picture of the unprincipled character of an anarchist.
As the author changed his mind about the hero in part while writing the
book, it is not convincing.

Another of the men who made his mark at this time was Dmitry
Vasilievitch Grigorovitch (born in 1812), who wrote a number of
brilliant books between 1847-1855. His chief merit is that he was the
first to begin the difficult study of the common people; the first who
talked in literature about the peasants, their needs, their virtues,
their helplessness, their misfortunes, and their sufferings. Of his
early short stories, "Anton Goremyka" (wretched fellow) is the best. In
it he is free from the reproach which was leveled at his later and more
ambitious long stories, "The Emigrants" and "The Fishermen." In the
latter, for the sake of lengthening the tale, and of enlisting interest
by making it conform to the general taste of readers, he made the
interest center on a love-story, in which the emotions and procedure
were described as being like those in the higher walks of life; and this
did not agree with the facts of the case. But the remainder of the
stories are founded on a genuine study of peasant ways and feelings.
Grigorovitch had originally devoted himself to painting, and after 1855
he returned to that profession, but between 1884-1898 he again began to
publish stories.

Among the writers who followed Grigorovitch in his studies of peasant
life, was Ivan Sergyeevitch Turgeneff (1818-1883), who may be said not
only to have produced the most artistic pictures of that sphere ever
written by a Russian, but to have summed up in his longer novels devoted
to the higher classes, in a manner not to be surpassed, and in a
language and style as polished and brilliant as a collection of precious
stones--a whole obscure period of changes and unrest. He was descended
from an ancient noble family, and his father served in a cuirassier
regiment. On the family estate in the government of Orel[22] (where,
later in life, he laid the scene of his famous "Notes of a Sportsman"),
he was well provided with teachers of various nationalities--Russian
excepted. One of his mother's serfs, a man passionately fond of reading,
and a great admirer of Kheraskoff, was the first to initiate the boy
into Russian literature, with "The Rossiad." In 1834 Turgeneff entered
the Moscow University, but soon went to St. Petersburg, and there
completed his course in the philological department. Before he