Circumstances define us; they force us onto one road or another, and then they punish us for it.

His last substantial work attempting to do justice to the problems of contemporary Russian society Virgin Soil ("Новь") was publiIvan Turgenevd in 1877. Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev (Russian: Ива́н Серге́евич Турге́нев; IPA: [ɪˈvan sʲɪrˈɡʲeɪvʲɪtɕ tʊrˈɡʲenʲɪf]; November 9 [O. Nabokov stated that Turgenev "is not a great writer though a pleasant one" and ranked him fourth among nineteenth-century Russian prose writers behind Tolstoy Gogol and Anton Chekhov but ahead of Dostoyevsky.

October 28] 1818 – September 3 1883) was a Russian novelist short story writer and playwright. S.