SOURCE: Freeborn, Richard. “A Centenary Tribute to Turgenev.” Journal of European Studies 14, no. 3 (September 1984): 155-71.

In the following essay, Freeborn discusses Turgenev's literary legacy one hundred years after his death.

Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev was born in 1818 and died in 1883. He was born into the privileged, serf-owning world of the Russian nobility, educated at the universities of Moscow and St Petersburg and abroad, at Berlin. The experience of Western Europe turned him into a devotee of European civilization, so that he became known as a Westernist or zapadnik. For forty years of his life, from 1843 until his death, he was a devoted admirer of the singer Pauline Viardot. He never lived far from her during most of those years (save for a period in the 1850s when he was confined by the authorities to his estate in Russia) and he became a close, irreplaceable member of the Viardot family...