Turgenev, Ivan Sergeyevich
Turgenev, Ivan Sergeyevich ( 1818 – 83 ),Russian novelist and playwright. He was born in Orel, in central Russia, and studied at Moscow and St Petersburg universities. He published some poetry in 1838 and studied in Berlin, 1838 – 41 . On returning to Russia he served briefly in the civil service, but from 1845 he devoted himself to literature. He also fell in love with the singer Pauline Garcia Viardot , and partly for this reason was to live much of his life abroad, mainly in Baden-Baden and Paris, where he died. His first important prose work was A Hunter's Notes ( 1847 – 51 ), the limpid prose of which, in such masterpieces as ‘Bezhin Meadow’ and ‘The Living Relic’, is one of his greatest achievements. This was followed by a series of novels in which individual lives are examined to illuminate the social, political, and philosophical issues of the day: Rudin ( 1856 ), A Nest of...
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