![[Main Page]](/images/danadams.png)
Novelist.
Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev (November 9 [O.S. October 28] 1818 – September 3, 1883) was a Russian novelist, short-story writer, and playwright. His first major publication, a short-story collection entitled A Sportsman's Sketches(1852), was a milestone of Russian Realism, and his novel Fathers and Sons (1862) is regarded as one of the major works of 19th-century fiction.
Source:
1.) "For example, Leonard Schapiro, Turgenev, His Life and Times (New York: Random, 1978) 214, writes about Turgenev's agnosticism as follows: "Turgenev was not a determined atheist; there is ample evidence which shows that he was an agnostic who would have been happy to embrace the consolations of religion, but was, except perhaps on some rare occasions, unable to do so"; and Edgar Lehrman, Turgenev's Letters (New York: Knopf, 1961) xi, presents still another interpretation for Turgenev's lack of religion, suggesting literature as a possible substitution: "Sometimes Turgenev's attitude toward literature makes us wonder whether, for him, literature was not a surrogate religion - something in which he could believe unhesitatingly, unreservedly, and enthusiastically, something that somehow would make man in general and Turgenev in particular a little happier."" Harold Bloom, Ivan Turgenev, pages 95-96.