You will have the opportunity to visit the Turgenev Dacha at your leisure on Saturdays and Sundays from 2.30 pm to 5.30 pm.
Nestled in Bougival, on the hillside of a wooded park, this uniquely charming residence evokes both the writer’s native Russia...
You will have the opportunity to visit the Turgenev Dacha at your leisure on Saturdays and Sundays from 2.30 pm to 5.30 pm.
Nestled in Bougival, on the hillside of a wooded park, this uniquely charming residence evokes both the writer’s native Russia and 19th-century Romantic Europe.
It was here, in this chalet with its half-Russian, half-Swiss appearance, that the author of *Tales of a Hunter* and *Virgin Lands* spent the last nine years of his life. Surrounded by trees, books and music, Turgenev found a fertile source of inspiration here. He wrote some of his major works there and, in 1876, completed the Russian translation of ‘The Legend of Saint Julian the Hospitaller’ by his friend Gustave Flaubert.
The dacha, as he liked to call it, stands at the heart of the Domaine des Frênes, owned by the family of the opera singer Pauline Viardot, his muse and loyal friend whom he had met in St Petersburg. It was a deep relationship, marked by forty years of correspondence, admiration and artistic kinship, lasting until the writer’s death in 1883.
A place of remembrance and artistic encounters
The house retains the writer’s spirit and intimacy: his pianoforte, his personal photographs, his study, his bedroom… Each room evokes his commitment to freedom, his opposition to slavery, and his love of nature and the arts.
Access to the Turgenev Museum via the woodland area at 28 Rue de la Croix aux Vents. At the far end of the small car park, follow the path straight ahead for 350 metres.
