writers of the '40's
consisted in the fact that the latter, imbued with the ideas of the
former, engaged in the analysis of Russian life, which constitutes the
strength and the merit of the Russian literature of that epoch.

Of all the Russian writers of that period, Turgeneff was indisputably
the greatest. No one could have been more advantageously situated for
the study of the mutual relations between landed proprietors and serfs.
The Turgeneff family offered a very sharp type of old-fashioned
landed-proprietor manners. Not one gentle or heartfelt trait softened
the harshness of those manners, which were based wholly upon merciless
despotism, and weighed oppressively not only upon the peasants, but upon
the younger members of the family. Every one in the household was kept
in a perennial tremor of alarm, and lived in hourly, momentary
expectation of some savage punishment. Moreover, the author's father
(who is depicted in the novel "First Love"), was much younger than his
wife, whom he did not love, having married her for her money. His
mother's portrait is to be found in "Punin and Baburin." Extremely
unhappy in her childhood and youth, when she got the chance at last she
became a pitiless despot, greedy of power, and indulged the caprices and
fantastic freaks suggested by her shattered nerves upon her family, the
house-servants, and the serfs. It is but natural that from such an
experience as this Turgeneff should have cherished, from the time of
his miserable childhood (his disagreements with his mother later in
life are matters of record also), impressions which made of him the
irreconcilable foe of serfdom. In depicting, in his "Notes of a
Sportsman," the tyranny of the landed gentry over their serfs, he could
have drawn upon his personal experience and the touching tale "Mumu;"
actually is the reproduction of an episode which occurred in his home.
His "Notes of a Sportsman" constitutes a noteworthy historical monument
of the period, not only as a work of the highest art, but also as a
protest against serfdom. In a way these stories form a worthy
continuation of Gogol's "Dead Souls." In them, as in all his other
stories, at every step the reader encounters not only clear-cut
portraits of persons, but those enchanting pictures of nature for which
he is famous.

The publication of his short sketches from peasant life in book
form--"Notes of a Sportsman"--aroused great displeasure in official
circles; officialdom