Fathers and Sons

Turgenev began his career as a philosopher; had not the Russian government abolished university instruction of the subject in 1841, he may never have given the world such beautiful novels as Fathers and Sons. Turgenev wrote his first sketches in the early 1840's, around the time that he met Pauline Viardot-García, a married woman whom he loved, unrequited, for the rest of his life. Turgenev's critical depiction of both radicals and conservatives in Fathers and Sons, a story of Russia's growing intergenerational schism, led to public outrage which drove him to live most of the rest of his life in western Europe. There he wrote his other best-known work, Torrents of Spring, and died of spine cancer with Pauline Viardot, with whom he had remained friends, beside him.