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Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev |
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Although his most enduring work is the novel Fathers and Sons, Russian realist writer Ivan Turgenev changed the lives of Russian serfs with his 1852 book Zapiski okhotnika, much as American writer Harriet Beecher Stowe did the lives of America's black slaves with Uncle Tom's Cabin. Turgenev's work, translated as A Sportsman's Sketches, is an unidealized yet affecting depiction of the life of Russia's rural peasantry, and it reportedly influenced reformist Czar Alexander II in his decision to emancipate Russia's serfs in 1861. Unfortunately for Turgenev, publication of Zapiski okhotnika, as well as his openly pro-Western views, did not endear him to the less humanitarian Czar Nicholas I. As a consequence, he spent most of his adult life in Europe, returning only rarely to his native country. A contemporary of Leo Tolstoy, Fydor Dostoevsky, and an elderly Nikolai Gogol, Turgenev also authored verse, short fiction, plays, and several novels during his long career and became the first Russian author to gain a large readership outside his homeland, particularly in France, Germany, and England.
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