaev. But if Rakitin is a superfluous man, Belyaev is hardly a nihilist. His freshness is something other than the promise of social change, something more universally human.