Turgenev, Ivan

Turgenev, Ivan (1818–83),
Russian novelist and critic. His ‘Hamlet of the Schigrovsky District’ (1849, in A Sportsman's Sketches) offers a provincial version of the ‘superfluous man’. Don Quixote and Hamlet (1860) contrasts two prevailing Russian character types: the one of ideals, faith, and conviction; the other sceptical, rational, and ironic.

Tom Matheson