Henry James--friend, colleague, and student--said of Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev that he was "in a peculiar degree what I may call the novelist's novelist, an artistic influence extraordinarily valuable, and ineradicably established." Turgenev himself was much more modest; in a letter to Sergei Timofeevich Aksakov in 1856, well after the publication of Turgenev's first major triumph, Zapiski okhotnika (A Hunter's Notes, 1852) and even after his first novel, Rudin (1856), he wrote, "I am one of the writers of the interregnum--the era between [Nikolai Vasil'evich] Gogol and a future chief"; for Turgenev that future chief turned out to be Leo Tolstoy. For all his modesty, however, Turgenev was the first Russian writer to achieve an international reputation; from the late 1860s on, most of his works appeared in French, English, and German almost simultaneously with their Russian publications. There was virtually no major European author with whom he was not personally acquainted, and many younger writers of the later nineteenth century openly acknowledged his influence on their writing.
