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Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev (1818-1883) was born into a wealthy family of the Russian landed gentry and educated in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Berlin. He made his name as a writer withA Sportsman's Sketches,an unvarnished picture of Russian country life that is said to have influenced Tsar AlexanderII's decision to liberate the serfs. In later years, Turgenev lived in Europe, returning only rarely to his native country. He was the author of poems, stories, plays, and six novels, the most celebrated of which includeFathers and Sons, Rudin,andOn the Eve. Charlotte Hobsondivides her time between translating and writing. She is theauthorof Black Earth City. Constance Garnett(1861-1946) was an Englishtranslatorof nineteenth-century Russian literature, and introducedTolstoy,DostoevskyandChekhovon a wide basis to the English speaking public.
Every class of society, every type of character, every degree of fortune, every phase of manners, passes through his hands; his imagination claims its property equally, in town and country, among rich and poor, among wise people and idiots, dilettanti and peasants, the tragic and the joyous, the probable and the grotesque. He has an eye for all our passions and a deeply sympathetic sense of the wonderful complexity of our souls. — Henry James Turgenev’s Russia is but a canvas on which the incomparable artist of humanity lays his colours and his forms in the great light and free air of the world….All his creations, fortunate and unfortunate, oppressed and oppressors, are human beings, not strange beasts in a menagerie or damned souls knocking themselves out in the stuffy darkness of mystical contradictions. They are human beings, fit to live, fit to suffer, fit to struggle, fit to win, fit to lose, in the endless and inspiring game of pursuing from day to day the ever-receding future. — Joseph Conrad
