Russian playwright and novelist Ivan Turgenev, best known for Fathers and Sons (1862) and A Month in the Country (1850), was born today in 1818. He died in 1888.Turgenev, a pioneer of the realistic novel, popularized the concept of nihilism through his character Bazarov in Fathers and Sons. Part of a literary circle that included Zola, Maupassant, and Flaubert, he also was a generous promoter of the works of his fellow Russian writers in the West.
