Books: On the trail of Ivan the terribly elusive

Twilight of Love: Travels with Turgenev By Robert Dessaix SCRIBNER pounds 12.99 pounds 11.99 (P&P FREE) 08700 798 897

There is a kind of biography that, instead of giving us a narrative life, chooses to reveal the process of its own creation. The classic of this sub-genre was The Quest for Corvo, in which A J A Symonds wrote about his discovery of an obscure novelist's work and his fascination with it. There are biographers who make following the subject's footsteps the subject: a recent example was Reading Chekhov, which combined critical biography with a travelogue about the writer Janet Malcolm's visits to Chekhovian sites in Russia and encounters with its citizens - none of whom appeared (to her) to understand Chekhov as well as she does. The danger with this approach is that the reader will eventually throw the book across the room, muttering: whose life is it anyway?

Dessaix goes even further than Malcolm in putting himself at the heart of the narrative. The difference, though, is that he has a profound knowledge of Russia, its language and literature, and comes with an argument about his subject's work which requires comparisons between Turgenev's time and our own. As he tells us in his preface, he began an affair with Russia some 50 years ago when, as a child of 11 or 12, he picked up a dictionary at a secondhand bookshop in Sydney and set out to learn a language that fascinated him at the start because of the appearance of its written texts. He went on to study at Moscow University, then to teach Russian at the Australian National University in Canberra, before leaving to pursue a career as a novelist and literary critic.

By rights, Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev should be the most accessible of the great Russian novelists: Henry James said that "there is perhaps no novelist of alien race who more naturally than Ivan Turgenev inherits a niche in a Library for English readers." His influence on European literature was considerable, not least because of his friendships with James, Flaubert, Zola, Maupassant and a host of others among the Realists and Naturalists of the later 19th century. Yet he seems strangely remote and, unlike Chekhov, inspires little affection. Less Russian than Gogol, less monumental than Tolstoy and a good deal less barmy than Dostoevsky, he may be the one Russian writer to derive great literature from a pretty dull life. He does adopt a tone of detached scepticism, a melancholy disenchantment. Even Dessaix admits to finding him an acquired taste.

The Australian feels an affinity, though, with a man from a country that is seen by Europeans as being on the edge of civilisation. Turgenev himself was not keen on Russia and spent much of his life abroad: in Baden-Baden and Paris, where Dessaix goes to look for him, hunting down the houses where he lived and the parks where he walked, usually finding that the ghost has drifted off to spend eternity elsewhere. These disappointments have a Turgenevian feel.

However, what really interests Dessaix is love. From 1843 (when he was 25) to the end of his life, Turgenev loved a married woman, Pauline Viardot. Their relationship was accepted by Pauline's husband Louis and the affair may have been unconsummated. He did have sexual relations, flings and even infatuations elsewhere, but the love of his life was Pauline. This was a great passion and one which, Dessaix claims, would be impossible today. His Turgenev is a Quixotic figure, at the closing of a whole emotional era; and we have lost something in our inability to experience a surpassing love of this kind.

As he pursues Ivan Sergeyevich to Germany, France and Russia, Dessaix meets old acquaintances - Ilse in Baden-Baden, Daniel in Paris and, finally, Irina - who listen to his ideas. For us, gentle readers, while describing Turgenev's passion, he drops hints about what he calls "my own arrangements". He tells us that he has been married and that his first sexual experience was in Paris, with a man. So what are Ilse, Daniel and Irina to him? How modern of us to want to know, he seems to be saying; how indiscreet we have become - how un-Turgenevian; how beside the point...

And beside Turgenev. How useful will this book be as an introduction? There are brief summaries that make the novels and stories - First Love, Fathers and Sons, or the one with the untranslatable title, Dvoryanskoe gnezdo ("a nest of gentlefolk"? Please!) - sound inviting. But, ultimately, this is not about the works, not even much about their author, but about attitudes to love. And, accidentally, the most interesting chapter turns out to be the one on post-Soviet Russia, in which Dessaix discusses how the country differs from the one he first encountered as a student long ago. There is a whole book he could write on that... Ah! Poor Turgenev. Missed him again.