Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev, novelist and playwright, was one of the most important writers in19th Century Russia, a notable achievement given the prominence of his rivals Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. His novel Fathers and Sons is considered one of the foremost novels of the century and remains a standard in Russian Lit courses.  
Turgenev was born in 1818 in the provincial city of Oryol. His father was a member of the landed aristocracy and a colonel in the Imperial cavalry. Ivan’s childhood was a bad one, having to deal with the fallout of his father’s chronic womanizing and the constant physical and emotional abuse from his wealthy mother. Turgenev was schooled by a tutor until he was old enough to leave for Moscow and the University.  After just one year, Turgenev transferred to the University of Saint Petersburg, and studied Classics, Russian literature, and philology. In 1838, the twenty-year old left Russia to study philosophy and history at the University of Berlin. This sojourn in Germany convinced Turgenev that Russia’s future lay in embracing modern Western ideas and drawing closer to the rest of Europe.
Turgenev didn’t gain any success as a writer until his 30s. His first work, published in 1852, was A Sportsman's Sketches, a collection of short stories concerning life in the country, especially the plight of the serfs. The book would become one of the most important works of literature to turn public opinion toward the abolition of serfdom. Turgenev considered this book to be his most important work.
The reign of Czar Nicholas I (1825-55) was a difficult one for intellectuals in Russia. Dissent was suppressed and writers such as Turgenev, Dostoyevsky and Gogol as well as noted intellectuals and scientists were either arrested or coerced into silence. Gogol, the leading Russian writer and dissident of the era died in 1852 and Turgenev was asked to pen an obituary for the leading St Petersburg paper. The article was banned but was picked up and published in a Moscow paper. The obituary was deemed subversive and Turgenev was arrested and spent a month in jail before being sentenced to two years internal exile to his estate.
While he had written it four years earlier while visiting France, Turgenev’s play A Month in the Country was also published in 1852. It was immediately banned and wasn’t performed until 1872. It has been seen as one of the first plays of the new Russian theatre that would eventually produce Chekov and Stanislavski and is still performed today.
Many writers moved to the west to escape Nicholas’s constant repression, and once his exile sentence was complete, Turgenev joined them them abroad.
He began an affair with a French singer named Pauline Viardot and moved to France to be near her. He continued to write and his first novel Rudin the story of a man in his unable to find a place in the Russia of Nicholas I was published in 1854. A Nest of the Gentry was published four years later and is a nostalgic relflection on the Russian countryside. Nicholas had died in 1855 succeeded by his son Alexander II but Turgenev elected to remain in the west. 1859 saw the publication of On the Eve, a portrait of a Bulgarian revolutionary named Insarov.
The following year, Turgenev returned to Russia, and completed the novella First Love. He met and became an acquaintance of both Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. But relations between them were strained. Tolstoy was angry at Turgenev’s love of the West and the two quarreled to such an extent that Tolstoy challenged Turgenev to a duel. Calmer heads prevailed but the two didn’t speak to each other for 17 years.
Fathers and Sons was published in 1862 to astoundingly bad reviews. Many critics missed the essential point of the novel and dismissed it as lightweight. Turgenev was disappointed and disillusioned and he again made his was west, this time settling near the Viardot family in Baden-Baden in what is now southern Germany.
He didn’t publish another work until 1867. Smoke was another critical disaster. Dostoyevsky, while visiting Turgenev quarreled over the book and the two ended up falling out. Dostoyevsky would mercilessly parody Turgenev in his novel The Devils. The two did however reconcile at the unveiling of the Pushkin Monument in Moscow in 1880.
As he grew older, Turgenev continued to write both poetry and novels although with less frequency. He became a popular writer in the West, where his novels sold well. He became friends with the French writer Flaubert and became a favourite of writers like Henry James and Joseph Conrad.
Turgenev died in 1883 in Bougival, near Paris.

Fathers and Sons

Turgenev’s novel, which first appeared in 1862, was the first Russian novel widely read outside or Russia and one of the most important works of the century.
While it can be taken on face value as the portrait of the discordant relationship of a father and a son, the novel is also clearly a political novel, using the family dynamic as a metaphor for the division of the old Russian social order from the new nihilistic, political radical movements that dominated the political landscape of mid-century Russia.
The Liberalism and Nihilism movements both saw Russia’s future as lying with the West, while the conservative Slavophiles believed that Russia’s salvation lay in Russian tradition and Orthodox religion. This conflict would dominate Russian politics for the next seventy years.
Fathers and Sons is regarded as the first modern Russian novel and appeared at the beginning of a golden age of Russian literature. It was the first Russian novel to find an audience in the west and paved the way for Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy.
The novel would be highly influential on those two writers, who would pick up the exploration of psychology, national psyche and political conflict.  The style of the novel would also influence the style of Gustave Flaubert and Guy de Maupassant.