I. S. Turgenev: His Life and Literary Activity

"Turgenev was about twenty years old when the mood depicted in the previous lines took hold of him, and when he made his Hannibal oath. He remained faithful to it to the end, and betrayal would have meant not only betraying his theoretical beliefs, but something far greater and more powerful—his heart, which learned to love and to hate amid the indescribable horrors of unbridled serfdom. Turgenev’s childhood, adolescence, and youth passed in an atmosphere that, on reading its description, you cannot help but feel resentment, bitterness, and indignation. Slavery, hypocritically hidden under the name of ‘serf dependency,’ cold-blooded torment and mockery of the people—that is what Turgenev saw above all in the first twenty years of his life, and what created ‘A Sportsman’s Sketches’—his most beloved and, at the same time, most humane work of the great Russian writer."