Turgenev was the second son of a retired officer, Sergey Turgenev, and had a wealthy mother named Varvara Petrovna, born Lutovinova. They owned the house in Spasskoye-Lutovinovo. The constant figure of his mother throughout his childhood and early adulthood supposedly started the practice of adding female characters to his famous novels. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay The Spasskoye house itself took on an important meaning for the young Turgenev, as an area that acted as if it were high class in a poor part of Russia and as an image of the injustice he saw in the servile condition of the lower classes . Turgenev promised endless hostility against the Russian social framework. This is most likely the beginning of Turgenev's liberal ideas and his vision of the elite as individuals committed to the social and political improvement of their nation. Turgenev was to be the leading Russian author with a strong European point of view and sensibility. Although he had received some sort of education at home, in Moscow schools and colleges in Moscow and St. Petersburg, Turgenev tended to consider his education useless because he enjoyed learning about new customs and cultural advances in Germany. . Turgenev spent the years 1838 to 1841 at the University of Berlin learning about the progress of this society. He returned home convinced that the West was much more advanced than Russia and thought that Russia should start moving towards Westernization. Turgenev was not a man of surprising interests, despite the fact that the romantic tale had to be at its best. known interest in his fiction. This affection for the singer Pauline Viardot, whom he first met in 1843, would overwhelm him for as long as he can remember. His connection with Viardot has often been regarded as impartial, but some of his letters, often as splendid as they would be seen and as suitable in their own way as anything he wrote, suggest the presence of a more remarkable intimacy. In general, however, they find him to be an affectionate and generous admirer, and in this case he was generally satisfied. Please note: this is just an example. Get a custom paper from our expert writers now. Get a Custom Essay He never married, yet in 1842 he had an ill-conceived child with a factory worker in Spasskoye; the boy's childhood later depended on Viardot. Meanwhile, he tried his hand at composing plays, some similar to A Poor Gentleman (1848), which rather clearly imitated the Russian ace Nikolay Gogol. Of these, The Bachelor (1849) was the only one published so far, the others falling afoul of official controls. Others of an even more personal character, such as One May Spin a Thread Too Finely (1848), stimulated the mental examinations detailed in his emotional spectacle, A Month in the Country (1855). This was only professionally organized in 1872. Unprecedented in the Russian theater, its dissemination by experts and groups of spectators required the first performance after 1898 of Anton Chekhov's works at the Moscow Art Theater. It was there that in 1909, under the great leader Konstantin Stanislavski, it was discovered as one of the true works of Russian theater.