A Desperate Character and Other Stories

Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev, a Russian novelist, short story writer, poet, dramatist, translator, and proponent of Russian literature in the West, lived from 9 November 1818 to 3 September 1883. Russia's Oryol is where Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev was born. His father fought in the Patriotic War of 1812 as a colonel in the Russian cavalry. Turgenev concentrated on Classics, Russian literature, and philology while attending the University of Saint Petersburg from 1834 to 1837 after spending a year at the University of Moscow. Turgenev never wed, but he had many relationships with the family's serfs, one of which gave birth to his daughter Paulinette, who was not his biological child. Oxford conferred an honorary degree on Turgenev in 1879. Turgenev periodically traveled to England, and the University of Oxford awarded him an honorary doctorate in civil law in 1879. Throughout his later years, Turgenev's health deteriorated. An aggressive malignant tumor (liposarcoma) was surgically removed from his suprapubic area in January 1883, but by that time the tumor had spread to his upper spinal cord, giving him excruciating suffering in the months before his death. In his home in Bougival, close to Paris, on September 3, 1883, Turgenev passed away from a spinal abscess, a side effect of metastatic liposarcoma. His bones were transported to Russia and interred at St. Petersburg's Volkovo Cemetery.