Ivan Turgenev grew up on Spasskoye, his mother’s large estate south of Moscow, where she owned thousands of serfs and treated them, and her son, with frightening cruelty. He spent his life writing against the world he was born into, though always with a gentleness she never showed.

He studied in Moscow, St Petersburg and Berlin, and began as a poet. His breakthrough came with a series of short sketches, published in a magazine from 1847 and collected in 1852 as A Sportsman’s Sketches (also translated as A Hunter’s Sketches). Each is narrated by a gentleman out hunting with his gun and dog, who meets peasants, foresters and landowners along the way. There are no speeches against serfdom. Turgenev simply shows serfs as human beings, with inner lives, talents and griefs, and their owners as often petty or brutal. Readers felt the effect. The future Tsar Alexander II, who freed the serfs in 1861, was said to have been moved by the book.

The authorities were less pleased. In 1852, after Turgenev published an admiring obituary of Gogol against the censor’s wishes, he was arrested and confined to his estate for over a year.

The great love of his life was Pauline Viardot, a famous opera singer who was married to a French writer. Turgenev met her in 1843 and spent much of the next forty years living near her family, in Baden-Baden and in and around Paris, on terms of friendship that remain a little mysterious. He became a link between Russian and Western literature, a close friend of Flaubert and Henry James.

Fathers and Sons (1862) is his masterpiece. Its hero, a young medical student named Bazarov, calls himself a nihilist, someone who accepts no authority and no principle on faith. Radicals thought Turgenev had mocked them; conservatives thought he had glorified them. The argument hurt him deeply, but the book has outlasted it. Bazarov’s death, from an infection caught while dissecting a corpse, is one of the great scenes in Russian fiction.

Turgenev died in 1883 at Bougival, near Paris, close to the Viardots, and his body was taken home to St Petersburg for burial.