me of an old stock of the Russian nobility.
He was born in Orel, in the province of Orel, which lies more than a
hundred miles south of Moscow, on October 28, 1818. His education was
begun by tutors at home in the great family mansion in the town of
Spask, and he studied later at the universities of Moscow, St.
Petersburg, and Berlin. The influence of the last, and of the
compatriots with whom he associated there, was very great; and when he
returned to Moscow in 1841, he was ambitious to teach Hegel to the
students there. Before this could be arranged, however, he entered the
Ministry of the Interior at St. Petersburg. While there his interests
turned more and more toward literature. He wrote verses and comedies,
read George Sand, and made the acquaintance of Dostoevsky and the
critic Bielinski. His mother, a tyrannical woman with an ungovernable
temper, was eager that he should make a brilliant official career; so,
when he resigned from the Ministry in 1845, she showed her disapproval
by cutting down his allowance and thus forcing him to support himself
by the profession he had chosen.

Turgenev was an enthusiastic hunter; and it was his experiences in the
woods of his native province that supplied the material for "A
Sportsman's Sketches," the book that first brought him reputation. The
first of these papers appeared in 1847, and in the same year he left
Russia in the train of Pauline Viardot, a singer and actress, to whom
he had been devoted for three or four years and with whom he maintained
relations for the rest of his life. For a year or two he lived chiefly
in Paris or at a country house at Courtavenel in Brie, which belonged
to Madame Viardot; but in 1850 he returned to Russia. His experiences
were not such as to induce him to repatriate himself permanently. He
found Dostoevsky banished to Siberia and Bielinski dead; and himself
under suspicion by the government on account of the popularity of "A
Sportsman's Sketches." For praising Gogol, who had just died, he was
arrested and imprisoned for a short time, and for the next two years
kept under police surveillance. Meantime he continued to write, and by
the time that the close of the Crimean War made it possible for him
again to go to western Europe, he was recognized as standing at the
head of living Russian authors. His mother was now dead, the estates
were settled, and with an income of about $5,000 a year he became a
wanderer. He had, or imagined he had, ver