Literary pilgrimages tend not to end well, at least in my experience. At Concord, Emerson’s house smelled so strongly of mildew and mothballs – not odors I associate with his thought – that I had to flee the premises. When my family and I went to Illiers, the magical “Combray” of Proust, we stopped at an inn – I think it was called the Duchesse de Guermantes – where the Duchesse wouldn’t have lodged her spaniel, let alone her stable boy. The food was inedible and, to make matters worse, all the other diners ate with copies of “A la recherche du temps perdu” propped studiously against the salt-shaker. It cost an extra 15 francs to take a shower; only the fleas were free.

In England, my wife and I once walked from Salisbury to the village of Bemerton to see the church where George Herbert had once served; the little chapel did seem infused with holiness, but at the parsonage, a sleek young man in shorts answered our knock. A well-fed spaniel lolled on the immaculate lawn, next to a red Porsche, while his wife, a shapely blonde in a very brief red bikini, lay sunbathing under the prayerful old windows.

Now when I read Herbert’s poem “The Collar,” I see that spaniel, and “Prayer” summons up teasing memories of abbreviated swimwear. So it has been in the houses of Hemingway in Key West or of Goethe in Frankfurt or of Victor Hugo in Paris. It is a cherished vacancy that is so reverently conserved in these shrines.

Still, I understand the temptation to hover over the actual precincts where some tutelary spirit once presided in the flesh, and no doubt I’ll make other such pilgrimages, even against my better judgment. The same urge has now led the Australian writer Robert Dessaix to follow in the ghostly footprints of Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev, an author he has been passionately devoted to for some 30 years and whose every written word, in print and manuscript, he has read in the original Russian. In “Twilight of Love: Travels With Turgenev” (Shoemaker & Hoard, 288 pages, $24), Mr. Dessaix tracks his beloved quarry through Germany, France, and finally, Russia, in an attempt to capture that ever-escaping sense of a living man behind the words.

This isn’t easy with any author, but is particularly difficult in the case of Turgenev. He disdained the flamboyance of his contemporaries. Dostoyevsky, who envied and loathed Turgenev (and lampooned him cruelly in “The Devils”) possesses an emphatic aura that hovers in the memory. Tolstoy as well comes pungently to mind, both as novelist and as crackpot sage, as does even poor Gogol (my own favorite among the Russians), with his scathing humor and suicidal asceticism. But Turgenev is slippery; even to his compatriots, who tried in vain to pin him down on political, moral, and spiritual issues, he remained evasive.

Rich and handsome, exquisitely cosmopolitan, equally at ease in three languages, an aristocratic landowner, and a successful if controversial novelist, Ivan Sergeyevich seemed to have everything. In fact, as it turns out, he had everything but what he most longed for. That lifelong desire, which both tormented and comforted him for more than 40 years, sprang from his passion for the fabulous French diva Pauline Viardot. Mr. Dessaix uses this (probably) unrequited love affair as a kind of Ariadne’s thread through the dim labyrinth of Turgenev’s inner life.

Despite his corny title, he accomplishes this with wit, humor, considerable insight, and a very burnished prose style, at once impressionistic and incisive. Even if Mr. Dessaix doesn’t accomplish what he set out to do – both to catch Turgenev himself on the wing and to plumb the nature of love, in his day and ours – in the end it doesn’t matter. The journey he leads us on holds our fascination, from the first braking of his train at Baden-Baden to his final sojourn at Spasskoye.

For Mr. Dessaix, the conundrum is this: Turgenev loved Pauline Viardot for four decades, during which time he was virtually inseparable from her and her husband, his friend Louis Viardot, and their children. During much of that time, he lived with them, or beside them, or in an adjacent home (built especially to be close to theirs). He spent much of every day in their company; he helped to raise their children; he shared their triumphs and their debacles. He was what Germans call a “Hausfreund,” a “house-friend,” but without the sexual privileges which that third point of the triangle normally accords the “friend.”

What, Mr. Dessaix wonders, did love mean for Turgenev and for his circle? Was he a sort of 19th-century “troubadour” (as Mr. Dessaix calls him), chastely serving an adored mistress? Mr. Dessaix is doubly troubled by this because he is convinced that such a love could not exist, or even be comprehensible, in our time. In his view we’ve lost even a superficial understanding of what Turgenev’s lifelong devotion betokened.

I’m not sure this holds true. I don’t pretend to know what “love” in all its intensities of nuance comprises, but my instinct tells me that it probably isn’t so radically different now from what it was in Turgenev’s day. Certainly I have witnessed (and sometimes experienced) the kind of passionate, decades-long adoration Turgenev felt for Pauline Viardot. But in any case, isn’t bafflement part of the very essence of love at any age?

Turgenev’s passion puzzled his contemporaries. Not because they had lost the meaning of “love,” but because Madame Viardot, great singer though she may have been, was downright plug-ugly. Mr. Dessaix sums it up nicely:

What was unforgivable about this love – and few forgave it – was not the fact that Pauline Viardot was married. … What was unforgivable was her ugliness. In a travel diary, published years later as “A European Journal,” the Englishwoman Mary Wilson, who saw Pauline perform at the Berlin Opera in 1847, called her “personally hideous beyond compare.” The German poet Heinrich Heine tried to be a little kinder: Yes, she was ugly, he wrote, “but with the kind of ugliness that was noble.”

Even Mr. Dessaix, contemplating her portrait, calls Pauline “masculine, squat and double-chinned.”(I suspect that she was what the French call une jolie laide: a woman whose very ugliness makes her somehow attractive.) This is a piquant detail, but what does it have to do with love? We can no longer hear Pauline’s glorious voice, which is surely where her true beauty lay, and that was what first drew Turgenev to her.

His quest for the meaning of love forms Mr. Dessaix’s rather portentous subtext, but what makes his account compelling is his gift for evoking place together with the curious, disconnected, flitting impressions travel affords us. I’ve never visited the precious spa town of Baden-Baden, but I feel as though I’ve been there after reading his description. So, too, with his evocations of Courtavenel, outside Paris, where Turgenev sojourned with the Viardots (the original chateau has been razed but Mr. Dessaix conjures impressions vividly out of absence).

The finest section, however, is the third, in which he recounts his stops in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and the remains of Spasskoye, the Turgenev country manor. The bizarre melange of glitz and squalor evident throughout contemporary Russia comes through brilliantly in his pages. He finds St. Petersburg “bamboozling” and “surreal,” while in the countryside the sour villages cling “like scabs to the slopes beside the road.” There’s an ad for Coca-Cola in the parking lot beside Turgenev’s old home.

If this were merely a record of impressions, it would be only mildly interesting. Instead, Mr. Dessaix weaves the biography of Ivan Sergeyevich together with a loving but dispassionate discussion of his novels and stories, from “A Hunter’s Notes” (written in 1847 at Courtavenel) through “Fathers and Sons,” “Smoke,” and “The Torrents of Spring” to his last and most ambitious novel, “Virgin Soil,” published in 1877, six years before his death. Mr. Dessaix also gives us unforgettable vignettes, not only of the Viardots, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and such lifelong friends as Flaubert, but of Turgenev’s savage and domineering mother, who terrorized him as well as the hapless serfs under her hair-trigger lash. His account of Turgenev’s death, in September 1883 at Bougival, on the outskirts of Paris, is terrible and moving:

In his green bedroom at Bougival, across the landing from his study, when he lay dying in great pain, Turgenev begged visitors to give him poison. In the Rue de Douai, where his cries of agony could be heard up and down the street, he implored his infinitely loved Pauline to throw him from the window. (She told him he was far too big and heavy – and he laughed.) He asked Guy de Maupassant, right at the end, to give him a revolver.

Like the master himself, Mr. Dessaix delights in quick suggestive dabs and almost pointillist evocations. By the end of his book, Turgenev has become unexpectedly real to the reader. So, too, has Mr. Dessaix. Interspersed with his itinerary are flashbacks and asides about his own life. We come to understand that he feels an intense affinity to Turgenev, not only because he himself is polyglot and steeped in European culture but because both come from the far ends of the earth (Mr. Dessaix lives in Hobart, Tasmania) and both are deeply, even obsessively, preoccupied by the nature and meaning of human love. We never reach that chimerical goal, but by the end of the book we have something perhaps better: the vivid record of a lifelong affection, as profound in its way as Turgenev’s for his diva, of one reader for a vanished master.