Ivan Turgenev, 1818 - 1883 Novelist, poet and playwright, Ivan Turgenev, was born to a wealthy family in Oryol in the Ukraine region of Russia. He attended St. Petersburg University (1834-37) and Berlin University (1838-41), completing his master's exam at St. Petersburg. His career at the Russian Civil Service began in 1841. He worded for the Ministry of Interior from 1843-1845. In the 1840's, Turgenev began writing poetry, criticism, and short stories under Nikolay Gogol's influence. "A Sportsman's Sketches" (1852) were short pieces written from the point of view of a nobleman who learns to appreciate the wisdom of the peasants who live on his family's estate. This brought him a month of… detention and eighteen months of house arrest. From 1853-62, he wrote stories and novellas, which include the titles "Rudin" (1856), "Dvorianskoe Gnedo" (1859), "Nakanune" (1860) and "Ottsy I Deti" (1862). Turgenev left Russia, in 1856, because of the hostile reaction to his work titled "Fathers and Sons" (1862). Turgenev finally settled in Paris. He became a corresponding member of the Imperial Academy of Sciences in 1860 and Doctor of Civil Law at Oxford University in 1879. His last published work, "Poems in Prose," was a collection of meditations and anecdotes. On September 3, 1883, Turgenev died in Bougival, near Paris.
Ann Pasternak Slater is a Fellow of St. Anne’s College, Oxford. She is the author ofShakespeare the Directorand the translator of the memoirs of Alexander Pasternak,A Vanished Present.
Fyodor Dostoevsky's life was as dark and dramatic as the great novels he wrote. He was born in Moscow in 1821, and when he died in 1881, he left a legacy of masterworks that influenced the great thinkers and writers of the Western world and immortalized him as a giant among writers of world literature. From the Paperback edition.
Ann Pasternak Slater is a Fellow of St. Anne's College, Oxford, and the author of Shakespeare the Director.