Ivan Turgenev

Turgenev's mother ran her serf-owning estate with casual cruelty, and his early sketches of peasant life were later credited with hardening opinion toward emancipation. He spent most of his adult life following the opera singer Pauline Viardot across Europe, a devotion that never became a marriage and left him permanently between two worlds: Russian by subject, French by address.

Fathers and Sons drew fire from both left and right on publication, radicals feeling mocked, conservatives feeling humored, which suited a writer allergic to certainty of any kind. He quarreled bitterly with Dostoevsky and, for years, with Tolstoy, and wrote First Love, his most perfect novella, out of the same wistful, self-implicating distance he brought to everything: the ache of watching desire happen to someone else.