Virgin Soil

The title of Turgenev’s last novel, Virgin Soil, evokes Russia’s vast countrysides and its fertile lands, ready to receive the seed of future crops from the farmer’s hands.

It also indirectly refers to the Russian peasantry, the object of propaganda and organizing actions by the ‘Going to the People’ movement of the 1870s, which is Turgenev’s chief focus in his novel.

This populist movement, the Narodniki, was led by young students and intellectual radicals, most in their twenties, who went to the countrysides to politicize “the people” for revolutionary action against the Czar.