Whereas I think: I’m lying here in a haystack... The tiny space I occupy is so infinitesimal in comparison with the rest of space, which I don’t occupy and which has no relation to me. And the period of time in which I’m fated to live is so insignificant beside the eternity in which I haven’t existed and won’t exist... And yet in this atom, this mathematical point, blood is circulating, a brain is working, desiring something... What chaos! What a farce!

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.