Turgenev, Alexander Ivanovich

Alexander Turgenev was born in 1784 in Simbirsk; was one of the four sons of the rich Simbirsk landowner, future director of Moscow University I.P. Turgenev - being closely acquainted with N.I. Novikov , in 1792-1796 he was forced to live with his whole family in the family estate of Turgenev, where Alexander Ivanovich and his older brother Andrei was brought up by Swiss Georg Kriotof Tobler during these years.

In 1797-1800 he was brought up at the Moscow University guesthouse together with V. A. Zhukovsky , the friendship with which continued until the very death of Turgenev. By the time of his stay at the university boarding school were his first experiments in the field of literature - speeches and translations ^[1] ; he was a member of the literary circle of the boarding house, which took shape in 1801 as the Friendly Literary Society .

He began his service in the Moscow archive of the College of Foreign Affairs, where he met D.N. Bludov . In the period 1802-1804 he studied historical and political sciences at the University of Gottingen ^[2] , then, together with Kaisarov , traveled through the Slavic lands, collecting historical sources. During his stay at the University of Gottingen, he kept a diary in which on May 8 ( 20 ), 1803 he wrote:

Arriving in Moscow, my first attempt will be to collect, as much as possible, the perfect library for Russian history, by the way, and its sources (Urkunden), especially in the Moscow archive, where by now there are many unknown treasures for Russian history, especially for the new .

- Archive of the Turgenev brothers. - Vol. 2. - SPb., 1911. - S. 225

He served in the Ministry of Justice: in 1805 he entered the Law Drafting Commission ; accompanied emperor Alexander I abroad. In 1810, September 13, he was appointed director of the department of the Main Directorate of Spiritual Affairs of Foreign Confessions and, at the same time, from April 9, 1812, was also an assistant to the state secretary of the State Council (for the department of laws, with the often ill state secretary G.I. Gagarin ^[3] ); Since May 4, 1812 - Member of the Council of the Commission on the drafting of laws. He had the rank of a real state adviser .

When the Ministry of Spiritual Affairs and Public Education was formed in 1817, Turgenev headed one of its two departments - the Department of Spiritual Affairs. In 1819 he was granted the title of Chamberlain . In 1824, Prince A.N. Golitsyn was dismissed from the post of Minister of Spiritual Affairs and Public Education, and the Ministry itself was transformed. The Department of Spiritual Affairs received a completely different look; Turgenev was fired from managing him and remained only a member of the Law Drafting Commission. Since then, he mainly lived abroad and examined archives and libraries there, collecting information on the ancient and modern history of Russia. The materials thus collected, by order of Emperor Nicholas I, were placed at the disposal of the archaeographic commission and were published by it in 1841 and 1842. Under the title “Historiae Russiae Monumenta ex antiquis exterarum gentium archivis et bibliothecis deprompta ab AI Turgenevio”:

• volume one - extracts from the Vatican archives from the 11th century .;
• the second volume is the correspondence between popes and reports from the papal nuncii about Russia from 1584 to 1718, as well as acts on Russia extracted from the archives and libraries of England and France from 1557 to 1671, and acts compiled by J. B. Albertrandi for the Polish historian A S. Narushevich .

In addition, Turgenev made extracts, mainly from the Paris archives, for the era of Peter the Great (see “ Journal of the Ministry of Public Education ”, vols. 37 and 41).

Turgenev was close to many representatives of science and literature, both Russian and foreign; was a member of philanthropic and other societies: the secretary of the Bible Society , the secretary of the Women's Patriotic Society and some others; He was a member of the literary circle "Arzamas". N. M. Karamzin , I. I. Dmitriev , Prince P. A. Vyazemsky were his friends. He took part in the writings and fate of K. N. Batyushkov , A. S. Pushkin , I. I. Kozlov , E. A. Baratynsky . It was Alexander Turgenev who took Pushkin’s body from St. Petersburg to the family tomb of the Svyatogorsky monastery . Pushkinist Vadim Stark described it this way:

“And the man who first met Pushkin in St. Petersburg, Alexander Ivanovich Turgenev, who helped with the determination in the Lyceum, [...] he will accompany the funeral procession with the body of Pushkin at the request of Natalia Nikolaevna , or rather, even at the direction of Nikolai the First, because she wanted Danzas to do this, but Nikolai the First believed that he was guilty, should bear his punishment and suggested that Alexander Turgenev [convoy escorted]. This is how the ring closed: the one who first met Pushkin in St. Petersburg escorts him to this very last path ” ^[4] .

He never stopped learning all his life; his letters, in the words of I. I. Sreznevsky : “one of the treasures of our literature, both in terms of variety and richness of the data noted in them more or less vividly and correctly, and in their content, in thoughts, feelings expressed in them, according to literary dignity. "

In his mature years, A. I. Turgenev began to explicitly condemn Orthodoxy and Catholicism ; closest to him was Protestantism , in which, first of all, he appreciated the denunciation of the hypocrisy and hypocrisy of the Roman church.

During his next visit to Moscow, from the end of August 1845, he caught a cold during the distribution of money to convicts on the Sparrow Hills and soon died on December 3 ( 15 ), 1845 . He was buried at the Novodevichy cemetery .

• 1812-1824 - the house of A.N. Golitsyn - embankment of the Fontanka River, 20.
• 1836-1837 - Hotel "Demut" - embankment of the Moika River, 40.

Latest Publications

• Turgenev A. I. Russian court in the XVIII century / TRANS. with French, note and a pointer to the names of D. V. Solovyov; Design by artist L. E. Miller. - SPb. : Art-SPB, 2005. - 528, [40] p. - 3,000 copies. - ISBN 5-210-01590-4 . (per.)

• Alexander Yves. Turgenev // In the rank of chamberlains: // Court staff // The Month and the General Staff of the Russian Empire for 1841. Part 1. - St. Petersburg. : Printing house at the Imperial Academy of Sciences , 1841. - S. 4.
• Turgenev, Alexander Ivanovich // Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary : 86 volumes (82 volumes and 4 additional). - SPb. , 1890-1907.
• Turgenev Alexander Ivanovich // Big Soviet Encyclopedia : [in 30 vol.] / Ch. ed. A.M. Prokhorov . - 3rd ed. - M .: Soviet Encyclopedia, 1969-1978.
• Chereysky L.A. Contemporaries of Pushkin. Documentary essays. - M., 1999 .-- S. 79-81.
• Gillelson M. I. A. I. Turgenev and his literary heritage . - 1964
• Obituary // " Journal of the Ministry of Public Education ", 1846, vol. XLIX;
• The list of works of A.I. Turgenev // Ibid., Vol. XXXIV, XXXVII and XLI;
• Memoirs of P. A. Vyazemsky , in the “ Russian Archive ”, 1875;
• Sreznevsky I.I. Alexander Ivanovich Turgenev. A few recollections of him. 1785-1845 // Russian Antiquity , 1875. - V. 12. - No. 3. - S. 555-564; No. 4. - S. 739-749.
• Letters of Turgenev // Russian Antiquity of 1881 and 1882

• Alexander Turgenev at the Rodovod . Tree of ancestors and descendants