Back in Russia, he wrote his first book of fiction, A Sportsman's Sketches (1852), about a hunter who travels through the Russian countryside, meeting peasants along the way. Turgenev portrayed the peasants as individual characters, rather than a faceless mass, which no Russian writer had ever done before. Soon after the book was published, Turgenev was arrested and imprisoned by Czar Nicholas I for criticizing the Russian government in a short obituary he'd written. He became famous for the scandal, and most people believed he had actually been imprisoned for suggesting that serfs were real people who deserved basic human rights. Intellectuals across the country read his book, and it helped build political pressure for the emancipation of the serfs in 1861.
Turgenev's masterpiece, Fathers and Sons, was published in 1862. It's about the conflict between two generations, the conservative elder generation and the radical youths who want to do away with tradition and create a new social order. Turgenev called these youths "nihilists," and defined the term for the first time: "A nihilist is a man who does not bow to any authorities, who does not take any principle on trust, no matter with what respect that principle is surrounded." The main character of Fathers and Sons, a young medical student, served as a model for many Russian revolutionaries at the turn of the nineteenth century.
Turgenev was friends with many of the leading writers in western Europe, and his works were translated into French, German and English only a few years after they had been printed in Russian. As a result, he was the first Russian writer to gain widespread appreciation in the West. He had a huge influence on writers like Henry James, Virginia Woolf, and Ernest Hemingway.
Ivan Turgenev said, "What's terrible is that there's nothing terrible, that the very essence of life is petty, uninteresting, and degradingly trite." And he said, "We sit in the mud and reach for the stars."
~Writer's Almanac
