The Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev lived in turbulent times. This fictional biography, solidly founded on historical and literary research, explores his life and work - from his childhood, dominated by his tyrannical mother, to his last years, in the tender care of Pauline Viardot, the Franco-Spanish diva who was the love of his life. Author Christopher Cruise offers insights into other affairs and flirtations, together with his ambivalent relationship with his illegitimate daughter Paulinette, the result of a half-hour liaison with a servant girl. The reader is transported to many parts of Europe, from the revolutionary streets of St Petersburg to the cultural salons of Paris. The intense generational clash of his era inspired his best-known work, Fathers and Children, while his mother"s cruelty ignited in him a lifelong horror of violence and injustice which found expression in A Sportsman"s Sketches, a book that contributed to Czar Alexander II"s decision to emancipate the serfs....