31 Facts About Ivan Turgenev

Ivan Turgenev's first major publication, a short story collection titled A Sportsman's Sketches, was a milestone of Russian realism.

Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev was born in Oryol to noble Russian parents Sergei Nikolaevich Turgenev, a colonel in the Russian cavalry who took part in the Patriotic War of 1812, and Varvara Petrovna Turgeneva.

Ivan Turgenev's father belonged to an old, but impoverished Turgenev family of Tula aristocracy that traces its history to the 15th century when a Tatar Mirza Lev Turgen left the Golden Horde to serve Vasily II of Moscow.

Ivan Turgenev spent an unhappy childhood under her tyrannical stepfather and left his house after her mother's death to live with her uncle.

The brothers had foreign governesses; Ivan Turgenev became fluent in French, German, and English.

When Ivan Turgenev was four years old, the family journeyed through Germany and France.

Ivan Turgenev returned to Saint Petersburg to complete his master's examination.

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

In 1841, Ivan Turgenev started his career in the Russian civil service and spent two years working for the Ministry of Interior.

When Ivan Turgenev was a child, a family serf had read to him verses from the Rossiad of Mikhail Kheraskov, a celebrated poet of the 18th century.

Ivan Turgenev never married, but he had some affairs with his family's serfs, one of which resulted in the birth of his illegitimate daughter, Paulinette.

Ivan Turgenev was tall and broad-shouldered, but was timid, restrained, and soft-spoken.

When Ivan Turgenev was 19, while traveling on a steamboat in Germany, the boat caught fire.

Ivan Turgenev denied such accounts, but these rumours circulated in Russia and followed him for his entire career, providing the basis for his story "A Fire at Sea".

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

Ivan Turgenev occasionally visited England, and in 1879 the honorary degree of Doctor of Civil Law was conferred upon him by the University of Oxford.

On 3 September 1883, Ivan Turgenev died of a spinal abscess, a complication of the metastatic liposarcoma, in his house at Bougival near Paris.

Ivan Turgenev's remains were taken to Russia and buried in Volkovo Cemetery in St Petersburg.

Ivan Turgenev first made his name with A Sportsman's Sketches, known as Sketches from a Hunter's Album or Notes of a Hunter or Memoirs of a Hunter, a collection of short stories, based on his observations of peasant life and nature, while hunting in the forests around his mother's estate of Spasskoye.

Ivan Turgenev himself considered the book to be his most important contribution to Russian literature; it is reported that Pravda, and Tolstoy, among others, agreed wholeheartedly, adding that Ivan Turgenev's evocations of nature in these stories were unsurpassed.

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

Ivan Turgenev is gone, that man whom we now have the right to call great.

The censor was dismissed; but Ivan Turgenev was held responsible for the incident, imprisoned for a month, and then exiled to his country estate for nearly two years.

Belinsky defended sociological realism in literature; Ivan Turgenev portrayed him in Yakov Pasinkov.

In 1858 Ivan Turgenev wrote the novel A Nest of the Gentry, full of nostalgia for the irretrievable past and of love for the Russian countryside.

In 1859, inspired by reports of positive social changes, Ivan Turgenev wrote the novel On the Eve, portraying the Bulgarian revolutionary Insarov.

Ivan 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.

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

Nabokov stated that Ivan Turgenev "is not a great writer, though a pleasant one", and ranked him fourth among nineteenth-century Russian prose writers, behind Tolstoy, Gogol, and Anton Chekhov, but ahead of Dostoyevsky.

Ivan Turgenev was known for his pejorative descriptions of Jews, for example in his story "The Jew".

Ivan Turgenev pursues his greed to the point of prostituting his daughter and is quoted as saying that "money is a good thing, you can get anything with it".