The main narrative is conducted as memories of the 52-year-old nobleman and landowner Sanin about the events of 30 years ago that happened in his life when he traveled to Germany

Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev (1818-1883) was a great Russian novelist and playwright. His novel Fathers and Sons is regarded as one of major works of 19th-century fiction. After the standard schooling for a child of a gentleman\'s family, he studied for one year at the University of Moscow and then moved to the University of St Petersburg, focusing on the classics, Russian literature and philology. Turgenev was impressed with German Central-European society, and believed that Russia could best improve itself by imitating the West. Like many of his educated contemporaries, he was particularly opposed to serfdom. He first made his name with A Sportsman\'s Sketches, also known as Sketches From a Hunter\'s Album; or, Notes of a Hunter. He wrote several short novels like The Diary of a Superfluous Man, Faust and The Lull. In them Turgenev expressed the anxieties and hopes of Russians of his generation. Amongst his other works are Liza: A Nest of Nobles, The Jew and Other Stories, On the Eve, A Reckless Character and Other Stories, The Torrents of Spring, and The Rendezvous.

Such are, generally speaking, the characters the author describes, which bear so unmistakably the stamp of nature that one cannot refrain from saying as he closes the book, "These must be portraits from life!" which criticism is always the highest praise, the best sanction of works of the imagination.—From "Turgenev", in "The Russian Novelists," translated by J. L. Edmands (1887).