Inside the writer’s now state-owned mansion 200 miles south of Moscow, celebration of Russia as a self-confident cultural power jostles uneasily with constant reminders of another, less secure country striving to join the West.

Image Ivan Turgenev (1818-83) Credit... J. & L. Allgeyer/Hulton Archive, via Getty Images

Many of the books in Turgenev’s library are in French and German, two of the seven languages he knew aside from Russian.

Paintings and drawings on the walls recall the many years he lived outside Russia — attending college in Berlin and living in the German spa town of Baden-Baden and then in France, where he pursued a doomed love affair with Pauline Viardot, a married French opera singer of Spanish descent.

His writings contain sometimes withering comments about his homeland, which he sorely missed when he was absent but also often deplored.

“Russian people are lazy and slow, and not accustomed to thinking independently, nor acting consistently,” Turgenev wrote in an 1857 letter to a conservative Russian countess. “But necessity — that great word! — will stir even this bear up out of its den.”