Ivan Turgenev

Ivan Turgenev (1818–1883) was a Russian novelist and playwright, born to a landowning family in Oryol and educated in Moscow, St. Petersburg and Berlin. A Sportsman's Sketches, stories of peasant life published in 1852, were credited with helping turn opinion against serfdom and earned him a month in jail. His novels Rudin, On the Eve and Fathers and Sons, which gave the word nihilist its currency, and the novellas First Love and The Torrents of Spring made him the first Russian writer widely read in the West. He spent much of his life in France and Germany and was a friend of Flaubert and Henry James.