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 🎂 Happy Birthday to Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev!


Turgenev was the quiet craftsman of Russian realism—a writer who believed in art for art’s sake. His first major success, A Sportsman’s Sketches (1852), was so powerful that it helped open the eyes of a nation; the book’s vivid portraits of peasant life reportedly moved Tsar Alexander II to begin the emancipation of the serfs.
His masterpiece Fathers and Sons (1862) remains one of the 19th century’s most influential novels, introducing readers to the word “nihilism” and sparking debate across Europe.

Writers from Henry James to Joseph Conrad admired his restraint and artistry, preferring him to his more volcanic peers, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. Vladimir Nabokov once praised Turgenev’s “plastic musical flowing prose,” though he couldn’t resist teasing him for his “labored epilogues.”

Fun Fact: Turgenev spent much of his life in France and was close friends with novelist George Sand—and even more famously, the opera singer Pauline Viardot, with whom he shared a lifelong (and somewhat complicated) affection.


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