Turgenev at sea...

from a tribute to Joseph Conrad by Brian Thompson
In May 1838, the Tsar Nicholas I, in transit from St Petersburg to Lubeck, caught fire just outside Lubeck's harbour suburb of Travemunde. "We must send a courier to the Emperor!" a hysterical Russian general cried as the ship began to list. The carriages of the rich were lashed to the deck: his was burning as briskly as any.
In the melee, a nineteen-year-old student on his way to university in Berlin a giant of a boy with a disappointingly squeaky voice -offered one of the Danish sailors 10,000 roubles to be saved at the expense of others.
It was not so much his life the young Ivan Turgenev was trying to save as his freedom. Just at the very moment he had unshackled himself from an oppressive mother and a moribund Russian society, fate (or chance) had laid him by the heels.
When the uproar first began, he was playing cards for money in the saloon. As the tables shot across the floor, it dawned on him that for all the poetry he had read and all the literary ambitions that buzzed in his head, he could not swim.
However badly Turgenev actually behaved -and who does well in such circumstances? -the incident was magnified back in St Petersburg as a tale of detestable cowardice, an accusation that dogged him all his life. (Dostoevsky used a version of the incident in The Possessed.) It was vexing, but it did not disturb by a single ripple Turgenev's famously assured sense of self. Forty-five years after the event, he wrote his own account of the fire at sea. Wracked by cancer of the spine and with only a few weeks to live, he characteristically represented this ancient disgrace as farce, though one lit by flames fierce enough to redden the sea. His account was dictated, for he no longer had the power to hold and guide a pen. There is something especially moving in this detail, for the tale was being spun by the man he had become since being saved: that is, by the supreme storyteller and a literary hero to his times. The incident was depicted as farce because at heart all human experience is so.
"A Fire at Sea" was almost the last thing Turgenev wrote. He died two months later, in September 1883, in a little town outside Paris, located on a bend of the Seine where it sweeps north for a while. He carried into posterity as much accumulated love and respect as any writer of the century.