Portal:Literature/Biography archive/2006, Week 43

Ivan Turgenev (November 9 1818 – September 3 1883) was a major Russian novelist and playwright. His novel Fathers and Sons (1862) is regarded as a defining work of 19th-century fiction. Turgenev made his name with A Sportsman's Sketches (Записки охотника), also known as Sketches From a Hunter's Album or Notes of a Hunter. Based on the author's own observations while sport hunting birds and hares in his mother's estate of Spasskoye, the work appeared in a collected form in 1852. Turgenev is considered one of the great Victorian novelists, ranked with Thackeray, Hawthorne, and Henry James, though his style was much different from these American and British writers. Turgenev has often been compared to his Russian contemporaries, Leo Tolstoy and Feodor Dostoevsky, who wrote novels about some of the same issues. A melancholy tone pervades his writings, a morbid self-analysis.