Ivan Turgenev

(1818 - 1883)

Born to a philandering father and a wealthy mother with a penchant for beating her sons, Ivan Turgenev in his twenties studied classics, history, and the philosophy of G.W.F. Hegel at the University of Berlin, which he attended between 1838 and 1841. He published an obituary of Nikolai Gogol—“Gogol is dead! What Russian heart is not shaken by those three words?”—in 1852, the same year he received wide acclaim for his collection Sketches from a Hunter’s Album.