father was a rake. His mother, a strange, despotic woman, who lorded it over an estate of 5000 souls, quarrelled with him, and never forgave him for losing caste by becoming an author, when he might have achieved a brilliant military career in the Tchin. He received a double education—à la française, at the hands of indifferent preceptors and dancing masters, and à la Tartare, that is, at the point of the lash. At eighteen he was glad to escape from the maternal home, with its atmosphere of violence and servility, and to make his way first to Moscow for a season of pleasure, then to Petrograd to taste the comparative liberty of student life. These were the darkest days of political despotism, and the temptation to breathe the air of freer lands was very strong. At twenty Turgenev left Russia, and spent three years at the University of Berlin.
IV
This first absence of three years determined his future life. On his return to Russia he could no longer breathe his native air, at twenty-nine years of age, in 1847, he returned to a wandering life, and left his country for good, returning to it only for a few weeks each year in
