About the Author

Born in 1818 to wealthy parents, Ivan Turgenev was educated by French and German tutors, and early acquainted his taste for Western emancipation. Turgenev's first important work A Sportsman's Sketches, tales of peasant life which attacked serfdom, caused a sensation comparable to Uncle Tom's Cabin in the United States. Turgenev was jailed for his opinions. In search of intellectual freedom, Turgenev spent much of his life in Paris, with his friends Zola, Flaubert, the de Goncourts, and the great singer, Madame Viardot, but his heart was always in Russia, with the poor and oppressed. Turgenev's influence on Russian life and literature was enormous. He remains a national hero, one of the most sensitive artists of Russia's great age of writers. FATHERS AND SONS is his masterpiece.