Biography

Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev (1818-1883) was a Russian novelist, short story writer, poet, playwright, translator and popularizer of Russian literature in the West. Turgenev made his name with 'A Sportsman's Sketches', also known as 'Sketches from a Hunter's Album' or 'Notes 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. The book is credited with having influenced public opinion in favour of the abolition of serfdom in 1861. Turgenev himself considered the book to be his most important contribution to Russian literature. One of the stories, 'Bezhin Lea' or 'Byezhin Prairie', was to become the basis for Sergei Eisenstein's controversial film Bezhin Meadow (1937).