Ivan Turgenev

Ivan Turgenev was born in 1818 in Oryol, Russia, into a wealthy landowning family. His mother, who owned thousands of serfs, ruled the estate of Spasskoye harshly, and her treatment of the serfs troubled him. He studied in Moscow, Saint Petersburg and Berlin, where he absorbed German philosophy and became a lifelong admirer of Western Europe. He worked briefly in the civil service and then turned to writing. A Sportsman's Sketches (1852), stories of rural life told by a hunter, portrayed serfs as individual human beings and is said to have influenced Tsar Alexander II, who freed the serfs in 1861. Turgenev was arrested and confined to his estate for an obituary praising the writer Nikolai Gogol. His novels include Rudin, A Nest of Gentlefolk, On the Eve and Fathers and Sons (1862), whose young character Bazarov, a 'nihilist' who rejects all authority, caused heated debate. Devoted for decades to the singer Pauline Viardot, he spent much of his life in Germany and France, where he befriended Flaubert and Henry James. He died near Paris in 1883.

Ivan Turgenev is also an author in the library: author page and works.

Faith: Considered an agnostic. Source: Wikipedia