Ivan Turgenev

Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev was born in 1818 in the Russian Province of Orel. He suffered during his childhood from a tyrannical mother. After the family moved to Moscow in 1827 he entered Petersburg University, where he studied philosophy. When he was nineteen he published his first poems and, convinced that Europe contained the source of real knowledge, went to the University of Berlin. After two years he returned to Russia and took his degree at the University of Moscow. In 1843 he fell in love with Pauline Garcia-Viardot, a young Spanish singer. He followed her on her singing tours in Europe and spent long periods in the French house of Garcia-Viardot and her husband, both of whom accepted him as a family friend. After 1856 he lived mostly abroad and became the first Russian writer to gain a wide reputation in Europe. He was a well-known figure in Parisian literary circles, where his friends included Flaubert and the Goncourt brothers, and an honorary degree was conferred on him at Oxford. His series of six novels reflect a period of Russian life from 1830s to the 1870s: they are "Rudin" (1855), "A House of Gentlefolk" (1858), "On the Eve" (1859), "Fathers and Sons" (1861), "Smoke" (1867), and "Virgin Soil" (1876). He also wrote plays, which include the comedy A MONTH IN THE COUNTRY, short stories, and literary essays and memoirs. He died in Paris in 1883 after being ill for a year and was buried in Russia.