Ivan Turgenev

Ivan Turgenev was a Russian writer born in Oryol in 1818 and died in 1883. He grew up on his mother's country estate, where he saw serfdom at close range, and he later studied in Moscow, St Petersburg and Berlin. From the 1840s he lived much of his life abroad, especially in Germany and France, while continuing to write about Russia. His early fame came from sketches of peasant and country life, which gave human faces to the serfs and helped turn opinion against serfdom. He went on to write quiet, finely shaped novels and novellas about love, idealism and the clash between generations. His prose is clear, restrained and full of feeling for landscape and for people who fall short of their hopes. He was one of the first Russian authors to be widely admired in Western Europe, and he counted Flaubert and Henry James among his friends. Readers still turn to him for his elegance and for his honest portraits of a changing Russia.