Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev

A Russian novelist, born in 1818 to parents of provincial gentility, and educated in Moscow, St. Petersburg and Berlin. At Berlin he was a member of a group known as the Russian Westernizers. As a youthful writer, he fell in love with the famous singer Pauline Viardot, and his unrequited love for her became the dominant emotional strain of his life.

His early writings were poems and plays, but after the success of Sportsman’s Sketches (1852) he confined his efforts entirely to short stories and novels. Fathers and Sons (1862) was bitterly criticized by the radical intelligentsia of Russia, and Turgenev voluntarily absented himself from Russia for most of his subsequent life.

Rudin (1852), Smoke (1867), an answer to the critics of Fathers and Sons, and Virgin Soil (1877) are among his most important contributions to Russian literature. Turgenev’s art was in the tradition of poetic realism developed by Pushkin, Lermontov and George Sand. Upon his return to Russia in 1880, he was triumphantly received, but he was always disliked by some of his great contemporaries – Tolstoy, Nekrasov, Dostoyevski. In 1883 he died near Paris.