A Sportsman’s Sketches Book by Ivan Turgenev

This Book “A Sportsman’s Sketches” is written by Ivan Turgenev. Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev (9 November 1818 – 3 September 1883) was a Russian novelist, short story writer, poet, playwright, translator and popularizer of Russian literature in the West. His first major publication, a short story collection entitled A Sportsman’s Sketches (1852), was a milestone of Russian realism. His novel Fathers and Sons (1862) is regarded as one of the major works of 19th-century fiction. Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev was born in Oryol (modern-day Oryol Oblast, Russia) to noble Russian parents Sergei Nikolaevich Turgenev (1793–1834), a colonel in the Russian cavalry who took part in the Patriotic War of 1812, and Varvara Petrovna Turgeneva (née Lutovinova; 1787–1850). His father belonged to an old, but impoverished Turgenev family of Tula aristocracy that traces its history to the 15th century when a Tatar Mirza Lev Turgen (Ivan Turgenev after baptizing) left the Golden Horde to serve Vasily II of Moscow. Ivan’s mother came from a wealthy noble Lutovinov house of the Oryol Governorate. She spent an unhappy childhood under the tyrannical stepfather and left his house after her mother’s death to live with her uncle. At the age of 26 she inherited a huge fortune from him. In 1816, she married Turgenev. Ivan, his brothers Nikolai and Sergei were raised by their mother, a very educated, but authoritarian woman, in the Spasskoe-Lutovinovo family estate that was granted to their ancestor Ivan Ivanovich Lutovinov by Ivan the Terrible. Varvara Turgeneva later served as an inspiration for the landlady from Turgenev’s Mumu. She surrounded her sons with foreign governesses; thus Ivan became fluent in French, German, and English. The family members used French in everyday life, even prayers were read in this language. Their father spent little time with the family, and although he was not hostile toward them, his absence hurt Ivan’s feelings (their relations are described in the autobiographical novel First Love). When he was four, the family made a trip through Germany and France. In 1827 the Turgenevs moved to Moscow to give their children a proper education.