Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev, (28th October, 1818, Oryol, Russia—22nd August, 1883, Bougival, near Paris, France), was a Russian novelist, poet, and playwright whose major works include the short-story collection A Sportsman’s Sketches and the novels Rudin, Home of the Gentry, On the Eve, and Fathers and Sons. These creations offer a realistic and affectionate portrayals of the Russian peasantry and penetrating studies of the Russian intelligentsia who were attempting to move the country into a new age. Turgenev poured into his writings not only a deep concern for the future of his native land but also an integrity of craft that has ensured his place in Russian literature. The time he spent in Western Europe was due in part to his personal and artistic stand as a liberal between the reactionary tsarists rule and the spirit of revolutionary radicalism that held sway in contemporary artistic and intellectual circles in Russia.
Turgenev was much influenced by the dominant nature of his mother, which is reflected in the heroines of his major fictions. Against the Russian social system, he was to take an oath of perpetual animosity, which was to be the source of his liberalism and the inspiration for his vision of the intelligentsia as people dedicated to their country’s social and political betterment. He was to be the only Russian writer with avowedly European outlook and sympathies. Though he got an education at home, in Moscow schools, and at the universities of both Moscow and St. Petersburg, he tended to regard his education as having taken place chiefly during his plunge “into the German sea” when he spent the years 1838 to 1841 at the University of Berlin. He returned home as a confirmed believer in the superiority of the West and of the need for Russia to follow a course of Westernization.
Though Turgenev had composed derivative verse and a poetic drama, Steno, in the style of the English poet Lord Byron, the first of his works to attract attention was a long poem, Parasha, published in 1843. The potential of the author was quickly appreciated by the critic Vissarion Belinsky, who became Turgenev’s close friend and mentor. Belinsky’s conviction that literature’s primary aim was to reflect the truth of life and to adopt a critical attitude toward its injustices became an article of faith for Turgenev. Despite the influence of Belinsky, he remained a writer of remarkable detachment, possessed of a cool and sometimes ironic objectivity.