Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev (/tʊərˈɡɛnjɛf, -ˈɡeɪn-/ toor-GHEN-yef, -⁠GAYN-;[1] Russian: Иван Сергеевич Тургенев[note 1], IPA: [ɪˈvan sʲɪrˈɡʲe(j)ɪvʲɪtɕ tʊrˈɡʲenʲɪf]; 9 November [O.S.

Turgenev was impressed with German society and returned home believing that Russia could best improve itself by incorporating ideas from the Age of Enlightenment.

Turgenev's early attempts in literature, poems, and sketches gave indications of genius and were favorably spoken of by Vissarion Belinsky, then the leading Russian literary critic.

During the latter part of his life, Turgenev did not reside much in Russia: he lived either at Baden-Baden or Paris, often in proximity to the family of the celebrated opera singer Pauline Viardot,[7] with whom he had a lifelong affair.

Unlike Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, Turgenev lacked religious motives in his writings, representing the more social aspect to the reform movement.

Dostoyevsky parodies Turgenev in his novel The Devils (1872) through the character of the vain novelist Karmazinov, who is anxious to ingratiate himself with the radical youth.

In 1852, when his first major novels of Russian society were still to come, Turgenev wrote an obituary for Nikolai Gogol, intended for publication in the Saint Petersburg Gazette.

The story tells a tale of a deaf and mute peasant who is forced to drown the only thing in the world which brings him happiness, his dog Mumu.

During the period of 1853–62 Turgenev wrote some of his finest stories as well as the first four of his novels: Rudin ("Рудин") (1856), A Nest of the Gentry ("Дворянское гнездо") (1859), On the Eve ("Накануне") (1860) and Fathers and Sons ("Отцы и дети") (1862).

In 1858 Turgenev wrote the novel A Nest of the Gentry ("Дворянское гнездо"), also full of nostalgia for the irretrievable past and of love for the Russian countryside.

It contains one of his most memorable female characters, Liza, whom Dostoyevsky paid tribute to in his Pushkin speech of 1880, alongside Tatiana and Tolstoy's Natasha Rostova.

In 1859, inspired by reports of positive social changes, Turgenev wrote the novel On the Eve ("Накануне") (published 1860), portraying the Bulgarian revolutionary Insarov.

The vision presented therein of man torn between the self-centered skepticism of Hamlet and the idealistic generosity of Don Quixote is one that can be said to pervade Turgenev's own works.

It is worth noting that Dostoyevsky, who had just returned from exile in Siberia, was present at this speech, for eight years later he was to write The Idiot, a novel whose tragic hero, Prince Myshkin, resembles Don Quixote in many respects.

Its leading character, Eugene Bazarov, considered the "first Bolshevik" in Russian literature, was in turn heralded and reviled as either a glorification or a parody of the 'new men' of the 1860s.

Turgenev's next novel, Smoke ("Дым"), was published in 1867 and was again received less than enthusiastically in his native country, as well as triggering a quarrel with Dostoyevsky in Baden-Baden.

Stories of a more personal nature, such as Torrents of Spring ("Вешние воды"), King Lear of the Steppes ("Степной король Лир"), and The Song of Triumphant Love ("Песнь торжествующей любви"), were also written in these autumnal years of his life.

[7] Turgenev wrote on themes similar to those found in the works of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, but he did not approve of the religious and moral preoccupations that his two great contemporaries brought to their artistic creation.

Turgenev was closer in temperament to his friends Gustave Flaubert and Theodor Storm, the North German poet and master of the novella form, who also often dwelt on memories of the past and evoked the beauty of nature.

[17] Vladimir Nabokov, notorious for his casual dismissal of many great writers, praised Turgenev's "plastic musical flowing prose", but criticized his "labored epilogues" and "banal handling of plots".

[18] His idealistic ideas about love, specifically the devotion a wife should show her husband, were cynically referred to by characters in Chekhov's "An Anonymous Story".

Isaiah Berlin acclaimed Turgenev's commitment to humanism, pluralism, and gradual reform over violent revolution as representing the best aspects of Russian liberalism.

The story describes a "zhyd" named Girshel as short and thin, with red hair, reddish eyes that he blinks constantly, and a long and crooked nose.