Ivan Turgenev was exposed early to Byron and Byronism in both European and Russian forms. His early upbringing may have encouraged him to find in Byron a critic of society's ills, particularly the malaise of Russian serfdom in the 1820s and 1830s. He was born in 1818 in the Orel, near the Turgenev family estate of Spasskoe. His father, interested in other, more attractive women than his wife, died in 1834, leaving Ivan with his heavy-handed, hen-pecking mother whose cruel treatment of the family's serfs repulsed and repelled him (Moser 1972, 4). Perhaps his mother's greatest contribution to Turgenev was her death in 1850, the result of which was a sizeable inheritance that, had he been a better manager of money, would have left him financially comfortable for the rest of his life (Lowe 1989, 22). Spasskoe became a place for Turgenev to gain inspiration, to write, and to be exiled to, though he preferred to travel and live throughout Europe. When he left Russia at the age of eighteen to attend the University of Berlin after deserting Moscow University and completing his undergraduate studies at St. Petersburg University, it was the last time Turgenev was to remain in his native Russia for eighteen years without leaving (Moser 1972, 5).

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