Turgenev by Edward Garnett

The biographers tell us that Turgenev left Russia again in 1847, for the sake of being near Pauline Garcia, the famous singer (afterwards Madame Viardot), whom he adored all his life; that he left her in Berlin, visited Salzbrunn with the critic Byelinsky, who was dying of consumption, and then proceeded to Paris, Brussels, Lyons and Courtavenel. In Paris he works incessantly, producing plays and short stories and most of the series of _A Sportsman's Sketches_; makes friends with Hertzen and George Sand; studies the French classics and avows his democratic sympathies, without any illusions as to the good-for-nothingness of "the Reds. " In the autumn of 1858 he returns to Russia, recalled by news of the grave illness of his mother, who, however, refused to be reconciled with her two sons, whom she tried to disinherit on her deathbed. Turgenev was henceforward a rich man.

In 1852 _A Sportsman's Sketches_ appeared in book form, and in April of the same year, for writing a sympathetic article on Gogol's death, Turgenev was ordered a month's detention in a police-station and then confined to his estate at Spasskoe. [13]