van Sergeich Turgeniev was born in 1818 in Orel, the son of provincial gentry. His best known work in the United States is Fathers and Sons (I862) in which a love plot is interwoven with the social issues of the time. Turgenev was embittered by the negative - reaction of friends to Fathers and Sons which led to his subsequent settlement abroad. He died in I883 near Paris. During his life in Europe he was a close friend of Flaubert and was influenced by George Sand. Guy de Maupassant admired his skill as a writer and Ernest Hemingway was later influenced by him. His fictional characters are revealed more by the poetic atmosphere they inhabit than by their psychological makeup; his female characters are in general more attractive and stronger than their male counterparts.
Torrents of Spring (also translated
as Spring Torrents and Spring Freshets) was finished in I87I. It
is a romantic tale of a Russian man--Sanin--who while travelling in Europe,
falls in love with a beautiful Italian girl named Gemma. The story is based
on Turgeniev's own experience at the same age. A key autobiographical element
of the story is the hero's infatuation with a rich Russian woman--Maria
Nikolayevna--patterned after Turgenev's infatuation with the famous singer
Pauline Viardot. The tragic element of love as obsession leading to a man's
ruin is clearly drawn in Torrents of Spring and recurs in Turgenev's
other works. The book was a great success. Flaubert is quoted as saying
"Ah, this is a love story if ever there was one!"