Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev (1818-1883)
Arranging for Gissing to contribute to Vestnik Evropy. 1880
Autograph letter signed ('Ivan Tourguéneff') to [George Gissing] ('Monsieur'), 50 rue de Douai, Paris, 2 December 1880.

In French. 1¼ pages, 209 x 136mm, on a bifolium with Turgenev's printed address and monogram. Provenance: Le Cesne-Viardot collection (blind stamp to lower left corner) – with Bernard Quaritch, 2008.

Arranging for Gissing to contribute to Vestnik Evropy. Turgenev confirms the arrangements for Gissing's contributions to the Saint Petersburg journal Vestnik Evropy (whose name he gives in French as the Messager d'Europe): 'I need to communicate some changes in the dates of your dispatches. Your first article ... being due to appear, not on the 1/13 January – but on the 1/13 February, here are the 4 dates for dispatch from London ... I need not remind you that the Russian style is 12 days behind yours. / As for the subjects of the articles, – we expect from you above all accounts of the political, parliamentary and social life – allowing the greatest freedom in your point of view – simply reminding you that the Messager d'Europe – is the mouthpiece of the liberal party in Russia. You would not touch upon literary questions except if they had a direct relationship to the political or social life of England'.

First published in Pierre Coustillas, George Gissing and Ivan Turgenev (1981). After the failure of his first novel, Workers in the Dawn (published in June 1880), George Gissing (1857-1903) had been obliged to seek work as a private tutor in Latin and Greek before the proposal came via Professor E.S. Beesly to write quarterly articles on English affairs for Vestnik Evropy. Although grateful for the £32 annual fee, Gissing found the work increasingly laborious, and his last contribution was in November 1882. After Turgenev's death, he wrote a brief eulogy in a letter to his sister Ellen, concluding 'I possess two letters, on matters of business, which he wrote me from Paris. They are of course valuable and will become more so in course of time' (quoted in Coustillas, op. cit., 12).

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